How to add a “sleep” or “wait” to my Lua Script?

Question

I'm trying to make a simple script for a game, by changing the time of day, but I want to do it in a fast motion. So this is what I'm talking about:

function disco ( hour, minute)
setTime ( 1, 0 )
SLEEP
setTime ( 2, 0 )
SLEEP
setTime ( 3, 0 )
end

and so on. How would I go about doing this?

Answer 1

This homebrew function have precision down to a 10th of a second or less.

function sleep (a) 
    local sec = tonumber(os.clock() + a); 
    while (os.clock() < sec) do 
    end 
end

Answer 2

If you have luasocket installed:

local socket = require 'socket'
socket.sleep(0.2)

Answer 3

Lua doesn't provide a standard sleep function, but there are several ways to implement one, see Sleep Function for detail.

For Linux, this may be the easiest one:

function sleep(n)
  os.execute("sleep " .. tonumber(n))
end

In Windows, you can use ping:

function sleep(n)
  if n > 0 then os.execute("ping -n " .. tonumber(n+1) .. " localhost > NUL") end
end

The one using select deserves some attention because it is the only portable way to get sub-second resolution:

require "socket"

function sleep(sec)
    socket.select(nil, nil, sec)
end

sleep(0.2)

Answer 4

wxLua has three sleep functions:

local wx = require 'wx'
wx.wxSleep(12)   -- sleeps for 12 seconds
wx.wxMilliSleep(1200)   -- sleeps for 1200 milliseconds
wx.wxMicroSleep(1200)   -- sleeps for 1200 microseconds (if the system supports such resolution)