Hi all,
A bit of background to explain my question:
I'm currently writing a port of xpenguins in Clutter/gnome javascript
bindings (just for a bit of fun).
The idea is that I wish to spawn many toons (penguins) on the screen.
Each toon is basically a Clutter.Texture. It is 'animated' in the
sense that it has a single image (like a cartoon) and animation is
simulated by sliding the actor's clip box over each frame of the
cartoon.
However, even though there may be many (say 50) toons on the screen,
there are only (say) 5 different *types* of toon: each individual toon
is either a walker, runner, cycler, floater, or skateboarder. Each
type of toon has its own little filmstrip image to represent its
animation.
Now, I could spawn each of the 50 toons by having each *individual*
toon store a copy of its filmstrip image. This seems easiest (each
toon is just a Clutter.Texture), but also seems inefficient.
The way the original XPenguins does it and the way I'd like to try, is
to have some central ToonData object, one per type of toon. So in my
example I'll have 5 of them. Each ToonData has its image filmstrip
loaded up. Then, when an individual toon is drawn, it looks up the
ToonData corresponding to its type and picks out the frame of the
animation it is up to.
In this way, I only need to have 5 image filmstrips loaded up in
memory, instead of one filmstrip per toon.
My question is, how can I implement this situation? Could it be that
ToonData.image is a Clutter.Image, and each Toon is a Clutter.Texture,
but somehow each Toon stores a pointer to the corresponding
ToonData.image? How do I do that? I envisage someting like:
Toon.prototype = {
__proto__: Clutter.Texture,
_init: function() {
// this.data is a pointer to the ToonData for the toon's type.
}
...
}
var toon = new Toon();
Toon.set_image_pointer( toon.data.image );
Is this possible? I basically want to just load the image once per
toon type rather than once per toon. Or do I have to make each Toon a
Clutter.Actor and somehow override the paint method to look up the
image & display?
Can anyone recommend how I can go about this?
cheers!
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