Game loop inside libGDX game loop

Question

I have the main game loop in libGDX. On the touch() event I want an animation to be executed. So I will have a variable which will store the value which will be updated each frame and further rendered side by side each frame.

The problem: I want an another animation to take place after the first one finishes. How do I update variable to do so? Because it should take place after first. I can't place two statements in loop one after another. Is there a way to create an another game loop inside first so that when inner runs the outer is paused?

Answer 1

You would usually use an explicit state machine for that. The idea is that you have a variable that stores the current state (say: animation A). And when that animation finishes you update the state variable to a new state (say: animation B).

Then, in your loop, when playing animations, you have a switch satement that selects a case depending on the state variable, and then that case handles the logic for that state.

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There are more advance solutions, of course. You might create your state machine as a tree, where each state has sub-states. You may represent them as data (they are not a bunch of switch statements, but dictionaries). Or you could use full-fledged behavior tree.

Alternatively, you might also use coroutines. A common trick is to implement them as iterators (each loop you pull a new item, and the logic is in the iterator), then you can build an implicit state machine around them.

And of course, you can mix and match. For example, have a state machine that picks a behavior tree.

There are also libraries that help you implement all that, you may want to have a look around. I do not really develop in Java. So, I can’t really recommend.