Kestrel Lua API / Scene Presentation

Scene

The Scene class represents a given "scene" within Kestrel. This may be a scene that you wish to move to/present to the user or the currently presented scene.

Scenes are how Kestrel handles all contextual state. An overworld view of the game may be its own scene, whilst an NPC communication view maybe another scene. As scenes are presented, they are placed upon a stack, with Kestrel rendering and sending events only the top most scene on the stack.

Presenting a Scene

In order to present a scene, you will need to have a Controller script to manage the functionality of the scene. Such scripts are encoded as LuaC resources. Below are example KDL and the Lua script files for this illustration.

-- scripts/MyScene.lua

print("Hello, World")

` game.kdl

declare LuaScript {
    new (#128) {
        Script = import "@rpath/scripts/MyScene.lua";
    };
};

This scene can then be loaded and presented using the following snippet.

local scene = Kestrel.scene("Example Scene", Resource.id(128))
scene:present()

Here, we're asking Kestrel to create a new scene with an internal identifier of Example Scene. This identifier is purely for our own, debugging purposes and is not related to the underlying resource data or controller script. The Resource.id(128) is telling the scene that the controller script for it, is in resource 128. The LuaC type in this instance is inferred.

Acquiring the current Scene

It will almost certainly be likely that you need to acquire the current scene that Kestrel is presenting. Whether this be within the confines of the controller script, or in another aspect of functionality that you have added.

You can acquire the current scene like so

local scene = Scene.current()

Direct Instantation

Due to the internal structure of Kestrel and how deeply integrated Scenes are in the architecture of Kestrel, it is not possible to directly instantiate a scene currently. You must go through the Kestrel.scene method.

Static Methods

The following methods are exposed on the Scene class.

Method Name	Return Type	Lua API Version
current()	Scene	v0.0.1

---

Scene.current()

Returns a reference to the scene that is currently at the top of the scene stack in Kestrel.

Example

local scene = Scene.current()

Instance Methods

The following methods are exposed on Scene.

Method Name	Return Type	Lua API Version
present()	None	v0.0.1
render(Function)	None	v0.0.1
onKeyEvent(Function(KeyEvent))	None	v0.0.1
onMouseEvent(Function(MouseEvent))	None	v0.0.1

---

Scene:present()

Pushes the specified scene on to Kestrels internal scene stack, causing the specified scene to become the current scene.

Example

local scene = Kestrel.scene("Example Scene", Resource.id(128))
scene:present()

---

Scene:render(Function)

Provide a function to the scene that will be called each time a new render pass is made. You should perform any updates, and drawing of entities in these functions/closures.

Example

scene:render(function()
	ball:draw()
end)

---

Scene:onKeyEvent(Function(KeyEvent))

Provide a function to the scene that will handle keyboard events.

Example

scene:onKeyEvent(function(event)
	if event.keycode == 262 and event.pressed then
		print("Left Button pressed")
	end
end)

---

Scene:onMouseEvent(Function(MouseEvent))

Provide a function to the scene that will handle keyboard events.

Example

scene: onMouseEvent(function(event)
	if event.moved then
		local position = event.point
		print("Mouse moved")
	end
end)