I have some time between classes, so I'm thinking about my button API.
Current Situation:
There's a Button class that is applied to drawables as a decorator. This means you can turn just about any image, text, whatever into a button. Buttons take ButtonBehaviors, which define what happens on different events, such as click, cursor entering or exiting the button, cursor actively hovering or not hovering, etc. The problem with this setup is that there's no way for the menu system I'm including in the extension library to automatically create Buttons and ButtonBehaviors since they need initialization with arbitrary parameters. This means the user has to write a ButtonFactory or something in addition to the ButtonBehavior class if they want to use the button in a menu, which I don't like.
Moreover, buttons would be much more flexible and easier to use if there's predefined behavior to select from. They should ideally be able to be created from scripts as well.
Proposed Solution:
You'll still be able to define your own ButtonBehaviors in your project if you want, but I'm going to switch the main focus to constructing them out of predefined behavior components, which could be assigned to whatever event listener you want.
Supported Behavior Components:
- Function callback
- Scene transition if scenes end up being built into the engine
- Change text
- Change background
- Change text color/alpha
- Change background color/alpha
- Show selection cursor
- Hide selection cursor
- Apply shader
- Stop applying shader
- Apply tween set (moving or whatever other arbitrary behavior you feel like tweening)
Am I missing anything? Also, I should make some of these recyclable for other purposes.
How to do this?
I'm thinking I'll make a generic ButtonFactory or something. After instantiating it, you would be able to set it to create buttons with certain properties (e.g. text or background) and add behaviors to the various function calls. So if you want the text to change color and a selection cursor to appear whenever the cursor enters the button, you would create a behavior for color change and a behavior for showing the selection cursor, then call the factory's method to add them to the OnEnter method or something. I guess the builder should add them to a list of actions or something and pass them to the button, which calls all of them whenever the event is triggered. When you're done, you can either tell the factory to create the button and handle it yourself, or you can feed it to a MenuFactory and have it construct a menu.
I'll probably be making other factories as well, and I'll add methods to automatically apply transition sets to all objects created by the factory on creation and destruction.
