Difference between revisions of "Complete roguelike tutorial using C++ and libtcod - part 6: going berserk!"
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In this article, we'll actually implement melee fighting. It's significantly bigger and harder than the previous articles. | In this article, we'll actually implement melee fighting. It's significantly bigger and harder than the previous articles. | ||
==Preparing for a huge diversity of actors== | |||
Those orcs and trolls have been teasing us for too long. It's time to slice them and repaint this dungeon in red... With actual fight comes the primordial question of how we handle actors specifities. Our Actor class represents everything that has a position on the map. It's easy to see that it will encompass a wide range of different entities : items, traps, doors, monsters... The question is how do we handle this in our class hierarchy ? | |||
The old school way would be to stuff every property in the Actor class and use flags to determine what feature is active on a specific actor. This is great because any feature can be enabled on any actor. But there's a lot of wasted memory because every actor stores a lot of properties it doesn't use. | |||
Another way is to make a base Actor class with all common attributes and a derived class for each type of actor. Item, Trap, Door, Monster. That's more efficient as each class only stores the attributes it needs. But it's very rigid. No way an item can also be a monster. What if you want to wear an acid spitting critter like a weapon ? Or populate the dungeon with enchanted flying knives that attack you on sight ? | |||
There's a way to get most of the advantages and almost no drawback : '''composition'''. The Actor class will contain a pointer to every "pack" of features it needs. If a pack is not needed, the pointer is NULL and only waste 4 bytes (8 on a 64 bits OS). | |||
[[Category:Developing]] | [[Category:Developing]] | ||
Revision as of 15:24, 6 October 2015
| Complete roguelike tutorial using C++ and libtcod -originally written by Jice Text in this tutorial was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported and the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts) on 2015-09-21. |
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In this article, we'll actually implement melee fighting. It's significantly bigger and harder than the previous articles.
Preparing for a huge diversity of actors
Those orcs and trolls have been teasing us for too long. It's time to slice them and repaint this dungeon in red... With actual fight comes the primordial question of how we handle actors specifities. Our Actor class represents everything that has a position on the map. It's easy to see that it will encompass a wide range of different entities : items, traps, doors, monsters... The question is how do we handle this in our class hierarchy ?
The old school way would be to stuff every property in the Actor class and use flags to determine what feature is active on a specific actor. This is great because any feature can be enabled on any actor. But there's a lot of wasted memory because every actor stores a lot of properties it doesn't use.
Another way is to make a base Actor class with all common attributes and a derived class for each type of actor. Item, Trap, Door, Monster. That's more efficient as each class only stores the attributes it needs. But it's very rigid. No way an item can also be a monster. What if you want to wear an acid spitting critter like a weapon ? Or populate the dungeon with enchanted flying knives that attack you on sight ?
There's a way to get most of the advantages and almost no drawback : composition. The Actor class will contain a pointer to every "pack" of features it needs. If a pack is not needed, the pointer is NULL and only waste 4 bytes (8 on a 64 bits OS).