Trapped in the bureaucratic spiral

(copied from lucera blog)

The last week there have been no news because we were involved in bureaucratic issues and we are attending an intensive course in management and business administration that will finalize the next week.

This has prevented us from making great advances in recent days, despite of that, we have been making some small internal changes and we have been testing some of our latest features added.

Improved layer system

(copied from lucera blog)

MindShake has improved its layer system.

Until now the layers were little else that an object container, but now you can:

* Set the layer position, affecting all the objects inside.
* Modify layer render order.
* Scale independently each layer, horizontaly or vertically.
* Set its pivot, to move each layer snugly and make nice transitions.
* Modify the layer alpha channel or colorize (tint) it, to make some cool effects.

And, of course, you can still enable camera transformation to leave the system to adjust the layers relative position and scale to do automatic parallax scrolling.

All these changes affect the contents of the layer and you can make some effects more easilly now.

Unified Layers

(copied from lucera blog)

At beginning we mistakenly thought that was better to separate objects per kind because we thought that this way would be simpler for the users and we wanted to promote the use of layers because we think that is is a powerfull feature.


But now we think that is better, and easiest, allow the user decide how he/she wants to distribute the objects across layers.


In this way we unified SpriteLayer, TextLayer and 3DModelLayer (not available) into ObjectLayer. Thus, the only different layer at this point is TileLayer that is in fact wholly different from other layers.

Notes about new event StateChange

(copied from lucera blog)

Note that if you reach a state for the first time the order of the events will be:

1. ExitState (last state)
2. StateChange
3. Begin (for which behaviors associated with current state that have not been yet initialized)
4. EnterState
5. ...

For this reason we are able to make some configuration changes in this event, because it will be before than Begin

New event for behaviors

(copied from lucera blog)

We added a new event ‘StateChange’ to allow behaviors to detect when the state will be changed. This event will be sent after ‘ExitState’ and before ‘EnterState’ to all kind of behaviors, with & without state.

Inside this event you can check the prior state and the current state, using behavior manager, to make per state changes or configuration.

IBC: Inter Behavior Communication

(copied from lucera blog)

MindShakes provides an easy way to communicate between different behaviors through messages.

When you are splitting the logic between different behaviors, you don't need to worry about how these behaviors will handle their visibility. If you need that several behaviors communicate, you can use the IBC system.

All behaviors have a virtual method to be used to receive messages from the behavior manager. The name of this method is "Notification". A behavior only can receive notifications for those messages for which it has been registered. To do that you must use the method "RegisterNotification", from the behavior manager, where you must specify the notification id and the behavior instance that will receive the notification. Then, when the method "SendNotification", from the behavior manager, will be invoked, the "Notification" method, for each behavior that has been subscribed to this message id, will be invoked.

Notice that you must overwrite the "Notification" method on your behavior, if you want to handle any notification.