Rusher 2.1 – Introduction & Migrating from 2.0

Go to Rusher 2 project homepage
Rusher 2 tutorial list

By merging into Rusher what I’ve learned at DigiPen, mostly from Game Engine Architecture Club lectures, I’ve secretly marked it version 2.1 a while ago.

For convenience, here’s a quick list of what’s new and what’s removed in version 2.1:

• A brand new engine-system and entity-component framework. The concept is the same, but the interface is much more polished and consistent. The core part of the engine still makes use of SwiftSuspenders for dependency injection and management.
• A simplified Renderer2D system has taken over the old camera-layer based one. I think it makes more sense for the developers to decide what type of systems they want to use themselves.
• An extension for Starling is available. It’s pretty much the mirrored version of the new Renderer2D system and RenderTarget component class.
• The new Action List framework replaced the old command and state machine framework. I’ll write a dedicated post on action lists later.
• Components no longer “update” themselves. They are pretty much “passive” in version 2.1. If you want to have an “active components” that update themselves, then you’d need to create a system to update them. More on this topic later.

Now I’ll cover some of the immediately important topics in detail.

Reference Management & Dependency Injection

The [Inject] metadata tag still works in the same way. But if you choose to obtain an object reference later on in the game instead of at the time of injection, you may make use of the newly-added getInstance(Type:Class, name:String="") method that is conveniently available in almost every scope. This method makes use of the underlying injector to obtain object reference and thus takes what you’d expect as arguments: a class type and an option name string for further differentiation.

var transform:Transform2D = getInstance(Transform2D);

The mapping rule to obtain object reference is the same:

• The name is not required for systems, since there can only be on instance for each system class.

Component Updates

One major change in version 2.1 is the update sequence management. Previously, all components are updated, which is not necessary since some components are just for holding data. In Rusher 2.1, if an object is to be updated, then the class should define an update method like udpate(dt:Number), and add itself to some other object that is able to update it. For instance, the RenderTarget2D component class overrides the Component.init() method, which is invoked when the component is added to an entity, to register itself to the related Renderer2D system through the Renderer2D.register(component:RenderTarget2D) method. It is the client’s responsibility to define a component update method and a system register method.

//RenderTarget2D component class
override public function init():void 
{
  getInstance(Renderer2D).register(this);
}

The class also overrides the Component.dispose() method, which is invoked when the component is removed from an entity, to unregister itself from the renderer system through the Renderer2D.unregister(component:RenderTarget2D) method. It’s also the client’s responsibility to define a system unregister method.

//RenderTarget2D class
override public function dispose():void 
{
  if (displayObject_ && displayObject_.parent)
  {
    displayObject_.parent.removeChild(displayObject_);
  }
  Renderer2D(getInstance(Renderer2D)).unregister(this);
}

The Renderer2D system class internally has an InList (intrusively linked list) object that keeps the chain of registered components, where the RenderTarget2D component class ultimately extends the InListNode class for this to work.

//Renderer2D system 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();
  }
}

This is just an example of how you can manage an internal update list in a system; you can of course implement one in your own way.