I’ve pretty much posted all the basic stuff I’ve learned about Moai already. Does anyone have any suggestions for topics they’d like to see? If so, leave a comment and I’ll do my best!
Category Archives: Moai
Handling User Input – InputManager
There are two ways to handle user input in Moai – by polling or registering callback functions. I’m going to focus on polling for now, since that is what I am using. Moai provides some ways to check for input through the MOAIInputMgr.device and it’s properties. Depending on your device/host, there will be different properties like MOAIInputMgr.device.touch (touch input on a phone) or MOAIInputMgr.device.mouseLeft (left click). To use these you could do this:
if MOAIInputMgr.device.mouseLeft:down() then
print("the left button is down!")
--do your logic here
end
However, this will fail if your device doesn’t actually have a left mouse button, like on an iPhone.
Managing Game State – SceneManager
We have a bunch of scene definitions now, but how do we keep track of them and transition between them? A solution is the SceneManager class, which maintains a stack of Scenes and handles adding/removing/updating them. Here’s what the stack might look like, with each layer being a Scene:
At each step, only the top Scene on the current stack will be updated and drawn. As Scenes are added to the stack, they are initialized, and as they are taken off, they will be cleaned up. The interface for the SceneManager will be as follows:
- pushScene(scene) – add a new scene to the top of the stack
- popScene() – remove the top scene
- update() – should be called every loop iteration, calls update() on the top Scene
Defining Game State – Scenes
Now that we have a lot of the basic pieces in place to make a simple game, we need to think about how to keep track of game state. For example, how do you know to start with a start menu? How can you transition to the actual gameplay? What if user wants to pause the game or quit?
We do this by defining each one of these game states to be a Scene. Some examples are:
- Start menu
- Settings dialogs
- Credits scroll
- Game level
- Game map
- Pause menu
ResourceManager – Keeping Track of Decks and Props
Remember in Moai, you think of graphics resources in terms of Decks and Props. Decks are the actual definition of the resource – the vertex locations, texture data, etc. A Prop is a reference to a Deck and any information used to actually draw an instance of it – the actual location or any other transformation. In order for this to work though, you need to keep track of all your Decks in order to create new Props. I wrote up a class called ResourceManager to help with this.
ResourceManager = {}
--cache of filename -> deck
local cache = {}
Since we want this to be accessible anywhere, I’m treating this like a static class. That means I don’t need to use the CreateClass() function I introduced earlier – I just need to create a global scoped table and add some functions to it. Since there will only ever be one instance of this, I can create private variables by just declaring them local. Here, “ResourceManager” will be the name of the class, and we have a private table “cache”, which we will use as a dictionary with a string (filename) to Deck mapping.
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