[JAVA][Beginning Java 8 Games Development]

Chapter 17 ■ Enhancing Game Play: Creating a Scoring Engine, Adding Treasure and an Enemy Auto-Attack Engine
It is important to note that we could also accomplish this objective by overloading this .addCurrentCast()
method as well. If you wanted to do this in this fashion, the Java code would look like the following method bodies:
public void addCurrentCast(Actor... actors) {
CURRENT_CAST.addAll(Arrays.asList(actors));
}
public void addCurrentCast(Actor actor) {
CURRENT_CAST.add(actor);
}
Once your game design becomes more advanced and you have decorative Actor objects on the Stage, you can
implement the COLLIDE_CHECKLIST in your if() structures that need to iterate through (only) the Actor objects in
your Scene that need to be processed for collision.
At this point in our game design, we are processing all of the Actor objects for collision, thus, we don’t yet need
to implement the COLLIDE_CHECKLIST List Array. I’ve included it in the class design to be thorough and
because I design foundational classes for games by looking out into the future toward what I will need in order for me
to create an advanced (complete) game engine. That said, we may not have enough pages in this Beginner title to get
that advanced, but the functionality is there if you needed to use it in your games, and after this chapter you will have
plenty of experience using if() structures!
Now that we can add cast members on an individual basis, it is time to write the methods that will allow us to
check the CURRENT_CAST List Array to make sure that there are iBullet, iCheese, and iBeagle Actor objects in
place for us to use for the next iteration of the auto-attack engine. What these methods will do is to look for these Actor
objects in the CURRENT_CAST List, and if they are not present, will add one of them to the List so that it is ready for
any type of attack that our conditional if() statements and random number generator create together!
We’ll write three methods, one for deadly projectiles, called .loadBullet(); one for healthy projectiles, called
.loadCheese(); and one for Enemy objects, called loadEnemy(). This will give us the ultimate flexibility, later on in
our game development, of calling each type of functional Actor object type in its own “replenishment function.”
Each method will look through the entire CURRENT_CAST List, using a for() loop, along with a .size() method
call. In this way, the entire List is processed, from the first element (zero), through the last element (the List’s size).
If there is no Actor object of that type found in the cast, that is, if the for() loop is completed, and no object of that
type is found, after looking through the entire CURRENT_CAST List for a match using object.equals(), then
the two statements after the for loop will be executed.
The first statement will add one Actor object of that type to the CURRENT_CAST List, and the second
statement will then add one Actor object of that type to the JavaFX SceneGraph. At that point, the method is finished,
and will then return control to the calling entity.
If an Actor object of that type is found in the CURRENT_CAST List Array, a return; statement will be
called to immediately exit the method, and return control to the calling entity. This means that the statements at the
end of the for() loop, which add a new Actor object of that type to the cast, as well as adding a new Actor object to the
JavaFX Scene Graph root object, will not be executed.
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