The Dink Network

I use external a lot, but I don't understand it. All I know is that a procedure called with external seems to kill itself as soon as it hits a wait or return, so you don't need a kill_this_task?

A procedure called with external kills itself as soon as it hits a wait? Weird...

I use emake.c to do cutscenes whenever something dies, and I accidentally put a wait statement in there. Needless to say, the following lines did not seem to run. Perhaps this was because &save_x and &save_y got changed, but I vaguely recall that I passed them to locals, so the best explanation seems to be external dying on wait. I should test more.

Ah, that would make sense, because when you call a script with external, it's sort of treated as part of the script that called it. Since the script that called it is attached to a dying creature, it's not too surprising that the whole thing collapses when it the sprite is killed (ie. when it comes to a wait).

You can get around this by either using script_attached(1000) or using spawn isntead of external. In either case, make sure put kill_this_task at the end.

So if I read this correctly, external() is more like include() (PHP-style), but with a proc reference?

Yes is there more info on this command ?

Some in the DinkC Reference v4, found in your Dink/develop folder. I believe this has been mentioned once or twice