Forums » Help » Question about entities pool and entity casting

Hey guys,
for my current game, I'm using 2 entities pools. One for the bullets and one for the particles.
I was wondering if it was possible to merge both pools into one generic EntityPool that will manage instances of the Entity class.
To be able to do this, I need a way to transform an Entity to an EntityBullet (which extends Entity), and a way to transform an EntityBullet back to an Entity with default properties and methods.

How can I do that?

I thought of doing something like this to transform and Entity to an EntityBullet:

var entity = new ig.Entity();
entity = new EntityBullet();

But doing it like this, am I not using a pool for nothing?

Thanks for any input!
Bastien.

Why are you using an entity pool in the first place? Is entity creation and garbage collection a performance bottleneck in your case?

Switching out entity classes is pretty difficult to get right, I believe. You'd have to fiddle with the .prototype and .constructor properties. Also, copying over all default attributes (using ig.merge() or similar) is probably not that much faster.

Thanks for your reply dominic.

I'm doing a "Bullet Manager" because I learned that while I was programming in C. I read a few days ago that Object pools are non-sense in language where there is a garbage collector.

I admit that I didn't even try without. I'll do some benchmarks next week.

About switching Entity classes, you're right, it might not be worth it !