Ardor3D adds a mechanism for subscribing to events in the scene graph; things like when a node is added or removed, or has one of it’s render states or it’s bounding volume altered. The way notifications are handled is a little confusing at first, as the listener interface (DirtyEventListener) has a method which takes a Spatial as it’s first argument; hoever, the spatial is the node in the scene graph on which the event occurred, it is not the node that the event is fired from.

By way of example: if there are 2 scene nodes, a Spatial named ‘child’ and a Node named ‘parent’, and the child is attached to the parent via a call to Node#attachChild(Spatial) then the following events will be fired (assuming that the child was not already attached to another node):

1. from the child: spatialDirty(child, Attached)

2. from the parent: spatialDirty(child, Attached) if the parent was attached to another node (for example, ‘grandparent’) then this pattern would continue, like so:

3. from the grandparent: spatialDirty(child, Attached) also, if at any point in this one of the spatialDirty calls returns true, then the event is assumed to have been handled and propagation will stop at that point.

What this means in practice is that if you need to know which node an event is being fired from you cannot reuse listeners on multiple nodes. For detaching nodes the situation is a little different: the event propagation starts at the parent node, with the detached child passed as as the method argument.

Be aware that the parent will already have been set to null when the event is fired though, so if you need to be able to do something with the parent you will need to add distinct listeners to each node of interest.