Overlap between AppState and Controls classes

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Hi all,

I was playing around creating a small world with some imported objects, physics, and effects.

Mostly everything so far has been intuitive. However, when I went to add effects, I found that the next step in encapsulating the behavior of the objects I was spawning would break my understanding of the use of controls.

Basically, I created a small bomb object and spawned it into the world on a keypress. This works great. I then created a Control, called ExplosionControl, which causes any object to ‘explode’ by watching for N seconds to elapse and then removing it from the scene. That works great, as well.

Now, let’s say I want to take the ExplosionControl class and add an explosion effect to the control. Unfortunately, ExplosionControl does not have access to assetManager, and there doesn’t seem to be a way to get one through the Spatial object. So, my thought was to investigate AppStates, before realizing - is it not actually possible to encapsulate the behavior of the spatial once that behavior involves secondary assets? Sound, shaders, etc? Or am I missing something?

And then, if I wanted to refactor and create a “Bomb” class, which loaded the appropriate model and textures and associated the control with its Spatial, it would also require that I pass an AssetManager instance to it? Is this standard operating procedure? Or is it intended that only the AppState be able to manage any resources?

I guess the ‘intuitive’ thing for me here is, if you have a control which is intended to describe the behavior of an object, and that behavior involves any kind of asset (for example, a sparking generator, or an NPC that plays a sound when you walk by), there should be some way to handle that situation, but it feels like you would create a lot of classes that depend directly on AssetManager. That seems a little odd to me. What is the appropriate way to do this?

Thanks!
-Alex

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mySpatial.addControl(new ExplosionControl(assetManager));

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To answer this question: a completely different architecture where your spatials are just visualization and your game objects are kept separate. The spatials, sounds, effects, etc. then become independent expressions of the current state of your game objects and can potentially be managed completely independently of one another.

Else, just give everything that needs to load assets a reference to the asset manager. Or use the kludge of adding the asset manager as a static field of your main class.

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