architecture - Event-driven Communication in a Game Engine: Yes or No?

I am reading Game Coding Complete and the author recommends Event Driven communication among game objects and modules.

Basically, all living game actors should communicate with the key modules (Physics, AI, Game Logic, Game View, etc.) via an internal event messaging system. This means having to design an efficient event manager. A badly designed system eats CPU cycles, especially affecting mobile platforms.

Is this a proven and recommended approach? How should I decide whether to use it?

Answer

This is an expansion of my comment to a full answer, as suggested.

Yes, plain and simple. Communication needs to happen and while there are situations where 'Are we there yet?'-type polling is required, having things check to see if they should be doing something else generally wastes time. You could instead have them react to things they are told to do. Plus, a well defined communication pathway between objects/systems/modules boosts parallel setups significantly.

I've given a high-level overview of an event messaging system over on Stack Overflow. I have used it from school into professional gaming titles and now non-gaming products, adapted to the use case every time of course.

EDIT: To address a comment question on how do you know which objects should get the message: The objects themselves should Request to be notified about events. Your EventMessagingSystem (EMS) will need a Register(int iEventId, IEventMessagingSystem * pOjbect, (EMSCallback)fpMethodToUseForACallback) as well as a matching Unregister (making a unique entry for an iEventId out of the object pointer and callback). This way, when an object wants to know about a message it can Register() with the system. When it no longer needs to know about the events, it can Unregister(). Clearly, you'd want a pool of these callback registration objects and an effective way to add/remove them from lists. (I've usually used self ordering arrays; a fancy way of saying they track their own allocations between a pool stack of unused objects and arrays that shift their sizes in place when needed).

EDIT: For a completely working game with an update loop and an event messaging system, you might want to check out an old school project of mine. The Stack Overflow post linked above also refers to it.