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Getting Started

Components are the building blocks of actors in your game. They are responsible for adding behavior to all of your actors and can be used to create complex interactions between actors as well. In this guide, you will learn how to create and use components in your game.

Create a new component​

To create a new component, you must inherit from the Component class. It will be impossible to append a component to an actor if it does not inherit from the Component class. Additionally, you cannot append a non-inherited class to an actor either.

To create a new component:

import pygerm

class MyComponent(pygerm.Component):
    def onStart(self):
        pass

Methods​

The Component base class implements several lifecycle methods that you can override to add custom behavior to your component. These methods are called at different points in the game loop, and their order and execution will be described in the following sections.

These are the components lifecycle methods:

  • onStart()
  • onUpdate()
  • onLateUpdate()
  • onDestroy()

and, if you have a Rigidbody component attached to the actor, you can also use:

  • onCollisionEnter()
  • onCollisionExit()
  • onTriggerEnter()
  • onTriggerExit()

Additionally, it is only within these lifecycle methods (or functions called by these lifecycle methods) that gives you access to many of the API methods covered in this documentation. For example, you can only access the Application API methods from within a component's lifecycle method.

Member Variables​

Additionally, once you have created a component in an actor and it is running (or has finished running) its onStart lifecycle function, you will have access to a few member variables that are unique to the component. These member variables are:

actor The actor that the component is attached to.
enabled A boolean that determines if the component is enabled or not.
key A string that represents the key of the component in the actor's components dictionary.

actor in particular will be extremely helpful in accessing other components in the actor or the actor itself.

You can access these member variables like so, even without them being declared in your class.

import pygerm

class MyComponent(pygerm.Component):
    def onStart(self):
        print(self.actor)
        print(self.enabled)
        print(self.key)

Custom Constructor​

If you are looking to create a custom constructor for your component, you can do so by overriding the __init__ method. However, you must call the parent constructor with the super() method to ensure that the component is properly initialized. Without this, your program will not run.

import pygerm

class MyComponent(pygerm.Component):
    def __init__(self, my_custom_variable):
        super().__init__()
        self.my_custom_variable = my_custom_variable

    def onStart(self):
        print(self.my_custom_variable)