Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Creating userdata
So far we've been using global data to store information about our agents. As we're going
to create decision structures that require information about our agents, we'll create a local
userdata table variable that contains our specific agent data as well as the agent controller
in order to manage animation handling:
local userData =
{
alive, -- terminal flag
agent, -- Sandbox agent
ammo, -- current ammo
controller, -- Agent animation controller
enemy, -- current enemy, can be nil
health, -- current health
maxHealth -- max Health
};
Moving forward, we will encapsulate more and more data as a means of isolating our sys-
tems from global variables. A
userData
table is perfect for storing any arbitrary piece of
agent data that the agent doesn't already possess and provides a common storage area for
data structures to manipulate agent data. So far, the listed data members are some common
pieces of information we'll be storing; when we start creating individual behaviors, we'll
access and modify this data.
