Feb 25 2008
Component-based fun
Filed under Game development by Jussi Lepistö
As I suspected, most of yesterday was spent snowboarding and playing board games, but today I have been working quite a lot on the game again. Specifically, I’ve been working on component-based entities. It was quite a big a change and it essentially had to be done all at once, so the game didn’t even start for the whole day. And now all I got is a black screen with the HUD (GUI) drawn on it, so something’s obviously wrong, but the hard part should be behind.
Though the code is still a bit of a mess and the transformation to components isn’t fully done yet, I can really say they clean up the code structure and responsibilities a lot. Communications also work better than I expected, at least at this point. We’ll see what problems I run into when things get a lot more complex. I really like the entity type / entity distinction too. You can already add new units and artillery shell types to the game by placing an appropriate Python script file in the “units” or “shells” directory, respectively. In any case I’m happy to finally get back to “real” progress after this transformation. And you can start expecting screenshots again next week. 
Btw, if you want to know more about how some part of my design works, feel free to ask and I’ll talk about it in a future post.
That would be nice having a post about the design, as you said. I am working on this kind of thing but nothing is done, only experiments. The more informations I get, the better it will be.