Accessing Actors

[volch]

Hi! I'm brand new to game editor and I've started fiddling with it, but wrapping my head around the system is harder than I thought it would be.

I have set up a couple of spawn points, which create actors based on a timer. How should I go about accessing arbitrary actors that the spawn points spit out? (Getting a pointer to x actor without a collision or some other location event)

I see the script editor has a getClone function, but If I understand it correctly, I need to know the name of the clone. What to do If I don't know the name or how many clones I currently have, I just want a pointer to a random clone?

Thanks

[skydereign]

At some point you need to know what clone you want. getclone uses the actor's clonename to retrieve the Actor pointer. If though you really want a random clone you can use a clonename of the format name.random_cloneindex.

Code: Select all

char buffer[30];
int random_index;

do
{
    random_index = rand(30); // gets random clones from 0-29
    sprintf(buffer, "enemy.%d", random_index);
}while(getclone(buffer)->cloneindex==-1); // loop while the random actor obtained is invalid

But that code doesn't really selectively pick which clones the spawn actor created (just a random clone). Why do you want to do this?

[volch]

Thank you very much for the quick reply!

I was trying to set up a growing horde of clones of which the player could only interact with one at a time. So that he would hit a key to 'select' the next clone etc. But I don't really want a 'random' clone, I just want a clone that isn't the currently selected one.

I've been able to find some references to a 'cloneindex' which sounds like it is in the direction I want to head, but how to actually use it is murky. (Is there more detail than this page somehwere? http://game-editor.com/Cloneindex)

It seems from the code you posted that the cloneindex doesn't remove references to destroyed clones. Is that correct?

[skydereign]

Actors have three identifying variables.
name, which is the name you choose when creating the actor.
cloneindex, which is a unique number given to a clone when it is created.
clonename, a combination of both.

In your case, you want to lock onto a single clone. You can use a similar method as I posted, to get the next clone.

Code: Select all

int
get_next_clone (char* aname, int index)
{
    char buffer[30];

    do
    {
        index++; // move to next clone
         sprintf(buffer, "%s.%d", aname, index);
    }while(getclone(buffer)->cloneindex==-1); // loop while the new clone is invalid
    return index; // return the index of the next clone
}

The only problem with this function is that it won't detect if there are no more clones. In that case it will never break out of the loop. This is easy enough to fix, by either setting a max number of attempts to find a new clone, or keep track of the highest cloneindex, and use that for modulus purposes. Two things that might be of help. Look into getclone2 functions on the forums. They are very handy for dealing with clones. The other thing is whenever an actor is created, it will alway shave the highest cloneindex out of all actors with the same name. This can be useful when trying to keep track of the highest cloneindex.