Tracing the boot up sequence of TAEB part 2

This entry goes into detail of the top of the main loop of the taeb script, line 81-98.

taeb,lines 81-98 is the top-level of the taeb main loop. The main loop is composed of 2 main parts. The first item in the main loop is the actual operational statement. The later item, which is actually multiple statements, are only executed if taeb has been told via the command line option, --loop, to re-execute itself after it has completed playing a nethack session.

Let's review these 2 portions by first going over the later item, since it is only executed when specified via the command-line.

taeb, line88: only reinitialize/restart taeb if local variable $loop is not equal to 0. This will happen when --loop is specified via the command-line.

taeb, line90: reset all taeb variables and states
taeb, lines 92-96: Sleep for 5 seconds before starting a new nethack game

The eval statement, which is the first statement ecountered at the start of this loop, does all the work.

taeb, line 83: sets INT handler to print message to screen and prevent starting a new game by setting $loop to 0.

taeb, line 84: execute a taeb session
taeb, line 85: reports the results of a taeb session

taeb, line84, is TAEB->play;The method play is sent to the TAEB object, which is defined in TAEB.pm.

TAEB.pm, lines 742-749: Inside this loop, each iteration is a step. At the end of each step, results are store of the step. The last step of the taeb session will print its results to the screen.

Inside each step, the following methods are called in order:


redraw
display_topline
human_input
full_input
handle_XXXX called

redraw is invoked from TAEB::Display::Curses. redraw is used to repaint the entire nethack screen at the start of a step. display_topline is also invoked from TAEB::Display::Curses, too. display_topline displays any messages received from the last step in the current step. human_input is defined inside TAEB.pm. human_input is used to get keyboard input if ai allows human control and a key is pressed. Under normal operational circumstances, human_input will not capture anything.

full_input is a wraper method that is used to capture nethack screen data and load it into the taeb database. At the start of full_input's operation, the screen scraper is reset to take new info and the publisher is turned off. The publisher is resumed after scraping and processing of the scrape is finished. After the publisher is off, then next instruction performed is process_input, which reads any input from a previous action or user and sends it to the vt, virtual terminal. Afterwords, the screen is scraped and loaded into the Taeb database.

The next step performed is that dungeon and senses variables are updated. After the update of these items, the publisher is renabled. This completes the phase of a step where the percepts are captured.