Animation-CobThreads
Source
https://spring.clan-sy.com/svn/spring/trunk/rts/Sim/Units/COB/CobThread.cpp
Introduction
Much of the time you can expect your script to execute sequentially; that is, looking through your code, the system progresses from statement to statement without anything "strange" (variables being changed, threads being started, etc.) between them. HOWEVER, "strange" things do happen, and in fact they happen quite regularly in scripts. We say that the script system has "concurrency".
Why Concurrency?
So why go to all this trouble with concurrency? The script system has concurrency because we never know when things are going to happen. The player could give a command to the unit, the unit could run into a wall, rocks could fall out of the sky and kill the unit, and so forth. Without concurrency we would have to check very often whether which of all possible events had happened recently in order to determine what to do next. This would suck.
Dealing With Concurrency
Every time a callin is called or a start-script statement is executed, a "thread" is created. At any one time, only one thread is being executed at a time, but sometimes a thread will stop executing for a while and continue later, while several other threads will execute in the meantime. Most of the time your script is guaranteed to execute sequentially. If you say x = 1;, it will stay 1 unless you change it again. The exceptions are as follows:
* Before a script starts. * After a wait-for-move or wait-for-turn statement. * After a sleep statement.
During these times, any other thread has the ability to come in and change all your static variables, tell your pieces to move, turn, and spin, and so forth. Therefore, you cannot always assume these things will be the way you left them when execution of the thread resumes. If it is possible that another thread will change something that you need to know about, you need to check it after any of these times.
Sleeping
You can have a thread sleep by using a sleep statement:
sleep [time in ms];
