Composer with Objects

Pretty much completed this, for first project anyway - I'm putting together reusable components for a game, rather than simply writing it. Next thing will be a library which utilises .fnt / .png files to print text in a coherent fashion, I want to be able to animate them and scale them and so on to produce Amiga Demo style effects without too much difficulty.

The Composer library is probably useable if anyone wants to play with it, but the interface might change a bit. You never quite know how useable your components are until you write something with them.

So, some examples. These all come from the demo that is there, shortened, mostly removing either print statements for debugging or scene setup code.

This declares a scene class which can be reused easily, just to create test scenes easily really.

SimpleSceneClass = sm.Scene:new()
creates a new scene. sm is the singleton instance of the Scene Manager.

function SimpleSceneClass:create()
local vg = self:getViewGroup()
self.r = display.newRect(10,10,display.contentWidth-20,display.contentHeight-20)
self.r.anchorX, self.r.anchorY = 0,0
self.r:setFillColor( 0.4,0,0 ) self.r.strokeWidth = 42 self.r:setStrokeColor(0,0,1)
        vg:insert(self.r)
        (more of the same setting up simple display stuff.)
self.item = 0
end

this is analogous to the create event - it creates objects which are insert into the view group.

function SimpleSceneClass:tap(event)
if event.target == self.text then 
self:gotoScene(self.tgt)
else
self:gotoScene("over1")
end
return true
end

this is a tap event. You can tap the text bit to go to another scene, or you can tap something else to go to an overlay called "over1". It works the same sort of way, though I do allow dimming of the background scene, or not, as you like.

function SimpleSceneClass:enterFrame(a,b,c)
self.item = self.item + 1
self.textCount.text = self.item
end

This is quite useful.  Firstly, data can be stored in a scene, and won't be lost even if the scene is created and destroyed. So self.item is a counter. The enterFrame event is called automatically by the SceneManager if this is the current scene. What this does is display a counter which increments at 30Hz. (fps rate). You don't have to set up, or remove event handlers.

function SimpleSceneClass:getTransitionType() return "flip" end

This overrides the 'exit' transition from the class, so it uses flip.

function ShortDisplayClass:create()
self:insert(display.newText("And now ...",display.contentWidth/2,display.contentHeight/2,native.systemFont,24))
end
function ShortDisplayClass:nextScene() return "thirdscene" end
function ShortDisplayClass:sceneDelay() return 2500 end

This is fun. This is a Scene class which creates the scene (as normal), but it automagically waits (2500ms, e.g. 2.5 seconds) and then goes to the scene "thirdscene". Quite nice for transient information scenes.

DemoOverlayClass = sm.ModalOverlayScene:new()

function DemoOverlayClass:create()
local c = display.newCircle( display.contentWidth/2,display.contentHeight/2,100 )
c:setFillColor( 0,1,0 )
c.strokeWidth = 2
self:insert(c)
c:addEventListener( "tap", self )
end

function DemoOverlayClass:tap(e)
self:closeOverlay()
return true
end

The worlds dullest overlay. Just displays a circle, you tap on it, and it closes the overlay. There is a non modal overlay scene class as well.

So, we'll create three scenes and an overlay and wire them together.

s1inst = SimpleSceneClass:new():setup("One","secondscene")
s2inst = ShortDisplayClass:new()
s3inst = SimpleSceneClass:new():setup("3","firstscene")
ovinst = DemoOverlayClass:new()

these are instances of scene classes. It's OOP, so you create a scene class then an instance of it (though in LUA you can actually do both with the same thing). The set up method just puts some text to make the classes visually distinguishable, the second parameter is where you go after this. ShortDisplayClass has this hard coded (it goes to thirdscene, specify in the nextScene() method).

smgr:append("firstscene",s1inst):append("secondscene",s2inst):append("thirdscene",s3inst):append("over1",ovinst)

Then we tell the scene manager what they are and what they are called. I kept the Corona idea of naming scenes, but you can use the reference if you like. And I like chaining. And templates.

smgr:gotoScene("firstScene")

.... and it does.  So we've created with this code two scenes with the counter and the overlay button (1 and 3) and the transitional automatic screen (2) and an overlay scene. None of them actually do a great deal, but they could, of course.

All this stuff, incidentally, is under the MIT license, which pretty much amounts to 'help yourself'.