Making Things Talk

164 MAKING THINGS TALK

That’s all the code to define a Player. Put this

code at the end of your program (shown next),

just as if it were another method. To make a new Player

object, write something like Player newPlayer = new

Player(h, v, thisClient).

When you do this, the new Player, and all its instance

variables and methods, are accessible through the variable

called newPlayer (the new Player is not actually stored

in this variable; it’s stuffed away in a portion of memory

somewhere that you can get at through the newPlayer

variable). Keep an eye out for this in the program.

public Player (int hpos, int vpos, Client someClient) {

// initialize the local instance variables:

paddleH = hpos;

paddleV = vpos;

client = someClient;

}

Here’s the constructor for the

Player class. It comes right after the

instance variables in your code. As you

can see, it just takes the values you

give it when you call for a new Player

and assigns them to variables that

belong to an instance (an individual

player) of the class:

8

The variables declared at the beginning of the class as

shown in the example are called instance variables. Every

new instance of the class created makes its own copies

of these variables. Every class has a constructor method.

This method gets called to call the object into existence.

You’ve already used constructors. When you made a

new Serial port in Processing, ...