My Sword Does Damage Now

My blade has been infused with an ancient power...

A force found only in ancient legends, striking fear into the hearts of enemies inanimate bushes...

The power of....

section:TriggerAt("playerDamageSelf", { swordPolygon });

Okay, so there's a bunch of stuff that I did recently. I'll get to the damage trigger in a minute. First things first, major changes:

Removed 'Tiles' from the game and replaced them with entities. There was a missing abstraction here--Tiles and Entities were close to identical except for a few properties, so I merged them into one object. Of course, from the editor's point of view, there's still tiles, since it's incredibly convenient to edit layered, axis-aligned stacks of tiles for the level geometry. However, when the game loads these from data, it simply converts them to regular old entities.

Updated the script editor. Here's what it looks like right now:

Most notable is the 'test' button, which compiles and attempts to run the script. Since there's no game context and scripts make use of a number of parameters passed in, the editor uses mock objects that implement those interfaces. At the very least, this ensures two things: that the code compiles, and that the methods called on those interfaces exist, and that the parameters are correct. A limitation of this, however, is that I can't ensure that all branches are executed. In the script above (which turns a light on and off when the player slashes it), the method entity:GetState always returns null, so the 'else' clause won't ever run in the test script.

Also note the label above the method body which tells you the implicit function signature of the event. A future enhancement would be some sort of browser that shows you the available methods on those objects. Intellisense would be great, but that's way out of scope.

Another minor but useful update: added a launch button to the editor. Fourth item on the toolbar (play). Runs the game with whatever section you're editing.

Okay, now for the demos.

This first video illustrates the new trigger 'playerDamageSelf'. This is an event handler for entities, so the 'self' in the name refers to the entity. That is, when you define 'playerDamageSelf', you are declaring what happens to an entity when the player damages it.

There are four sets of bushes, each with a slightly more advanced feature than the last:

1. The leftmost bushes simply change texture when slashed.
2. The script clears the collision model out so the player can walk over it after it's slashed.
3. A single leaf entity is spawned in the middle of the bush.
4. Multiple leaf entities with randomized positions and velocities are spawned.

Next up: Making entities collide. Remember the video with the fireballs coming out of the braziers? Well, let's make them disappear when they hit a wall.