Nested awareness

Describe the current state of the problem Currently, ct.js assumes a more traditional way of writing games: that you run one room at a time that consists of a flat list of entities (tiles, copies, backgrounds). This produces a set of limitations:

• really big worlds with tons of entities will lag, as everything is computed at once;
• (solved) no separate layers that would allow transforming one set and not another. Say you have an RTS where you can zoom in and out (and even rotate) but UI should stay the same;
• nested copies don’t work with world positions, which break collisions with the outer world;
• (partially solved) there is no easy way to use prefab rooms (for modular level building and procedural generation), because of the lack of UI tools in ct.js and collisions.
  • prefab rooms are also a shortcut to UI editor #53

Describe the solution you’d like

• Merge #127 that would allow a proper cleanup of nested structures
• Rewrite room editor with pixi.js #39 as it is a foundation for most further UI tools
• Change ct.place so it works with world coordinates
• Add an ability to put one room into another;
  • It would be cool if game devs could control when these rooms are loaded (e.g. based on camera position, or by triggers #67 ) and unloaded (aka a streaming system).
    • Isn’t it a game developer’s task, though?
• Add API to work with UI coordinates:
  • ct.mouse.xui, ct.mouse.yui;
  • ⬆️ the same for ct.touch
• Add API to easily position layers
  • It can be made with parameters for prefabs that would tell whether a layer should use screen UI or world ones, should it follow the camera or not.

At the same time, ct.js must stay enjoyable and available for the good ol’ traditional game dev approach.

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UI coordinates: most known in other engines as screen coordinates, though they do differ as ct.viewWidth is not always the size of the canvas in screen pixels. These will be in a range from 0 to ct.viewWidth (ct.viewHeight) and be used in UI layers.

[CosmoMyzrailGorynych]

Then your starting point is an internal method ct.rooms.forceSwitch 💪 https://github.com/ct-js/ct-js/blob/develop/app/data/ct.release/rooms.js#L103 Don’t forget about a companion pull at https://github.com/ct-js/docs.ctjs.rocks

[stale[bot]]

This issue is now closed! Please create a new one with a proper template if this issue still affects ct.js.