Creating a new internal name only SimObject instance

The internal name of a SimObject instance is not exposed to the world in the same way that its optional globally unique name is. We may access it using the internalName property of the SimObject instance and it is useful when searching for SimObject instances within a SimGroup or SimSet collection. When working with the GuiControl objects we will often make use of the internal name. Creating a new internal name only SimObject instance is a rarely used feature of TorqueScript, but we will learn to create it in this recipe.

How to do it...

Creating an internal name only SimObject instance is almost the same as creating an ordinary SimObject instance. The difference comes down to how we decorate the name we use. Here we will create a ScriptObject instance with an internal name, the simplest SimObject derived class, and assign it to a variable:

%object = new ScriptObject([MyScriptObject]);

How it works...

By surrounding the name of the SimObject instance with square brackets, Torque 3D automatically sets the internalName property of object rather than its globally unique name. If we call the getName() method on our new ScriptObject instance, it will return an empty string. But if we call the getInternalName() method, MyScriptObject will be returned.

There's more...

This shortcut to setting the internal name of a SimObject instance can be handy when working with GuiControl instances. The normal pattern works like the following:

new GuiWindowCtrl(MyDialog) {
   ... some properties here ...

   new GuiControl() {
      internalName = "control1";
      ... some properties here ...
   };
   new GuiControl() {
      internalName = "control2";
      ... some properties here ...
   };
};

With this pattern we have to set the internalName property of each GuiControl class manually. Using the special name decorators, the internalName property will be set automatically as follows:

new GuiWindowCtrl(MyDialog) {
   ... some properties here ...

   new GuiControl([control1]) {
      ... some properties here ...
   };
   new GuiControl([control2]) {
      ... some properties here ...
   };

See also

• Creating a new SimObject instance

• Creating a new Datablock object

• Creating a new singleton

• Extending a SimObject instance using the class property