Forums » Help » entity touches method not working?

I have a 'water' entity:

ig.module('game.entities.water')
.requires(
	'impact.entity'
)
.defines(function() {
	EntityWater = ig.Entity.extend({
		_wmDrawBox: true,
		_wmScalable: true,
		_wmBoxColor: 'rgba(0,0,0,0.5)',
	});
});

And a player entity

ig.module('game.entities.player')
.requires(
	'impact.entity',
	'game.entities.water'
)
.defines(function() {
	EntityPlayer = ig.Entity.extend({
              //...
              update: function() {
                     var water = ig.game.getEntitiesByType(EntityWater);
                     water = water[0];
                     if (this.touches(water)) {
                           //doesn't work :\
                     }
              } 
	});
});

Now when I move my character inside my water entity, it won't register.
'touches' always returns false anyway.

Why?

Have you tried enabling the 'impact.debug.debug' module and checking "show collision boxes"? Might make it easier to confirm visually that the entities are indeed touching. Sometimes an entity may look like it is in one place, but the actual position is somewhere else...

I tried to check. It seems that very large entities do not get a collision box. My water entity spanned 960px wide and 30 px tall.

I sized it down such that the entire water could be visibly drawn on the screen at once and now it works.

I suppose I need to split my water up in chunks?

I'm not sure why size would make a difference. As far as I know your entities should be capable of any size and still retain .touches functionality...

Hm. strange. Well, I fixed that easily for now by simply sizing them down and using multiple 'water' entities.

I agree with Joncom, size does not make a difference. The touches method is only a bounding box intersection test, so whether or not it is bigger than the screen should not matter. I suspect there is something else going on, and that splitting the entity into multiple smaller entities is just fixing the symptom instead of the source.

Indeed, the size of the Entity shouldn't be an issue for .touches().

I suspect that your ig.game.getEntitiesByType(EntityWater); went wrong somehow. Maybe you had multiple water entities in the level and water[0] was always the wrong one?

Dominic brings up a good point, to which I'd add: don't use getEntitiesByType at all. One way of doing it that doesn't need the touches and doesn't care which water entity you're intersecting would be using the checkAgainst and type properties and the check method.

For example: have the player checkAgainst the type of entity (not class) that the water entity is. Then in the check method of the player (which is called automatically on two touching entities when one checks against the other), set a property such as inWater based on whether the other entity (first argument passed to the check method) is a water entity. And at the end of the player's update, always set the inWater property to false, because the check method gets called after the update and will set the property back to true if the player is in the water.