Another Try

OK, lets see if you like this behavior instead. The Event System behavior I had created was really just a finite state machine, so I created a new behavior specifically for that. And really this is more useful as a behavior anyway. For our game we needed a simple AI system for the enemies, so we are going to use a basic FSM for that. I also simplified how the Datablocks are created/named so it doesn't have some of the ugly indexes of the Event System datablocks I had.

The behavior has a single parameter, the name of the initial State. All the states are Datablocks that look like this:

new t2dSceneObjectDatablock(moveLeft)
{
	enterDelay = 1000;
	enterMethod = "moveToLeft(%this);";
	stateMethod = "";
	nextMethod = "lookForFood(%this,\"-34.762 -3.92\",10.5,\"waitLeft\",\"moveLeft\")";
	leaveDelay = 1000;
	leaveMethod = "";
	repeatDelay = 1000;
};

So you have a delay & method when you first enter the state. Then a state method that is called after the state is entered, or after a repeat (when you are staying at the same state). The nextMethod allows you to determine which state to transition to (or stay at the current state). The leaveDelay and leaveMethod are called when you are leaving the state. The finally the repeatDelay is the time delay if you are simply repeating the current state. All the delays are evaled, so you can put code in there to determine the delay (for random delays).

As an example, I have a quick YouTube video:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG64IBhC9tw

As a test, I have a single fish and falling food. Both the fish and food are controlled by a FSM. The fish has the following states:
- MoveLeft (moves to the left side of the screen)
- WaitLeft (waits around on the left side of the screen for a few seconds)
- MoveRight
- WaitRight
- EatFood (move to a close bit of food)

The food simply has a single state DropFood with a random repeatDelay

The MoveLeft and MoveRight states move the fish and check for 2 conditions. Either the fish has arrived and it moves to the Wait state, or it finds a close bit of food, then moves to the EatFood state.

Nothing too fancy yet here (this is a basic FSM). Just wondering if anyone has any comments/suggestions. What I'm thinking of is to build some kind of GUI app to simplify the creation of the datablocks. It would be awesome to get this to a point where very little scripting is necessary (part of the point of Behaviors).