Getting started with Ember

Getting started with Ember:

the Game

If your new to entity systems then you may want to read my posts on Game Architecture and Entity Systems first to get an over view. You can download the code for this example here

Ok so first step to making games on the Ember frame work is to create you games main class. This has the same role as an applications context in robotlegs.  Its main role is the initialization and tearing-down of you game.

package{
    import com.tomseysdavies.ember.base.Game;

    public class MyGame extends Game{
        override protected function startUp():void{

        }
    }
}

we can now launch the game from felx like so and pass it a reference to the display object that we want to become the games view.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<s:Application xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009"
               xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark"
               xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx" minWidth="955" minHeight="600" xmlns:local="*">
    <fx:Declarations>
        <!-- Place non-visual elements (e.g., services, value objects) here -->
        <local:MyGame contextView="{gameView}" />
    </fx:Declarations>
    <mx:UIComponent id="gameView" />
</s:Application>

Components

So our game is now launching and has a reference to its view so we can now look at creating our first component. A component is a value object its highly portable and normal has no methods only data. For this tutorial we will need two.

package components
{
    public class PositionComponent
    {
        public var x:Number = 0;
        public var y:Number = 0;
    }
}

package components
{
    import flash.display.Bitmap;

    public class GraphicsComponent
    {
        public var asset:Bitmap;
    }
}

Entities

Now lets go back to our start up function. So here we first create that our components then next we create an entity and add our components to it. Think of an entity as an empty container to which we can add components. We create entities with the entityManager [...]