Components....

[rogerborg]

From personal experience Eidos asked us to turn a mech combat game into a giant armoured spheres race game half way through the project.

Well, let me be sckeptic but if after that change your desing did not need to change to much

You seem to be refuting something that I never said. How curious.

[Halifax]

Halifax: Yes, of course you are right, you take my examples too much specific, I named gear of wars just becasue was the first that came to my mind. Choose another one that can fix correctly my example.

Well that's kind of what I was explaning, there are virtually no games out their that don't change from the start. These aren't like movies. All the major games out there that you see today probably changed a lot over their lifetime. For example, Halo did in fact start as an RPG, but eventually became a FPS.

Either way I think this is pretty much a pointless argument, as rogerborg has basically proven his point.

[xDan]

well, I just "converted" my engine to this component system... and I LIKE IT! It has certainly made my code much clearer, I had a bad case of The Blob.

btw, I currently have no game ideas (well no achievable ones..), so it needs to be flexible for when I do decide what I'm going to make.

[ebo]

IMHO a component model fits well into the distinctions you have to make when using a approach with different engines:

You have a Irrlicht-scenenode and some code to get it drawn.
You have a physics-node and some code to get it into action.
You have scripts for a object.

That are all pretty distinct components and thats even enforced by the type system: When dealing with the irrlicht you have to use irrlicht-types and so forth.

It's just not the standard approach you get taught in a oo-programming class.

[RustyNail]

Hmmm...If I were to implement this into my engine...
Should each Entity be, like in Sudi's case - an ID
or a list of pointers to components?
I'd say a list would be easier to manage....

[sudi]

well depends. when ur list is visible to the engine uer its not easy to maintain because u can crash the engine really easily.
I changed my concept a little in the background. so the user still just gets the id of the entity but in the background there is now a container for the entity. that way its faster to add and remove stuff.

[RustyNail]

Hmmm...
I'll have to think about it...
But currently I have more pressing matters:
I have no knowledge what-so-ever of matrices, and I need to somehow get this knowledge to move on with my engine..
(http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/phpBB2/ ... hp?t=26550)