Director Class 1.3

Hello folks,

Today I'm releasing the new Director Class 1.3. As you could see on the preview video, there are some cool stuff on this version that I will explain on this post, but first the link to download it:

https://bitbucket.org/ricardorauber/corona/downloads/director_by_ricardo_rauber-1_3.zip

Almost completely rewrite

I did so many changes that the code it's way different of the other versions. You will find that it's clean and easier to understand.

More consistent

The older versions were made based on timers, I changed that to execute transitions/fxEnded on the onComplete parameter of the transition.to function as the example below:

Before:

showFx = transition.to ( currView, { x=display.contentWidth*-1, time=fxTime } )
timer.performWithDelay( fxTime, fxEnded )

After:

showFx = transition.to ( currView, { x=-_W, time=fxTime, onComplete=fxEnded } )

Function cleanGroups() removed

There is no need to keep this function because Ansca changed the removeSelf() method to be recursive, so now the scene groups are cleaned only with the removeSelf().

Call to clean() function removed

On Director 1.2 I put a call to a clean() function if it exists on the scene that was going to be removed. That was a good thing but why did I removed it from Director? Just because a lot of people didn't understand how to use it properly. I received A LOT of e-mails asking about this and almost 90% were about wrong name and commands (i.e: function Clean() ... ). You can still create a clean() function but its up to you to call it before change scenes.

Scenes = Objects

Director works with display groups but I did a mistake on version 1.2 writting a bunch of code outside the new() function. On this version, I'm trying to go back on this step and put everything back inside the new() function. Why? It will be needed to reload the same scene. Display objects are Lua tables with some more data, when you create a new table you are creating a new instance that we could understand as an object. You can add attributes and methods to a display group and treat it like a real object oriented programming, like this:

local obj = display.newGroup()
--
obj.rect = display.newRect( 0, 0, 200, 200 )
obj:insert( obj.rect )
--
obj.changeColor = function ( r, g, b )
  obj.rect:setFillColor( r, g, b )
end

Reload Scene

After some research and assumption that every scene is an object, it was fine to reload the same scene. Now you can use changeScene() to load the same scene you are using but be sure that it's an object or some weird errors will occur.

Protection

I created an invisible protection (square) to prevent unwanted touches on scenes during the transition. It becomes active when you call changeScene() and turns off after fxEnded(). If you really need to disable this, just cut off the event listener on line 218.

protection:addEventListener( "touch", fncProtection )

Security and error handling

This is a great add-on, now every new scene will be called using PCALL function to execute it on a secure mode and Director will be able to tell you if some error happens. This is another think that programmers sent me a lot of e-mails. Good developers take a deep look on their code before anything when an error occur, other guys simply goes crazy telling everyone that the error is on Director, never on their code. The thing is that 99% of these errors are mistakes of the developers and take sometime to they see it. Now if a scene has errors, Director will show an error message on the simulator and device.

Pop Up

You want to call a pause scene during a game without clean the scene? You can use now the new pop up feature. The openPopUp() function loads a scene on the top layer, turns on the protection, doesn't clean the current scene and can be closed with the closePopUp() function. The only restriction is that you can only load 1 pop up, if you want other pop ups, you need to close it first.

Parameters

Now you can send parameters between scenes! It's very simple, you only need to put it in a table, check this out:

local params = { label="Sending Parameters", reload=true }
director:changeScene( params, "screen2", "fade", "white" )

Parameters are optional, you can keep changing scenes without parameters:

director:changeScene( "screen2", "fade", "white" )

Folders

This is not on Director itself but about the sample of the version 1.2. I did it using folders for images but this is not good. Ansca recommends that we put all our files on the same folder. I don't like this but I had some problems with it on Android builds so I changed the sample and put all together.

Help us with a donation

I never put a price on Director and I don't want to do this but everybody needs money, if you want to help me keeping it free, you can donate any value on the donate button here. Thanks a lot for all that already donated!