Event system for actors

[romaintailhurat]

Hi!

First, congrats for Excalibur, its a wonderful job you've done!

I'm exploring the features, but i'm currently stumbling on the event system for actors.

My goal is simple: i designed a Planet class that inherit from Actor, and i want this to listened to actor pointer event.

My implementation is here.

I'm using the onInitialize method to enable pointer events, and then i register a function to the pointerup event.

But this doesn't work, no click on the visual object triggers this event.

What am i doing wrong ?

Maybe the way i instantiate the classes is wrong ?

[eonarheim]

@romaintailhurat Thanks for the post, I appreciate the kind remark! We've been working hard to get the next version out the door soon!

I'd expect what you're doing to work in onInitialize(), this feels like a sharp edge in excalibur in regards to graphics/collider behavior with pointer events. I think the issue is that even though there is a graphic, there is no collider geometry (width = 0 and height = 0) for the pointer to test against.

I'm able to reproduce this issue with the excalibur bits you're using 0.25.0-alpha.115 and the latest bits 0.25.0-alpha.178, if I give the Actor some width and height it appears to work as you would want.

To help with debugging the engine.toggleDebug(); will display some very basic bounds

I'm open to improvement suggestions, perhaps a warning logged if registering a pointer event on an actor with width = 0 or height = 0? We could perhaps add a way for pointers to test either graphic bounds or collider geometry? or both? Let me know what you think and what would have helped you sooner.

Hope this helps!

[romaintailhurat]

Thank you very much for your kind and quick reply!

I thought about a collision bounds problem but I wasn't able to grasp the mechanism by browsing the source code. 😅

I think both a warning (at compile time if it is possible with Typescript ? But runtime could be find too) and a default behaviour could be nice.

[eonarheim]

It's not released yet, but we just merged a feature to configure graphics and/or collider geometry for pointer events! #2071

[romaintailhurat]

Hi @eonarheim !

I finally chose to define the collider shape in the constructor:

this.body.collider.shape = Shape.Circle(this.radius);

It works perfectly. 👍