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Advanced use of the Graphic Entity Module

The Graphic Entity Module includes a few advanced features you might need for your game.

Masks

Masks are used to hide parts of an image. If you have never heard of masks before, we suggest you check Wikipedia's definition.

With the Graphic Entity Module, masks can be made of Shape, Sprite and SpriteAnimation. Once your mask created, you can set it to any Entity with setMask().

The behaviour can be different:

  • For Sprites as masks: black pixels will hide the Entity, any other pixel will show it.
  • For Shapes as masks: the color or the alpha of the shape doesn't affect the mask, all pixels of the shape are considered as a white mask

Buffered Groups

If your game uses tiles, you might experience some artifacts when resizing the viewer.

Artifacts

They appear due to rounding errors. These artifacts can be reduced thanks to BufferedGroup. Buffered groups work the same way as Group, but the viewer renders its children when they change into a dynamic texture before being displayed. ⚠Warnings

  • buffered groups inside buffered groups are not supported and can have unexpected behaviour
  • It is not recommended to use a SpriteAnimation in a BufferedGroup
BufferedGroup bufferedGroup = graphicEntityModule.createBufferedGroup();
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