I'm just going through the javadoc and various tutorials on libgdx and I'm at the stage of trying to figure out differences between various concepts that seem similar to me or provide similar capabilities in libgdx.
At first I thought scene2d was about creating interactive items such as menus, etc but various tutorials I'm reading use scene2d/actors for the main game items (i.e. the player, etc) and others just use sprites.
What exactly is the difference between using Sprite and Actor (i.e. scene2D) in a game and when should you choose?
Thanks.
A Sprite is basically an image with a position, size, and rotation. You draw it using SpriteBatch, and once you have your your Sprites and your SpriteBatch, you have a simple, low-level way to get 2D images on the screen anywhere you want. The rest is up to you.
Actor, on the other hand, is part of a scene graph. It's higher-level, and there's a lot more that goes into a scene graph than just positioning images. The root of the scene graph is the Stage, which is not itself displayed. The Stage is a container for the Actors that you add to it, and is used for organizing the scene. In particular, input events are passed down through the Stage to the appropriate Actor, and the Stage knows when to tell the Actor to draw itself. A touch event, for example, only gets sent to the Actor that got touched.
But note that Actor does not contain a texture like Sprite does. Instead you probably want to use Image, a subclass of Actor that's probably closer to Sprite than just a plain Actor. Other subclasses of Actor contain text, and so on.
Another big advantage of Actors is that they can have Actions. These are a big topic, but they essentially allow you to plan a sequence of events for that Actor (like fading in, moving, etc) that will then happen on their own once you set them.
So basically Actor does a lot more than Sprite because it's part of a graphical framework.
It is more or less matter of taste. If you want to use actions and stage, use actors. Actors cannot be drawn directly, you need to override draw method. Inside draw you can use sprites.
Related
What technique should be used in multi-view app (using CompositeViewer) if some nodes look differently in different views? For example, if some label positions should be recalculated depending on the view's camera parameters? Or if some other kind of annotations (rectangular area with a border some text) are visible or hidden depending on the view scale?
osg has Billboard and Text classes that handle orientation for each camera out of the box (see for instance how the CullVisitor applies to the Billboard class here).
To implement other behaviors which depend on the camera, the right place to make things happen is a Cull Callback added to your nodes: your callback will be invoked multiple times (one for each different camera) on every frame, and you can react accordingly to your needs.
I'm starting to develop a board game in C++ using OpenGL.
Before starting, I want to draw the UML diagram, as shown bellow.
The game has:
A board that contains a desktop, a footer and the points of both players to show.
Pieces to put on the board
Followers (soldiers)
Mouse events
A set of rules that the players must obay in order to play
Something like The Risk, of Monopoly, etc
I'm not an expert in UML, so by looking at what I've written so far, do you think the UML (arrows and relations) is accurate with the description?
What would you change, and why?
Hard to tell without knowing the game (use case). Generally you seem to over-use aggregation. Also I miss the basic properties/methods of the single classes. Those are general observations.
Some detail observations:
The model does not differentiate between the game and the technology.
What for it this Object? It seems rather pointless. You'd better be off designing the game logic first: what are those Pieces and what can they do? Think of a better name (my dictionary suggests Token, Meeple, PlayingPiece). Things are only what their name is!
What are the Rules? I don't see any rule class at all.
Create a 2nd diagram/layer where you can concentrate on technology in a later stage.
I am new to JavaFX and i have been recently googling around for a while to understand this.
I am planning to rewrite an existing screen-manager framework in my project which is in Swing.
I am interested to understand what is the alternative to JComponent in FX ?
Is it Stage or window or Control or Parent, i am not able to conclude. Neither i am sure if there is such an alternative any.
Why do i need the alternative for JComponent ?
Well, in the screen-manager framework that i have in place, we always return the type for any individual swing component (say a panel) as JComponent. So i am eager to know the alternative in FX, if we have one.
Thanks in advance for any help.
Somewhat loosely, the equivalent to JComponent is Node
I say loosely, because they are different things and it isn't a 100% equivalence relation, but I guess you can think of them as roughly representing similar things. Nodes represent more stuff than JComponents because they can represent shapes, media views, etc.
JComponent is:
The base class for all Swing components except top-level containers. To use a component that inherits from JComponent, you must place the component in a containment hierarchy whose root is a top-level Swing container. Top-level Swing containers -- such as JFrame, JDialog, and JApplet -- are specialized components that provide a place for other Swing components to paint themselves.
And Node is:
Base class for scene graph nodes. A scene graph is a set of tree data structures where every item has zero or one parent, and each item is either a "leaf" with zero sub-items or a "branch" with zero or more sub-items.
Note that a Scene is contained within a Window (or Stage), so somewhat analogous to a JComponent, a window is not a Node (but pretty much everything else that JavaFX displays is).
See the Working with the Scene Graph tutorial from Oracle for more information on what Nodes are and how they are used.
Im currently working on an exercise, for which I want to create a technical design documentation.
Therefore, I need to evaluate possible solutions to a bunch of problems coming with my fictional project.
Here's a quick glance at the exercise:
The game's art & core game design are split up very harshly - basically, the core system, game mechanics and design are created to be very abstract, in order to allow them to work with a very wide variety of art settings. Also, one of the restrictions is to re-use as many assets, levels & designs as possible.
Now to my question:
I want the level designers to create levels using "template" objects (object which have all the technical features that are required, ie slots for attachments, correct scale, textures etc) and later replace these objects with set of assets I receive from my outsourcer.
Since I dont want to manually replace all objects whenever I get a new set of assets, this is what I wanted to do:
Each template object gets a descriptive label, and each asset delivered by the outsourcer needs to have the exact same label name as its corresponding template-counterpart stored in it as well (for example as a custom attribute, a channel, or simply in its name).
I now want to replace all templates with the related asset using a script.
This would be done for each set of assets. I would also keep several deployments of my engine, one per set, but initially, they'd all start out with the templates that need to be replaced (since there will need to be some modifications for each setting, both visually and from a game design perspective, keeping all assets in one trunk/project didn't make any sense to me).
To make this easier i'd use a "database" of some sorts (probably a simple dictionary which the engine script could query and which would be filled out beforehand by another script upon delivery of new assets?).
My question is: is this possible? If yes, how difficult would this be from a programmers perspective? I have only limited knowledge in this field, so I'd love to hear what you lads & ladies think about this.
Also (very important) - do you know of a better way to achieve this "replacability" of assets? Or simply have an easier way to achieve what I want to do? I appreciate any feedback! Thank you!
quick edit: This would not only be applied to 3d Objects; textures would also need to be replaced, obviously
I think you are looking for Prefabs.
Basically prefabs implements a sort of prototype pattern.
Instead of putting into scene's hierarchy directly a GameObject you can make it a prefab and put into the scene a GameObject that is an instance of that prefab.
When a GameObject into the scene is linked to a prefab, and the prefab will be modified, the linked object will be modified too.
If you have several instances of the same prefab, all istances will be updated as well.
The only strong limitation to this feature is that, since now, nested prefabs aren't supported.
I want the level designers to create levels using "template" objects
(object which have all the technical features that are required, ie
slots for attachments, correct scale, textures etc) and later replace
these objects with set of assets I receive from my outsourcer.
This is the tipical use case. You have a placeholder into the scene (es. a Cube) that will be subistitued by a model when the artists will provide it.
If you instantiate 100 cubes into the scene, when you need to substitute them, you would do it manually for all objects.
If instead you have created a prefab (lets call it ModelPrefab) and the cubes into the scene are instances of that prefab, when you'll have the new 3d model you can simply update the prefab and all linked instances will be updated too.
My question is: is this possible? If yes, how difficult would this be
from a programmers perspective?
If you can work without nested prefabs you have to do nothing, it's already implemented. If you need to implement nested prefabs, it might not be so straightforward.
quick edit: This would not only be applied to 3d Objects; textures
would also need to be replaced, obviously
I made the example above using the models, but you can make a prefab from each GameObject that is actually a collection of Components (have a look at Component Based Object Management if you are interested).
EDIT
Yes, it is possible to update prefabs throught script the required functions are in the UnityEditor namespace, so they mast be used through an editor extension.
You can found all you need in PrefabUtility class.
I've been starting to get into game development; I've done some tutorials and read lots of articles but one thing I'm not sure about is what is the best way to manage large numbers of temporary objects, e.g. bullets.
Should each entity manage its own bullets, should I have a global bullet manager or should I create each bullet as a new full-blown individual object (that seems pretty inefficient though)?
Also, when using a component pattern what should I do about properties that seems generic, e.g. position, velocity, etc..?
Some stuff I've read seem to think that everything should be in some kind of component while others seem to think that generic properties that will be commonly accessed by a variety of components should be a member of the entity class itself.
Forgive me, these are probably simple but I want to make sure I'm thinking in the right direction.
Thank you very much!
Creating each bullet as a "fully blown object" shouldn't be too inefficient - have a look at the Object pool pattern, which outlines a way to speed up these object creations.
As for your question re: components and generic properties, it depends on how strictly you wish to follow the component architecture. If you want to be really strict with the component architecture, every property should be in a component and different components should talk to each other. Otherwise, for efficiency reasons, share some properties in the main object. For more information, have a look at this page on the component behavioural pattern.
The original Quake uses a fixed-size pool for entities (which are also sometimes called edicts). Anything whose existence persists between frames is an entity. This includes "shaped physical" things like the world and doors, rectangular physical things like monsters, players, and nails, movetype-transparent things like weapons, invisible but touchable rectangular things like trigger fields, and entirely-nonphysical things like delay events.
I think the limit in Quake is something like 700 edicts; the game will crash if the limit is exceeded. I think edicts are simply stored in an array, since every property which exists for any edict exists for all of them.