Name: Anonymous 2010-09-02 2:49
I suck at application architecture.
How do I do MVC for a video game? All explanations of MVC are completely tied to the web, where you have this nice clean cycle of [database -> page composition -> user submitted data]. A video game does not fucking work that way.
How do I refer internally to different parts of the game state? Let's say I have a top-level object called Game, which has an array of Players, and maybe a World class containing some Terrain and some Entities, some of which are PowerUps, etc. Now how do I find a PowerUp from within the Player source code?
Am I meant to go through the Game object, via game->world->entities->powerups? This is horrible because it creates a dependency chain; my Player source code is now dependent on all of those intermediate classes, even though it doesn't actually need to access them besides getting to the powerups. And how do I even access the Game object in the first place? They say don't use global variables. Does this mean I pass around a Game* to all methods in the entire app? Does this mean every single class in the app should store a reference to the Game*? There is a huge amount of overhead for this, not to mention lost optimization opportunities. Am I meant to make it a singleton? Because that's just a bullshit copout; that IS a global variable.
Is there a good book I can read that will explain all this bullshit?
How do I do MVC for a video game? All explanations of MVC are completely tied to the web, where you have this nice clean cycle of [database -> page composition -> user submitted data]. A video game does not fucking work that way.
How do I refer internally to different parts of the game state? Let's say I have a top-level object called Game, which has an array of Players, and maybe a World class containing some Terrain and some Entities, some of which are PowerUps, etc. Now how do I find a PowerUp from within the Player source code?
Am I meant to go through the Game object, via game->world->entities->powerups? This is horrible because it creates a dependency chain; my Player source code is now dependent on all of those intermediate classes, even though it doesn't actually need to access them besides getting to the powerups. And how do I even access the Game object in the first place? They say don't use global variables. Does this mean I pass around a Game* to all methods in the entire app? Does this mean every single class in the app should store a reference to the Game*? There is a huge amount of overhead for this, not to mention lost optimization opportunities. Am I meant to make it a singleton? Because that's just a bullshit copout; that IS a global variable.
Is there a good book I can read that will explain all this bullshit?