Comment by BSTRhino
3 months ago
Oh yes, handling interactions and dependencies and what is affected by what. I did a lot of React development (as in the frontend web framework) before making Easel and was quite inspired by how it hooks to change. The way you give it a little routine, it says what it depends on, and then it just fully re-executes that whole routine when the dependencies change. So in Easel when you say `with Health { ... }` it makes a behaviour that re-executes every time the Health changes. But, if it just reran the behaviour, then you'd end up with it adding a new sprite (for example) every time it re-executes, until you've got hundreds of them. So the other trick is the Easel compiler assigns an implicit ID to things like sprites so that it will replace rather than add the second time around. It's built into the programming language so you don't see it (most of the time). It actually took me 2 years to come up with that, which is both cool and depressing when I can explain it in one paragraph.
> So the other trick is the Easel compiler assigns an implicit ID to things like sprites so that it will replace rather than add the second time around
Is the ID computed based on the shape of the expression at runtime or on something else?
I found https://easel.games/docs/learn/language/functions/ids#implic... which suggests they are structure-based, at least, though loops aren't mentioned.
Great documentation, by the by!
The implicit ID is just an auto-incremented number actually, it's not anything too special. That means, if you have a loop, the component has the same ID each time and gets replaced. That is a feature, not a bug. So this code snippet will keep replacing the text sprite with a new one, counting from 1 to 10:
for i in RangeInclusive(1, 10) { TextSprite(i) }
Yes, you found the right place in the documentation. Thanks, yes I worked very hard on the documentation!
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