How would you go around creating a reusable weapon class? I can't really wrap my head around creating a class, which will work for both melee and ranged weapons.
Example given, that you have a knife, an RPG, and you have an ordinary pistol. How would you go around creating a class all three can inherit from?
Answer
It should certainly be possible to create a single class that represents all weapons equally well -- and this is ideal, because allowing yourself to fall into the trap of creating many subclasses for each weapon type is cumbersome. Composition(*) should be favored over inheritance.
The big challenges are going to be
- Enumerating the set of data and behavior that you expect of all classifications of weapon.
- Determining how to abstract that data and behavior into a data-oriented approach.
"Range" is a good example -- both swords and guns both have a range. You can either elect to use a simple system when a range of 0 just means "melee" or you can use a real-world measurement so as to (as suggested by another poster), gives daggers a shorter reach than a polearm.
Behavior can be handled by scripting(**). You could have an "on-activated" script object that was invoked when the weapon was used or swung -- the script for a melee weapon would look at the range, and the location of the actor using the weapon and perhaps compute the set of targets in an semi-circle in front of the actor and apply damage to each. Conversely the script for a gun might do a raycast from the actor, limited by the range.
(*) This does not strictly imply that you have to rely on "component oriented" systems to effectively avoid going crazy with inheritance.
(**) Either via scripts loaded from another language, like Lua, or by pointing the weapon at a C++ "Script" class which you do create subclasses of. The latter is obviously easier, but lacks some of the benefits of a scripting system as it requires recompilation, for example.
No comments:
Post a Comment