Copying Animations

[Spheres]

Hi Guys,

this may be more a LUA-related problem, but whatever...
LUA seems to work mainly with references, but is it somehow possible to create a copy, for example of an animation object?

If I do something like:

Code: Select all

anim1 = love.graphics.newAnimation(img_explosion, 40, 40, 0.6)
anim2 = anim1

I can't manage the states of those animation seperatly, because all I got is a reference to "anim1", but I don't want to call "newAnimation()" with the same parameters everytime I need a new instance of that animation...

Or did I just miss something?

[Kaze]

Hi Guys,

this may be more a LUA-related problem, but whatever...
LUA seems to work mainly with references, but is it somehow possible to create a copy, for example of an animation object?

If I do something like:

Code: Select all

anim1 = love.graphics.newAnimation(img_explosion, 40, 40, 0.6)
anim2 = anim1

I can't manage the states of those animation seperatly, because all I got is a reference to "anim1", but I don't want to call "newAnimation()" with the same parameters everytime I need a new instance of that animation...

Or did I just miss something?

It's likely that newAnimation returns a table;
Tables in Lua are pointers; For example (Taken from lua.org/pil):

Code: Select all

    a = {}
    a["x"] = 10
    b = a      -- `b' refers to the same table as `a'
    print(b["x"])  --> 10
    b["x"] = 20
    print(a["x"])  --> 20
    a = nil    -- now only `b' still refers to the table
    b = nil    -- now there are no references left to the table

[rude]

There's no way to copy an animation. If you need to create a lot equal animations frequently, I suggest that you put free animations in a buffer, or even preallocate them:

Code: Select all

-- (Code is untested)
active_anims = {}
free_anims = {}

-- Preallocate 100 animations.
for i = 1,100 do 
   table.insert(free_anims, love.graphics.newAnimation( ... ))
end

-- Reuse an existing animation, or create a new one.
function get_animation()
   local a = table.remove(free_anims)
   if a = nil then return love.graphics.newAnimation( ... ) end
   a:reset()
   return a
end

-- Make an animation available for reuse.
function free_animation(a)
   table.insert(free_animations, a)
end

Animations are not really that heavy to allocate, so I'm not sure you should bother doing this. This is a very neat trick for ParticleSystems, though.