Creating entities

All available entities, except the TextEntity, are abstract classes, meaning they should be extended to create an instance. After creating a class, an instance should be created, which can then be added to a YaegerScene, or a CompositeEntity through the addEntity(YaegerEntity) method.

In general, the setupEntities() is the appropriate place to do such a thing, but it is possible to call addEntity(YaegerEntity) from methods such as setupTimers() (see Timing things) or setupSpawners() (see below).

Spawning entities at a regular time-interval

Sometimes many entities should spawn within a scene. For instance, when enemies spawn to life, or when it snows.

For such cases, Yaeger provides an EntitySpawner, which was designed for specifically this case.

Creating many entities at once, using a TileMap

When many entities populate the scene, a TileMap can be used to easily create them and to let Yaeger calculate the exact location where they should be placed.

Imagine the image below should be used multiple times on the scene:

,

and should be placed in such a way that we get the following scene:

.

A TileMap facilitates this, by defining a two-dimensional array that represents the scene and stating which entities should be used. The TileMap will then calculate the location and size of each entity, instantiate them and add them to the scene.

To be able to use a TileMap, the scene should implement the interface TileMapContainer.