Rusher 2.1 – Getting Started

Go to Rusher 2 project homepage
Rusher 2 tutorial list

Rusher is a component-based game engine, which means everything is treated equally as an entity (a.k.a game object) that owns components making up the overall behavior of the entity. Systems are like components for the engine itself, where each system is in charge of an engine-scale behavior. For instance, the Input system manages all user input states that can be queried by components, and the Renderer2D system updates all RenderTarget2D components in the engine.

Systems & Components

Each engine can only have one instance of each system type, and each entity can have only one instance of each component type. You add systems to an engine and add components to an entity by passing in class object references:

//add systems to engine
engine.addSystem(Input);
engine.addSystem(Renderer2D);

//craete an entity of name "hero"
var entity:Entity = engine.createEntity("hero");

//add components to entity
//extra constructor arguments can be passed in
entity.addComopnent(Transform2D, 10, 20);
entity.addComponent(RenderTarget2D, new HeroShape());

To keep the engine running, the Engine.update(dt:Number) method must be called repeatedly. This is referred to as the game loop.

private function init():void
{
  //some other initialization code
  //...
  addEventListener(Event.ENTER_FRAME, gameLoop);
}

//The gameLoop method
private var oldTime:int = 0;
private function gameLoop(e:Event):void
{
  var newTime:int = getTimer();
  
  //dt is in seconds
  var dt:Number = 0.001 * (newTime - oldTime);
  
  //update engine
  engine.update(dt);
  
  oldTime = newTime;
}

The getInstance() Method

Remember the code snippet in the Renderer2D class from the introduction?

//Renderer2D class
override public function update(dt:Number):void 
{
  var iter:InListIterator = targets_.getIterator();
  var target:RenderTarget2D;
  while (target = iter.data())
  {
    var displayObject:DisplayObject = target.displayObject;
    if (displayObject)
    {
      var transform:Transform2D 
        = target.getInstance(Transform2D);
      var displayTransform:Transform 
        = displayObject.transform;
        
      displayTransform.matrix = transform.calculateMatrix();
      displayObject.transform = displayTransform;
    }
    
    iter.next();
  }
}

You might wonder what object the call to getInstance() returns reference to, and how Rusher knows which reference to return. It’s based on the reference mapping rules Rusher uses under the hood; I’ll write a dedicated post on this topic later. For now, all you need to remember is:

  • If you pass in a system class reference, since there can only be one instance of each system type, the one system instance reference is returned.
  • If you pass in a component class reference, a reference to the component object belonging to the same owner entity, i.e. the sibling of that type, is returned.
  • If the component class reference passed in is followed by a name (string), then the method returns a reference to the component instance of that type belonging to the entity of the name.

With the getInstance() method that is available in almost every scope, you can literally obtain references to all systems, entities, and components everywhere in your client code.

About Allen Chou

Physics / Graphics / Procedural Animation / Visuals
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