Server and game objects

Computers are stupid! But so are we, so it's actually okay.

So, in short, we don't want our single-threaded XRay Engine to implode...

That's why we have server objects and game objects! A-Life is inherently complex and has up to 65535 objects in the game, each having a ton of computations. We kinda don't want a ton of computations, so we only compute interesting things around player and everything else is simplified.

Server objects

All objects in the game have two faces: server and level objects. Server object exists always, and has all the really basic stuff about the object: what it is, its coordinates, its parent object and some more basic info. Server objects are also called offline objects, but mainly just server objects.

You can get a server object for something in the game using alife():object(id). Because the engine functions are Really Fucking Fragile we also have a function in _G called alife_object which does the same, but also checks that your id is what everyone expects it to be (a number). Better use it, mostly no overhead.

Special case: id of player (or actor) is 0, and player server object can be obtained with alife():object(0).

Level objects

Unsurprisingly, there also are online objects, or game objects, or level objects. Interesting parts about them: they only exist around player and they have more functionality than server objects. Online radius setting defines what exactly is "around".

You can get a level object for something using level.object_by_id(id). All the level objects are also saved in db.storage table, which is pure lua and won't randomly break. As with server objects, we have a function in _G called get_object_by_id which will perform a sanity check and give you the object either from db.storage or from level.object_by_id. Use it, it's good.

Special case: level object of actor is always online and is saved in db.actor.

:3