Generated Enums for Resources

Game Mechanics
#1

I’ve never really been a fan of using Strings and hash maps to store and use my game’s images. It leads to ugly code, and a small performance impact (I know… premature optimization blah blah). There is also no compile-time checking or content assist, which I’ve fallen in love with since the introduction of enums and generics.

So here is a crazy idea… Let’s say you’re already pre-processing your game’s assets into texture atlases with a tool like Texturepacker-GUI or TexturePacker2. During this step, we could also generate a Java source file for an Enum class which contains all of our resources. For example, take the following input images that will be packed into a TextureAtlas:

grass.png
font_small.png
pbar1.png
blur_box.png

Our pre-processing step generates the following Enum source code:

public enum Images {
	grass,
	font_small,
	pbar1,
	blur_box,
}

Then, we could render a particular sprite like so:

	//convenience method...
	public AtlasRegion getRegion(Images image) {
		return atlas.getRegions().get(image.ordinal());
	}
	
	public void render() {
		batch.draw( getRegion(Images.font_small), 0, 0 );
	}

And with a little tweaking could generate nested public static enums for sub-directories in our input, so that we could do things like this:
[icode]Images.hud.text.font_small;[/icode]

It would also simplify things like animations. For example, you could generate a final array after your enum declarations:

public enum Images {
    //generated from image file names
    grass,
    playerWalk1, 
    playerWalk2,
    playerWalk3;
    
    //generated arrays, for images with associates indices  
    public static final Images[] playerWalk = { playerWalk1, playerWalk2, playerWalk3 };
}

It would be ideal if you could re-generate the atlas and enum source automatically whenever the image folder is changed.

Anyways… Just a crazy thought. Probably not a great idea in practice, but it sounds interesting on paper.