Assets

HipAssets and its usages

Currently, the engine supports the following asset types:

• IHipAudioClip -> Required to play sounds, currently streamed is not supported, its implementation is minimal.
• HipCSV -> Load your excel file! This will be used to a future implementation on localization.
• HipFontAsset -> Can be both a .ttf, .otf, .bmfont. The renderer will know how to use.
• Image -> You'll almost never use that directly.
• HipINI -> Configuration file, good alternative to JSON.
• HipJSONC -> JSON with comments, follows almost all the std.json syntax.
• HipTexture/IHipTexture -> What you'll probably be using when dealing using drawSprite.
• IHipTextureAtlas -> You can get a HipTexture from it by using opIndex[], atlas["frameA"], accepts .atlas, .json, .txt(sprite sheet)
• IHipTilemap -> Accepts both ".tmx" and ".tmj" (Tiled format).
• string -> Yes you can load strings at runtime! Only .txt should be supported though.

Loading Strategies

• loadAll
• perScene

Currently only loadAll is supported since that is simply easier to get things done in the start. In the future, they may get a special UDA for whether @Preloading them or not.

Loading global assets

Global assets have a different strategy: They are loaded before they appear in a scene, for that, you use:

@Asset("texts/shared.txt")
__gshared string myGlobalString;

@Asset("images/bomb.png")
__gshared IHipTexture bomb;

They are loaded before your game runs, so, they won't be null.

Loading custom types

You can also load custom types with @Asset. You'll need to pass to the first parameter the path where your asset is, and for the second parameter a function pointer which returns your desired type (in this case JSON) and accepts a string argument:

@Asset("texts/mytable.json", &parseJSON)
JSON myTable;

You can use that for any type required, all it needs to implement is the function T parserFunc(T)(string content).

Loading assets per scene

Assets are always loaded only once. The preload() function present over there actually only populates the MyScene instance members. The assets are already loaded by the time the scene is created. If there exists a @Asset() __gshared , this member will be populated at load time. Meaning there's no necessity to call preload().

For loading the assets, you can use the following type of code:

class MyScene : Scene, IHipPreloadable
{
import hip.api;
mixin Preload;

@Asset("images/bomb.png")
IHipTexture bomb;

@Asset("sounds/pop.wav")
IHipAudioClip pop;

@Asset("texts/gametext.txt")
string tutorial;

@Asset("texts/shared.txt")
__gshared string aGloballyLoadedString;

override void initialize()
{
  ///This call is required for assets that aren't `static` or `__gshared`. It expands to:
  preload();
  /*
  this.bomb     = HipAssetManager.get!IHipTexture("images/bomb.png");
  this.pop      = HipAssetManager.get!IHipAudioClip("sounds/pop.wav");
  this.tutorial = HipAssetManager.get!string("texts/gametext.txt");
  */
}
}