Does Phaser have anything like Tags?

[boolean]

Hi there

 

I'm just getting started with Phaser, so hopefully this isn't an old/silly question.

 

I've been using groups in my game and they are pretty handy. I figure they are like adding folders to the hierarchy view in Unity (where you can group a bunch of elements together). I notice that it has a forEach method you can call that quickly cycles through all the entities inside the group.

 

However, groups are a container for any mixture of entities - for example I might have a group called "titleGroup" made up of several different UI elements. This makes applying actions to groups difficult since I can't be sure what methods are available.

 

In Unity we also have Tags. These let you tag entities by their type, which is separate from groups which are just a container of entities in the game world. The main advantage of tags is I could do a forEach on a tag type and know that every entity I'm cycling through is the same type. For example, my container of UI elements might have some buttons, a window, a image, all in a group call "titleGroup". With tags I could say 'foreach entity with tag 'button', set as disabled". Likewise, I might have 3 groups of enemy types, but if I do a linecast I don't want to cycle through all three groups manually, I would prefer to just do 'forEach tag of Enemy'.

 

Does Phaser have anything like this? 

[rich]

Yes you can use Group.iterate and use the 'key' and 'value' parameters to effectively be your "tag".

[boolean]

That's good to know, I'll use that for now.

 

Just out of curiosity, I assume though that if I have three groups I would still have to iterate through each group individually? By that I mean, there isn't a way I can globally say "Get me every entity in the game world with the tag X and forEach through it"?

 

If that isn't possible, perhaps I can add my entities to two groups - one for their container in the game world another group for their tag/type (I could just dump that into the constructor then). I think that should work. 

 

Thanks!

[rich]

There's no "master list" of Groups, so you'd have to iterate each one yourself I'm afraid.

[boolean]

No worries, thanks for the help Rich!