Table of contents
Player Interacting Logic
When the player hits the interact key (space) when in close enough proximity to a map entity that has an interact script, the entity’s interact script will be executed. The logic behind determining whether the player successfully interacted with an entity or not (be it a MapTile, NPC, etc.) takes place in the Map class’s entityInteract method.
Deciding which entity is interacted with
When the player hits the interact key and calls out to the Map class’s entityInteract method, the method will begin by getting all potential entities the player could possibly be interacting with. This includes all surrounding map tiles, and all currently active NPCs and enchanced map tiles. Then, it will go through each entity and determine if the player’s interaction range bounds are currently intersecting it. The Player class’s interaction range is its current bounds plus a modifier (the interactionRange instance variable) to increase the range by a bit to make it feel less clunky/exact to a user playing the game.
After going through all the entities that the player’s interaction range bounds intersect, more logic is then run to ensure that the situation is “right” for the player to be able to interact with the entity. If after doing the above steps only one entity was found to meet criteria, that entity is run through a series of validity checks involving its position relative to the player. The player also had to have last been moving towards that entity in order for it to be valid.
If after going through all the entities that the player’s interaction range bounds intersect, and multiple entities meet criteria, in addition to the extra validity checks mentioned in the above paragraph, there is also a series of comparisons done to see which entity is “closest” to the player. This is done by checking which entity player intersection has the greatest surface area.
Once narrowed down to a single entity, the entity’s interact script is turned active and begins execution. If the call results in no entities being found to meet interaction criteria, nothing will happen.
Typically, after a successful interaction, the entity’s interaction script will set the player’s state to INTERACTING while it is executing to prevent the player from being able to do anything. More details on how the player’s INTERACTING state works can be found [here]player states.