Extending Phaser.Group and overriding Update function

[eralpkaraduman]

Hi,

 

I'm coming from flash/flixel perspective. When I'd need spawn enemies or track some objects and draw something on them repeatedly, I used to create a class instance which contains and watches objects, and mostly use it as kind-of factory pattern as well to generate objects too. I was doing this by extending groups in Flixel. I know groups are pretty similar in Phaser too. But possibly because of my lack of experience on OOP javascript, I haven't found a nice way to extend groups.

 

Im extending groups this way;

var ElementalSpawner = function(game,squad) {    Phaser.Group.call(this,game);};ElementalSpawner.prototype = Object.create(Phaser.Group.prototype);ElementalSpawner.prototype.constructor = ElementalSpawner;

Until this point everything is great but when I want to override Phaser.Group's update function, I had to do this;

ElementalSpawner.prototype.update = function() {    // Elemental Spawner update code here    // super.update    var i = this.children.length;    while (i--)    {        this.children[i].update();    }};

This works for sure, but I'm not comfortable with it. (So what if I was overriding a 200 line code function )

 

As you see I had to copy original group class's update functions contents into the overridden function. What I intended to do is similar to calling super.update() in AS3/Flash/Flixel.

 

I'd like to ask for suggestions on how to extend and override functions of javascript/phaser classes? And more generally how would you design such structures like, spawners, healthbar renderers, GUI containers-updaters etc?

 

I'm working on our "incomplete" LD48 game

superdamage.com/LD29/dist

 

Thanks.

 

[stasuss]

You can call parent method like this:

Phaser.Group.prototype.update.call(this);

or

Phaser.Group.prototype.update.apply(this);

You can also pass arguments as a second parameter. call() need them to be listed one by one and apply() allows them to be in a single array.