Time

[nic-hartley]

I need a way to simulate in-game time passing that can be paused, serialized, deserialized, etc. Maybe u64 milliseconds since the start of the save file? I don't need to be particularly precise about this, and I don't need to handle any of the weird edge cases that come with real-world time. Mostly I need to make sure it's readable by everyone across the whole game while still being easily adjusted, but that's easy enough with AtomicU64. (We'll see if my embedded dreams make that problematic.)

[nic-hartley]

I'm wondering now if it might be easier to file this under a more general "centrally updated global state" thing, with the various "game time" things (realtime or round-based) being premade chunks offered (maybe integrated?) by the engine. There's other global state I'll want to be able to pass around so it makes sense to build that in together, and let the game decide what's there.

[nic-hartley]

Idea for generic global state:

• Add a type State: Send + Sync to trait Game
• Expect Game to maintain its State at all times
• Add Game::state() -> State to get the current state (owned value)
• Every so often, the Game is polled for the current state
• Arc<State> is passed around to the various threads
• Threads pass the respective &State to agents in the normal functions

State is expected (guaranteed?) to be updated every round (do I want to formalize rounds?)

Should have absolutely no issues with lifetimes, and also be possible to make nostd-friendly

Not sure how Cell should be involved, if at all. Maybe in some behind-the-scenes machinery, i.e. using an Arc<Cell<State>> or something instead of a channel to pass the new states around?