Why is my Scene's Display List null?

Phaser 3
1

Hello.

I’ve noticed that, for some reason, when I enter a scene of type ShadowMatchingTutorial (a custom type created by my co-worker) for the first time, everything works fine. However, when I later instantiate another ShadowMatchingTutorial scene with a different key, add it to the Scene Manager, and start that scene, it doesn’t work.

Specifically, this scene is one that starts with a character delivering dialogue, which in our game, is represented with bitmap text. When I enter the first scene, the text renders as expected. When I enter the second scene, which is supposed to render the same text, the text doesn’t render at the beginning. After some digging, I have determined that this is because the scene’s displayList property is null.

Why would that be? Does anyone have any idea? I’m completely flummoxed. I would love any help anyone could give me.

2

How are you adding the second scene?

3

I’m instantiating a new scene by calling the constructor, and then I’m calling “this.game.scene.add”, with the “autoStart” parameter set to “true”.

4

It’s normally null after a scene is destroyed/removed.

5

Interesting. What I’m doing is, I’m transitioning to a new scene, and then I’m destroying the scene I left. But we’re not attempting to add things to a scene after it’s destroyed; we’re adding something to a newly instantiated scene. Do you think it’s possible that destroying the previous scene somehow interferes with the newly created scene and sets its displayList to null?

6

I don’t think so.

Maybe try debugging this with phaser-plugin-scene-watcher.

Also try without transitions.

7

Thanks for recommending the Scene Watcher! It looks cool.

What do you mean by “try without transitions”?

8

If you’re using scene.transition() etc., try switching scenes without transitions to see if the problem still occurs.

9

I’m not using scene.transition(), but thanks for the idea!