Flint Particle System Forum - Removing initializers

Removing initializers

rrh — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 21:59:40 +0100

Why isn't this removing all the initializers?

var tempList:Array = emit.initializers;
for (var i:int=0;i  emit.removeInitializer(Initializer(tempList[i]));
}

trace(emit.initializers.length);

That trace at the end keeps tracing 3 or 4, but if it's removing the initializers, I'd expect it to be 0. Does removeInitializer not remove the intializer from the linitializers array?

Removing initializers

rrh — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 23:40:56 +0100

For context, the purpose of this is I'm doing something where I need to change the initializer properties a lot, and if I keep going:

emit.addInitializer( new ScaleImageInit( scale*0.25, scale ) );
emit.addInitializer( new ColorInit( colour ) );

What happens to the old initializers? I figured, hey, the easy solution is to just remove the old initializers before I add the new ones, but whatever I do, I want to be sure I'm not creating a memory leak.

Removing initializers

Richard — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:57:07 +0100

Because tempList is not a copy of the initializers array, it is the initializers array. As a result, tempList.length reduces by one every time around the loop and you miss some of the initializers.

There are a number of other ways you could do this that would work. Here's three of them...

var tempList : Array = emit.initializers.slice();
for ( var i : int = 0; i < tempList.length; i++ ) 
{
  emit.removeInitializer( Initializer( tempList[i] ) );
}

for ( var i : int = emit.initializers.length - 1; i >= 0; i-- ) 
{
  emit.removeInitializer( Initializer( emit.initializers[i] ) );
}

while ( emit.initializers.length > 0 ) 
{
  emit.removeInitializer( Initializer( emit.initializers[0] ) );
}

Removing initializers

Xor — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 16:58:05 +0100

If you don't need to actually remove or add new initializers, then you can also save reference to the initializer and then directly change the values on it as you go. This way you don't need to recreate it each time the values change.

var colorInit :ColorInit = new ColorInit( colour );
emit.addInitializer( colorInit  );

// later
colorInit.minColor = 0xFFFFFF;