Sleep without processing events?

Hi there,

just wondering if theres any good way to wait for e.g. 0.1 seconds without it dropping events of the event queue?

Yes - use timers - like so.

local timer = os.startTimer(0.1)
local event, param
while true do
  event, param = os.pullEvent()
  if event == "timer" and param = timer then
    timer = os.startTimer(0.1) --restart timer
    -- do stuff
  elseif event == "redstone" then
    --do other stuff
  end
end

Well I meant without timers ;D cause doing it with makes stuff messy.. instead of having 1 function i need 2 or so since i can't just jump back to where it paused

What are you trying to do? cause I think it would be possible with timers. You can make a sleep function that stores the received events and returns a table with them, so you can handle them after the sleep.

Well just if i want to wait at some point of my code for 0.1 seconds it makes it a low messier if i have to fiddle with events and then a second function to do the rest after the 0.1 seconds instead of just doing

function foo()
  //part  a
  sleep(0.1)
  //partb
end

vs

function fooA()
  //partA
  //timer
end

function fooB()
  //partB (ALSO having to retain all the variables for procesing htat fooA set)
end

while true do
  //fetch event timer and call fooB
end

If you don't want to miss events you need to handle them or save them. This function would sleep for the given time, and it returns a table containing the events that happend in that time so you can handle them later:

local function sleep2(nTime)
  local tEvts = {}
  local timer = os.startTimer(nTime)
  while true do
    local tEvt = { os.pullEvent() }
    if tEvt[1] == "timer" and tEvt[2] == timer then
	  break
    else
	  table.insert(tEvts, tEvt)
    end
  end
  return tEvts
end

You could use it like:

local events = sleep2(1)
for _,evt in ipairs(events) do
  -- handle the events
  -- evt[1] is the event type (like "redstone", "key", etc). evt[2], evt[3], ..., evt[n] are the arguments
  if evt[1] == "key" then
    handleKey(evt[2])
  elseif evt[1] == "rednet_message" then
    handleMessage(evt[2], evt[3])
  end
end

The only problem would be if there's too many events (if you sleep for too much), it may throw a "too long without yielding" error cause it would take too long to handle all the events.