Forums » Help » Spawn entity using variables from XML

I'm working on a game that spawns entities from an XML sheet. It iterates through the xml nodes, pulls out the variables, and then spawns the entity. This works great, except that it doesn't accept variables from an xml as the x or y position. It takes variables from the main.js file as x and y positions though fine.

//loop for spawning entities

for (x = 0 ; x <segment[this.segment_num].getElementsByTagName(child_node).length; x ++)
{
                        var entity_data = segment[this.segment_num].getElementsByTagName(child_node)[x];
                        for (i = 0 ; i < entity_data.children.length; i ++) {
                            new_entity[entity_data.children[i].nodeName] = entity_data.children[i].textContent;
                            //console.log("entity node name: " + entity_data1.children[i].nodeName + "node value: " + entity_data1.children[i].textContent);
                        }
                        ig.game.spawnEntity(EntityLayer,new_entity["x"], new_entity["y"], { zIndex:new_entity["z"],
                            animSheet: new ig.AnimationSheet(new_entity["image"],new_entity["width"], new_entity["height"])});
                    } 

//xml that is being imported

 <entities>
            <entity>
                <x>200</x>
                <y>50</y>
                <z>2</z>
                <height>416</height>
                <width>700</width>
                <image>media/mountain2.png</image>
            </entity>

            <entity>
                <x>10</x>
                <y>10</y>
                <z>3</z>
                <height>351</height>
                <width>1200</width>
                <image>media/mountain1.png</image>
            </entity>

            <entity>
                <x>10</x>
                <y>10</y>
                <z>4</z>
                <height>100</height>
                <width>152</width>
                <image>media/hut.png</image>
            </entity>

            <entity>
                <x>10</x>
                <y>10</y>
                <z>5</z>
                <height>150</height>
                <width>100</width>
                <image>media/princess.png</image>
            </entity>
        </entities>

Normally it will load all of my entities, and then they disappear and the browers crashes. What is going on?

My guess is that the variables from the XML are loaded as strings. Transform them to floats or ints before passing them to the spawnEntity() method. E.g.:

var x = parseFloat(new_entity["x"]);

May I ask why you aren't using JSON instead of XML? JSON would be easier to load an also readily makes the distinction between strings and numbers.