Beware the Invalid BitmapData

Just a note to fellow HaxeFlixel developers, in case it saves you some time.

If you extend a FlxTypedGroup<FlxSprite>, don't instantiate a variable of its kind in a class definition, outside a function.  I.e. don't do this:

class XYZ {
    public var myFtgInstance = new extendedFtg();

Instead, move the myFtgInstance = new extendedFtg(); into your new() or create() or whatever function is applicable.


The context for my story is that I did not at first realize there were FlxSubStates, so I rolled my own Popup class (extending FlxTypedGroup<FlxSprite>).  In the end, I sort of liked how mine was organized better, anyway.  I extended Popup into a few different specialized Popups, and they worked fine.

A few weeks later I went to make a new specialized Popup for a different state, and got a very hard-to-track-down runtime error, Invalid BitmapData, whose stack trace did not even originate in my project's code.

In the end, it was only because my state class code foolishly tried to instantiate the Popup derivative outside any function.  Unfortunately, figuring this out was not straightforward at all, in the end being fixed only thanks to an inspired guess.