Question

I’m using a specific game making framework but I think the question applies to javascript

I was trying to make a narration script so the player can see “The orc hits you.” at the bottom of his screen. I wanted to show the last 4 messages at one time and possibly allow the player to look back to see 30-50 messages in a log if they want. To do this I set up and object and an array to push the objects into.

So I set up some variables like this initially…

servermessage: {"color1":"yellow", "color2":"white", "message1":"", "message2":""},
servermessagelist: new Array(),

and when I use this command (below) multiple times with different data called by an event by manipulating servermessage.color1 … .message1 etc…

servermessagelist.push(servermessage)

it overwrites the entire array with copies of that data… any idea why or what I can do about it.

So if I push color1 “RED” and message1 “Rover”.. the data is correct then if I push
color1″yellow” and message1 “Bus” the data is two copies of .color1:”yellow” .message1:”Bus”

Answer 1

When you push servermessage into servermessagelist you’re really (more or less) pushing a reference to that object. So any changes made to servermessage are reflected everywhere you have a reference to it. It sounds like what you want to do is push a clone of the object into the list.

Declare a function as follows:

function cloneMessage(servermessage) {
    var clone ={};
    for( var key in servermessage ){
        if(servermessage.hasOwnProperty(key)) //ensure not adding inherited props
            clone[key]=servermessage[key];
    }
    return clone;
}

Then everytime you want to push a message into the list do:

servermessagelist.push( cloneMessage(servermessage) );