Impulses

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Impulses

Impulses (or Calls) are triggered actions. They normally do not have a duration (unless using Async calls) and happen in a singular instantaneous moment. Some examples of Impulses could be when a user clicks a button, when a user collides with something such as the ground, or when a object gets duplicated.

Impulses have some data associated with them. This data includes:

The user who sent the impulse, which can be read via a Local User node during the impulse.
The time of the impulse, read by the WorldTime (and similar) nodes.

When a ProtoFlux value is connected solely into nodes that receive Impulses, the value is no longer evaluated every game update but only when the node is impulsed. This is useful to optimize performance as instead of doing a constant evaluation, you wait until a Impulse is received to evaluate. A heavy computations which benefits from this approach is FindChildByName which searches an entire hierarchy when it is evaluated. In this scenario, the search only has to be done once during the Impulse, and then optionally it can be cached using a Write node.

Non-Asynchronous Impulse Code can freeze the game engine until the code is finished. This can cause performance issues in certain scenarios like when using loops with lots of iterations, and is why it is recommended to make such lengthy computations Asynchronous so they can be dealt with over a longer time period, and to not evaluate such things constantly.

Async

Async or Async Impulses are a way to take your code and run it over more than one engine update cycle. Async Impulses are required to run nodes that are in the ProtoFlux Async category as these nodes require a Async Operation to start executing and will often take some time to complete what they do. Nodes like this include but are not limited to Delays, Cloud variable nodes, and ASync Whiles.

Async is a way in some cases to reduce lag in some code as instead of halting the engine while you do a bunch of work in one update, you can spread the work over time and over multiple updates instead.

Async however will not completely remove lag from actions done in world. So if you create a massive amount of data that has to be networked all at once, then making the code Async will not always prevent the lag from occurring. Likewise if running Async code constantly it can also cause performance issues.

Async is currently not multi-threaded which is talked about in this video (at 40:00): link to the video at the specified time

Contexts

Contexts are a way for ProtoFlux to store a state of local variables in the scope of the executing code. A new context can be created using the StartAsyncTask node. Variables in the context will still be able to be accessed and read with the same values even if Delays are used. A context can be thought of as what data is available during a certain Impulse.

For variable types, see Store, Local, and Data Model Store pages.