Making many instances of a class

Questions
1

Hello,

I have made a class named showerBall that has properties such as velocity and position and should rebound off the corners of the screen. I want to call it from another function that makes lots of instances of this ball with different velocities and positions what’s the best way to do this in a sort of automated fashion. I guess what I’m stuck on is that I that to come up with a bunch of names for the different instances of the class and put them in a table which seems laborious and I can’t find a better solution for this.

thanks! Code below

ShowerBall = class()



function showerBall:init(x,y,speed)
    self.pos = vec2(x, y)
    self.radius = WIDTH*0.014
    self.speed = speed
    showerBallUse = "active"
    
end

function Ball:draw()
    local alpha = 255
    fill(0, 255, 63, 242)
    noStroke()
    ellipse(self.pos.x, self.pos.y, 2 * self.radius)
      
    
end

function Ball:update()
    self.pos = self.pos + self.vel
    if (self.pos.x + self.radius) >= WIDTH then
        self.pos.x = WIDTH - self.radius
        self.vel.x = -self.vel.x
        
    elseif (self.pos.x - self.radius) <= 0 then
        self.pos.x = self.radius
        self.vel.x = -self.vel.x
        
    elseif (self.pos.y + self.radius) >= HEIGHT then
 
    self:vanish()
        
        
   
        
    elseif (self.pos.y - self.radius) <= 0
    then
     self:vanish()
    end
    


    
end


function showerBall:vanish()
    showerBallUse = "stop Using"
    
end
2

Ps. Can someone explain how to post code on here so that it’s in that blue rectangle? Thanks

3

Put three tildas ~~~ at the start and end of your code block.


Code goes here
4

@rydergaz I added the ~~~ to the start and end of your code.

5

@rydergaz To use multiple instances of a class, just use a table. Here’s your code creating 200 instances. You had a lot of errors in your code. Compare what I have to what you had to see what I corrected.

function setup()
    sb={}
    for z=1,200 do
        table.insert(sb,ShowerBall(math.random(WIDTH),math.random(HEIGHT),math.random(10)))        
    end
end

function draw()
    background(0)
    for a,b in pairs(sb) do
        b:draw()
        b:update()
    end
end

ShowerBall = class()

function ShowerBall:init(x,y,speed)
    self.pos = vec2(x, y)
    self.radius = WIDTH*0.014
    self.vel = vec2(speed,speed)
    self.showerBallUse = "active"
end

function ShowerBall:draw()
    local alpha = 255
    fill(0, 255, 63, 242)
    noStroke()
    if self.showerBallUse=="active" then
        ellipse(self.pos.x, self.pos.y, 2 * self.radius)
    end
end

function ShowerBall:update()
    self.pos = self.pos + self.vel
    if (self.pos.x + self.radius) >= WIDTH then
        self.pos.x = WIDTH - self.radius
        self.vel.x = -self.vel.x

    elseif (self.pos.x - self.radius) <= 0 then
        self.pos.x = self.radius
        self.vel = -self.vel

    elseif (self.pos.y + self.radius) >= HEIGHT then
        self:vanish()
    elseif (self.pos.y - self.radius) <= 0 then
        self:vanish()
    end
end

function ShowerBall:vanish()   
    self.showerBallUse = "stop Using"
end
6

Ah I see thanks! Yeah excuse the errors I was making this class from a class called ball which I still hadn’t finished converting

7

Is there a way to delete an instance of the class to free up memory

8

@rydergaz To delete an instance, just set it to nil. When garbage collection happens, it will free memory.