Need a little bit of guidance with metatables

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#1

Howdy,

I took a shot at metatables today, and I’m completely stumped. I thought that they would greatly streamline my game in terms of combat abilities that I’m working on. Everything is working fine, except for the function Charge:Destroy().

local Charge = {}
Charge.__index = Charge

function Charge.new(data)
	
	local chargeinstance = {}
	setmetatable(chargeinstance,Charge)
	
	chargeinstance.Prefab		= data["ChargeEffect"]
	chargeinstance.Ancestors	= data["ChargeParent"]
	chargeinstance.Offset		= data["ChargePosition"]
	
	return chargeinstance
	
end

function Charge:Destroy()
	self:Destroy()
end

When I call Charge:Destroy(), I get this error. What am I doing wrong? Or am I approaching metatables the wrong way?

#2 
function Charge:Destroy()
	self:Destroy()
end

is akin to

function Charge.Destroy(self)
	self.Destroy(self)
end

and
Charge:Destroy() is akin to Charge.Destroy(Charge).
You get a stack overflow because Charge’s Destroy is calling the method itself.
See in the function above when self = Charge, the Destroy method of Charge is being called again.

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#3

The reason why you are getting this error is because you are attempting to call the :Destroy method within it’s self. This wont work because each time you call :Destroy it will call it’s self again.

Instead you should put in the :Destroy method what you actually want to destroy. With that you are doing it looks like you are trying to destroy self which isn’t possible because it is a table. Instead you should state what you want to destroy within self. Here is a quick example:

local module = {}
module.__index = module

function module.new()
	local self = setmetatable({}, module)
	self.Name = "This is a name"
	self.Level = 10
	return self
end

function module:Destroy()
	self.Name = nil -- Makes name nil
	self.Level = nil -- Makes level nil
end

return module
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