Friday 24 August 2018

Building a retro game with React.js. Part 5 - Fill 'er up

By now I had a good portion of the "player's part" of the game complete. Movement around the game area, drawing lines, detecting intersection with existing lines and preventing illegal movement were all done, using the div-based "drawing" that I was familiar with. But now it was time to draw the filled colour block that results when a closed area has been completed. And I was looking at a wall of complexity that I didn't know how to scale.



The answer was to challenge my own comfort zone. Allow myself to quote, myself:
I could do that with an HTML canvas, but I'm (possibly/probably wrongly) not going to use a canvas. I'm drawing divs dammit!
After all, if ever there was a time and place to learn how to do something completely new, isn't it a personal "fun" project? After a quick scan around the canvas-in-React landscape I settled upon React-konva, which has turned out to be completely awesome for my needs, as evidenced by the amount of code changes actually needed to go from my div-based way of drawing a line to the Konva way:
The old way:

const Line = styled('div')`
  position: absolute;
  border: 1px solid ${FrenzyColors.CYAN};
  box-sizing: border-box;
  padding: 0;
`;

renderLine = (line, lineIndex) => {
  const [top, bottom] = minMax(line[2], line[4]);
  const [left, right] = minMax(line[1], line[3]);
  const height = (bottom - top) + 1;
  const width = (right - left) + 1;
  return <Line key={`line-${lineIndex}`}
                  style={{ top: `${top}px`, 
                           left: `${left}px`,
                           width: `${width}px`,
                           height: `${height}px` }} />;
}

The new way:

import { Line } from 'react-konva';

renderLine = (line, lineIndex) => {
  return (
    <Line
      key={`line-${lineIndex}`}
      points={line.slice(1)}
      stroke={FrenzyColors.CYAN}
      strokeWidth={2}
    />
  );
}

... and the jewel in the crown? Here's how simple it is to draw a closed polygon with the correct fill colour; by total fluke, my "model" for lines and polygons is virtually a one-to-one match with the Konva Line object, making this amazingly straightforward:
renderFilledArea = (filledPolygon) => {
  const { polygonLines, color } = filledPolygon;
  const flatPointsList = polygonLines.reduce((acc, l) => {
    const firstPair = l.slice(1, 3);
    return acc.concat(firstPair);
  }, []);

  return (
    <Line
      points={flatPointsList}
      stroke={FrenzyColors.CYAN}
      strokeWidth={2}
      closed
      fill={color}
    />
  );
}

Time Tracking
Probably at around 20 hours of work now.