Forums » Help » Parenting Entitiys?

Hi,

is it possible to Parent Entitys or does they only can be added to the main game Stage?

For example I have a Entity "Building" And want to create the Building out of 3 different Images. so i could parent them to the "Building" entity and then I jus change the position of the Building and the 3 SubEntitys are moving too.

There are a few different ways to do this, but to respond to your specific question about "parenting" entities. Let's say you have buildings 1, 2, 3 and you want 2 and 3 to depend on the position of 1.

What you could do is spawn 1 in whatever position you want, then spawn 2 and 3 from 1's init, passing 1's position over to them (offset by however much you want). You could also set 1 as the parent entity for 2 and 3 at the same time. Eg:

in EntityOne's init:

ig.game.spawnEntity(EntityTwo, this.pos.x + 100, this.pos.y, {parentEntity: this});

If you want to then move building one on the fly after the others have been spawned, you can use the position of parentEntity to set the other two.

In a couple of games I've also gone the other way - set both the parentEntity in the entities being spawned and an array of childEntities in the parentEntity. Sooo...in EntityTwo's init (after passing parentEntity to it) you could have:

this.parentEntity.childEntitiesArr.push(this);

Then when moving EntityOne you could loop through its child entities array and move everything in it as well...

Thanks for the reply. Not exactly what I wanted but ok :)
I come from the Flash envoirment where you can parent every displayObject into other one, thats why I've asked :)