I am making a program using the amazing libGDX
+scene2d API and I structured it as follows:
- I have a single
MyGame
instance, holding a single PolygonSpriteBatch
instance.
- There is an abstract
MyScreen
class, holding a MyStage
class (see below)
- Then there are lots of different screen classes that inherit from
MyScreen
, and instantiate each other at will.
(in all cases, removing the "My
" gives you the name of the respective library class that it extends)
This model worked fine, until I encountered some problems to perform actions between screens using the Action
system. I decided then that it would be a good idea to have a single OmnipresentActor
belonging to MyGame
that, as the name says, is present in every scene. So I modified MyStage to look more or less like this:
public class MyStage extends Stage {
public MyStage(MyGame g) {
super(new FitViewport(MyGame.WIDTH, MyGame.HEIGHT), g.batch);
addActor(game.omnipresentInvisibleActor);
}
@Override
public void clear() {
unfocusAll();
getRoot().clearActions();
getRoot().clearListeners();
removeActorsButNotListenersNorActions();
}
public void removeActorsButNotListenersNorActions() {
for (Actor a : getActors()) if (a.getClass()!= OmnipresentInvisibleActor.class) a.remove();
}
It followed a painful debugging phase, until I found out the following:
public PresentationScreen(MyGame g) {
// super() call and other irrelevant/already debugged code
System.out.println("PRINT_BEFORE: "+ stage.getActors().toString()); // OmnipresentActor is there
mainMenuScreen = new MainMenuScreen(game);
System.out.println("PRINT_AFTER: "+ stage.getActors().toString()); // OmnipresentActor is not there anymore, but was added to the mainMenuScreen
the "PRINT_BEFORE"
statement shows that the stage
holds the omnipresentActor
. In "PRINT_AFTER"
it isn't there anymore, whereas mainMenuScreen
is indeed holding it. So my question, now more precise:
does scene2d prevent this to happen, or am I doing something wrong here?
Answers much appreciated! Cheers
An actor can only be a member of one stage: Thanks to @Tenfour04 for confirming that. The explanation is quite clear after doing a little research:
Stage.addActor()
looks like this:
(here the github code of Stage.java)
/** Adds an actor to the root of the stage.
* @see Group#addActor(Actor) */
public void addActor (Actor actor) {
root.addActor(actor);
}
whereas root is simply initialized as a group in the Stage constructor: root = new Group();
.
And Group.addActor()
looks like this:
(here the github code of Group.java)
/** Adds an actor as a child of this group. The actor is first removed from its parent group, if any. */
public void addActor (Actor actor) {
if (actor.parent != null) actor.parent.removeActor(actor, false);
children.add(actor);
actor.setParent(this);
actor.setStage(getStage());
childrenChanged();
}
So in the tree first lines is the answer: when creating the new stage, if the actor to add already has a parent, it is removed from its current parent. So, There are two possible solutions to the problem I enounced:
SOLUTION 1: Override addActor
removing the if statement, or any other alteration of the library, which I'm not sure if it would work. I rather think this could be very problematic, for instance it could prevent the stages from disposing correctly
SOLUTION 2: Change the design so you don't need an omnipresent actor, nor changing/reimplementing the libraries. For the moment this is what I've done based on this answer, it isn't very clean but it works so far:
1) In the MyScreen
class added the following fields:
private boolean watchingTemp;
private Actor watchActorTemp;
private Action actionTemp;
2) Then added this method:
public void addActionOnStageAfterActorEndsHisActions(Actor actor, Action action) {
watchActorTemp = actor;
actionTemp = action;
watchingTemp = true;
}
3) then in the render
method, I added the following:
if (watchingTemp && !watchActorTemp.hasActions()) {
watchingTemp = false;
stage.addAction(actionTemp);
}
4) finally, when wishing to perform an action at a screen transition (and eventually disposing the first one), you can do something like this: I use something similar when clicking on a door between screens
public void movePlayerTHENgotoNewScreen(float xPos, float yPos, whatever else...) {
game.player.walkToAnyPoint(xPos, yPos);
yourFavoriteScreen.addActionOnStageAfterActorEndsHisActions(game.player, gotoNewScreen(wathever else...));
}
Hope it helps!