How to get scripted programs governing game entities run in parallel with a game loop?

Posted by Jim on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by Jim
Published on 2014-06-02T12:45:06Z Indexed on 2014/06/07 15:41 UTC
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I recently discovered Crobot which is (briefly) a game where each player codes a virtual robot in a pseudo-C language. Each robot is then put in an arena where it fights against other robots.

A robots' source code has this shape :

/* Beginning file robot.r */
main()
{
    while (1)
    {
        /* Do whatever you want */
        ...
        move();
        ...
        fire();
    }
}
/* End file robot.r */

You can see that :

  1. The code is totally independent from any library/include
  2. Some predefined functions are available (move, fire, etc…)
  3. The program has its own game loop, and consequently is not called every frame

My question is: How to achieve a similar result using scripted languages in collaboration with a C/C++ main program ?

I found a possible approach using Python, multi-threading and shared memory, although I am not sure yet that it is possible this way. TCP/IP seems a bit too complicated for this kind of application.

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