I made a floor (more Scala and JMonkeyEngine)!

I've played around with Scala and JMonkeyEngine some more. It is always a supprise when you've been working on something and then you get an epiphany "Oh, I shouldn't do it like this...", then you change the way you go about the problem and you're basically done in five minutes. Well, ideally that is... This time that is what coding my Floor/Game Board implementation felt like.

I got the tip to use SharedMesh on the JME forum. This felt like a good fit for my floor since each Tile would be exactly the same. Initially I had created each tile with its own vertices, colors, indices and normals array. With the SharedMesh all Tiles share the data in these arrays. Niffty :)


So here I use the singleton object Tile as the TriMesh for the Tile class. I think this is a nice fit. There will only ever be a single instance of the TriMesh used to create the floor and if I later need to change some property of the floor I can just change the values in the Tile object. So when creating a new Tile I just use the apply method of the Tile object, pass in a name and the x an z offset. This is done in the Floor object below. The Floor class is basically just a Node at the moment, but I expect will grow when I start building the actual game :) The magic happens yet again in the companion object.

I have to say I realy like foldLeft and I have missed it since I stopped coding in Erlang. Everything becomes nice and clean with it. You pass in some state to a Itterable along with a function (that returns a new state) to apply for each element. No mutables that change and cause strange bugs. Sweet. Oh, and another nice feature in Scala is pattern matching. I use it in the calculatePos method. This case is a very basic example of pattern matching (I could have used a simple if-elseif-else instead) and it can be much more powerful.

And here is the result:















Next step will be to create a figure to move about my new floor, some pathfinding in a hexgrid (I think JME has an A* implementation, so I'll have a look at that). Later I'll add some basic controlls to the game.

Cheers,
Emil H