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Is there a way to find all objects of a specific object type?

by Ron Barbosa · in Torque X 2D · 04/09/2010 (9:06 pm) · 2 replies

I'm working on item drop right now, and I wanted to see if there was a way for me to leverage the TorqueObjectType field associated with each scene object.

Basically I want an array (or List...it doesn't matter) of all objects that have the object type "droppable" in their type list.

I know that I can test object types, but in the case of item drop, I don't have the item. I want to create the item from a list of eligible candidates (the droppables).

Is there a way to query the object database for all objects of a specific type?

Thanks
--RB
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Torque 3D Owner Henry Shilling
Smokin Skull
#1
04/09/2010 (10:09 pm)
In the code I sent you with the player stuff I find all objects of a few types and mark them for delete:
ulong bitmask = 0;

List<T2DSceneObject> _items = TorqueObjectDatabase.Instance.FindRegisteredObjects<T2DSceneObject>();
TorqueObjectType bonus = TorqueObjectDatabase.Instance.GetObjectType("nme");
bitmask = bonus.Bits;
bonus = TorqueObjectDatabase.Instance.GetObjectType("BonusPickup");
bitmask |= bonus.Bits;
bonus = TorqueObjectDatabase.Instance.GetObjectType("nme_bullet");
bitmask |= bonus.Bits;

for (int i = 0; i < _items.Count; i++)
{
     if ((_items[i].ObjectType.Bits & bitmask) != 0)
          _items[i].MarkForDelete = true;
}

So I wanted to get all the objects of a type I made. The FindRegisteredObjects only finds types like T2DSceneObject T2DAnimation etc. So I grab all the objects, and using the Bits bitmask I can sort out the ones I want. This is also why you can only have 32(64?) different types, they are all stored as bit flags.

So I get all the bitmasks for all my types, or them together into my bitmask then kill all the ones that match.




Torque Owner Ron Barbosa
Disposable Fun
#2
04/09/2010 (10:25 pm)
Got it!

Thanks, Henry...I was hoping the engine had some collection of objects by type that I could quickly query.

I'm not a huge fan of looping over objects in the database.

One thing I had considered after I posted the message was writing an OnRegister delegate that does a similar bit mask matching and organizes objects into a collection by group (either a hash or a dictionary).

That would allow me to query for a list of objects that match any type whenever I need to (without having to iterate). It's a bit cumbersome in that I have to remember to add this custom registration delegate to each scene object, but it might help performance.

I only need this for one type so far (and only a few scene templates use that type). Maybe I'll start by only applying the custom delegate to those objects that I want to organize for later processing.

I'll post what I find/implement here.

Thanks again for the answer, Henry!
--RB