AndEngine drawing 2D tiled game field

Question

I'm in process of developing simple android puzzle game. I decided to choose andEngine as an engine for my game.

In my game I have a gameField [][] array, which represents a game field, where each element is a cell of game level and consists of a type of the cell (for ex. FLOOR of WALL). During the game, state of cell can be changed (for ex. DOOR_CLOSED changed to DOOR_OPENED), but it happens rarely, almost all the elements of gameField don't change.

I tried to implement that by adding repaint method to updateHandler, which would paint sprites for each cell every tick. But I wonder wouldn't be that approach a wasting of memory and processor time? What is the best practise for doing that?

Answer 1

How about having that multidimensional array of yours filled with, say, an extension of TiledSprites. Something like the following:

public class Door extends TiledSprite {

    private boolean isOpen = false;
    private static final int DOOR_CLOSED = 0;
    private static final int DOOR_OPEN = 1;

    public Door() {
        this(0, 0, doorTextureRegion, vertexBufferObjectManager);
        this.setCurrentTileIndex(DOOR_CLOSED);
    }

    public open() {
        this.isOpen = true;
        this.setCurrentTileIndex(DOOR_OPEN);
    }

    public close() {
        this.isOpen = false;
        this.setCurrentTileIndex(DOOR_CLOSE);
    }

}

In your scene, you attach all the TiledSprites as children of the scene. Iterate over the array in an initialization method, say. You shouldn't have to constantly poll and redraw--AndEngine takes care of that for you.