Benefit of using Signal / Custom Signal

Help and Feedback Scripting Support
#1

Hello, I’m just a new guy who wanna try to use GoodSignal or similar to that, can you tell me what’s the benefit of using that custom Signal? Thank you.

#2

GoodSignal claims to be nearly the same as roblox’s RBXScriptSignal. the bonus is it might help with debugging by giving a couple more steps on a stack frame, The downside is that roblox can implement their signals in C/C++ and will have very good performance that no signal plugin can match.

Excerpt from GoodSignal github

--               Batched Yield-Safe Signal Implementation                     --
-- This is a Signal class which has effectively identical behavior to a       --
-- normal RBXScriptSignal, with the only difference being a couple extra      --
-- stack frames at the bottom of the stack trace when an error is thrown.     --
-- This implementation caches runner coroutines, so the ability to yield in   --
-- the signal handlers comes at minimal extra cost over a naive signal        --
-- implementation that either always or never spawns a thread.                --
1 Like
#3

if you want to make your own event system you can also do something like this

local module = {}
module.__index = module

module.New = function()
    local self = setmetatable({}, module)
    self.callbacks = {}
end

module.Bind = function(self, callback)
    local callbacks = {} -- if we are looping the old callbacks we don't want to break the order so instead of adding the callback directly we make brand new table
    callbacks[callback] = true
    for callback, value in pairs(self.callbacks) do
        callbacks[callback] = true
    end
    self.callbacks = callbacks
end

module.UnBind = function(self, callback)
    self.callbacks[callback] = nil -- its safe the remove callbacks directly so we don't need to make a new table like Bind
end

module.UnBindAll = function(self, function)
    self.callbacks = {}
end

module.Call = function(self, ...)
    for callback, value in pairs(self.callbacks) do
        callback(...) -- if you don't want the callback to block the next callbacks you might want to task.spawn the function
    end
end

return module

-- require the module above
local eventsModule = require(game.ReplicatedStorage.ModuleScript)

-- create a new event
local myCoolEvent = eventsModule.New()

-- bind a function to the event
myCoolEvent:Bind(function(value1, value2)
    print("Bind1", value1, value2)
end)

-- bind a second function to the event
myCoolEvent:Bind(function(value1, value2)
    print("Bind2", value1, value2)
end)

-- every 2 seconds call the event
while true do
    task.wait(2)
    myCoolEvent:Call("String Value", math.random(100))
end

or you could just use a BindableEvent

-- create a new event
local myCoolEvent = Instance.new("BindableEvent")

-- bind a function to the event
myCoolEvent.Event:Connect(function(value1, value2)
    print("Bind1", value1, value2)
end)

-- bind a second function to the event
myCoolEvent.Event:Connect(function(value1, value2)
    print("Bind2", value1, value2)
end)

-- every 2 seconds call the event
while true do
    task.wait(2)
    myCoolEvent:Fire("String Value", math.random(100))
end
1 Like
#4

Maybe people who just start scripting especially in Roblox will ask, what’s the difference using event connection compared to just writing a function, if it’s only used in the same script

#5

The difference can depend on how you tell the roblox workspace to handle events, the differed events beta can be a helpful mental mapping as well as speed up events execution (Article here). If not differing events then it should behave largely the same as a function until a yeilding function call is reached, then execution should (hopefully) resume after the bindable event’s :Fire call.

#6

Gotta make sure the return self is before the end and it will work