Grabbing current system time from lua?

[zacharycarter]

So I don't think there's a lua binding to grab the current system time (please correct me if I'm mistaken), right now I think there is only the binding for grabbing the last frame's delta time - but I think this would be a nice to have.

I can add the binding if you think the enhancement is worth the effort. It would give me more insight into how the whole lua interop works.

Thanks,

• Zach

[dbartolini]

You can use standard lua stuff: http://www.lua.org/pil/22.1.html
Is there anything particular you would like to have that is not covered by that?

[zacharycarter]

I read those but I was concerned (and quite probably an invalid concern) about the precision of the time that the lua calls would be returning. Right now my goal is to grab the current system time so I can use it to adjust a shaders alpha blending using it. I'll give it a shot using the lua date / time stuff and see if I can't get it working. If I end up needing a more precise system time I'll reopen this.

[zacharycarter]

Essentially what I'm looking to get is - clock()/CLOCKS_PER_SEC

[zacharycarter]

os.clock is what I was looking for :

The os.clock function returns the number of seconds of CPU time for the program. Its typical use is to benchmark a piece of code:

local x = os.clock()
local s = 0
for i=1,100000 do s = s + i end
print(string.format("elapsed time: %.2f\n", os.clock() - x))

http://www.lua.org/pil/22.1.html - just for future reference / in case I forget in the future