Hmm, interesting. Why is it that whenever I see people give examples of using a handle, they store it in an array? Is that the easiest way of doing it? Or the only way?

@Lukace

Ah that makes a lot more sense. The part that confused me in the manual was when it gave an example on how to use a handle, it didn't use an array. This made me believe that arrays didn't have to be used while spawning enemies. I think I'll be able to figure the rest out from here. Thanks.

Yeah, Cae is right. There will certainly be many cases where you want to pass around just a single handle too, like when calling a specific function that uses a handle as an argument, or creating one of this kind yourself, but for what you asked about enemy handling arrays are really the best approach in BGT, I think.
Lukas

Yeah, I'm sure that's what you want it to do, but how does the script know that? :-D By that, I mean if you have some actual loop somewhere that calls this method repeatedly, or perhaps indirectly through a main class update method of sorts. Remember, if you call a method once somewhere, if it's not inside a loop, it will not begin looping explicitly all by itself just because it somehow senses that you wish it to. :-) Besides, how would it know when to stop looping, if it controlled itself like that? :-)

Hope you see what I mean here. The tone used was intentionally light so that it could hopefully make more sense to you, it was not meant as an insult or anything, so I hope you take it for what it was meant. :-)
Lukas

Oh, sorry about that wrong assumption then. I was almost sure you forgot to actually loop it, as that's what happened to me ages ago, too. :-)

In that case, are you sure there is nothing in there somewhere that would set the enemy's moving bool back to false?

It would probably be best if you posted your entire code, or at least the enemy class and the main loop.

Lukas

Oh, I see the issue now. You do call the enemy move method from inside a loop, but only when you actually press the key. That's to be expected in that case. So, I was right in a sort of way before, just expressed my point poorly.

Either give up on this approach to enemy movement entirely and make them move automatically through an if check in the loop, i.e. call the correspondingly modified move method every x milliseconds directly from within the loop, or make the bool moving argument global to the entire enemy class instead of just belonging to the move method. Like this, it's of absolutely no use to you at the moment. If you did this, you would then do the following in your main loop, besides keyboard commands:
if (standard.moving) standard.move();

It's not a very good approach but hey, it would work. I assume the entire single enemy handle called standard and the key that's supposed to trigger the looping movement are all there just for testing purposes anyway.

Hope this helps,
Lukas

Hi,
yeah, I suppose making the key press just spawn another enemy and add it into the array of handles would be a better approach in general.

If you made the moving boolean entirely global, then yes, it would of course control all of the enemies at once. Another possibility would be to make it a property of the enemy class instead. That way, it would be specific and separate for each instance of enemy. In any case though, there is no need to use it as an argument in the move method itself, that just provides no real use.

You could also get rid of it entirely. If you only wanted to make sure that the enemy doesn't start moving until spawned, well, then he doesn't, because since he's not there on the game board yet until he's been spawned, he can't actually move either. If you want to have other factors influencing when an enemy should start moving in the end product, you will probably need other decisions and if checks to compare more specific circumstances anyway.
For the time being, you could pretty well just check the value of the timer.

Lukas

Eh, basically, if you use an array of handles to enemy class instances which, as revealed through the previous discussion, would be the best approach to implementing a multitude of enemies, then you will have to loop through the enemy array in your main loop. The best way to do that is using an embedded for loop. To put it simply, among other instructions in your main loop, you will just be doing something through a for loop manipulating the array of enemies.

What this something is will be entirely up to you. The style I like using is doing all the subsequent instructions for individual class instances in that class's own method which I call act or update. Basically, the enemy behavior itself is not written out plain in the main loop but only in that subsequent method which is called for each enemy instance in the array through the main loop.

If the enemies' only job in the end will be to handle movement, you might as well just do that directly when looping through the array, without having to call another method of the enemy class.

Does this make more sense now?

Lukas

Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Just do whatever you want to do with the enemies through the array. That's the point of the array being used in the first place. So, you shouldn't be doing standard.movement in your array loop, but rather enemies[x].movement. Of course, replace x with anything you feel like using to refer to the array index.

Similarly, if you want spawning to occur at a fixed time interval, just put it in your main loop as well.

Let me know how it goes.

Lukas