Thread: Question about Inheritence

There is no use in arguing about the low-level design of the fight system if the high-level design of the game is unknown. For example, in the typical JRPG style game, you have several game modes. You have the map mode, where you walk around. You have the menu mode, where you browse your inventory and stuff. And finally you have the fight (actually, you'd probably call it battle) mode that you enter when you stumble upon a monster.
In such a design, Battle is very much a class, implementing the GameMode interface. It is passed two arrays of FightingCharacter (as opposed to non-fighting characters like shopkeepers) pointers, which denote the two teams involved in the battle. The Battle will query those characters for actions in turn. This will probably return a pointer to an Action object. The Battle will then tell the Action to execute itself, deducting or adding HPs and MPs as appropriate. The Battle will then query the characters for their status and decide if the battle is finished or goes on.

Or you could have a completely different design.

Originally Posted by phantomotap

You have got to be joking. That doesn't even approximate the conceptual situation in my response to Bubba. (Though, it is an example of compile time polymorphism I noted as a possibility, and one that I also implied has many problems. You've managed to introduce every problem with a surprisingly simple bit of code.) That doesn't model a situation where each "IEntity" fights differently. That is a perfect model of where every "IEntity" fights exactly the same. (Worse than that, every fight is a series of repeated actions of every other fight.) The only thing that is different: what is shown when they do the same actions! Does that make any sense to you? Anyone?

It makes big sense to me.
Those are the basic requirements for a battle. If you don't like them, then specialize the template.
It then calls animations for each. All the classes would need to do is derive from a common base class for the "basic" fighting animation. If it needs special animations, it could overload functions for the special animations.
It makes perfect sense to me, so please, if you can, point out the problems and how to address them.

Originally Posted by CornedBee

There is no use in arguing about the low-level design of the fight system if the high-level design of the game is unknown. For example, in the typical JRPG style game, you have several game modes. You have the map mode, where you walk around. You have the menu mode, where you browse your inventory and stuff. And finally you have the fight (actually, you'd probably call it battle) mode that you enter when you stumble upon a monster.
In such a design, Battle is very much a class, implementing the GameMode interface. It is passed two arrays of FightingCharacter (as opposed to non-fighting characters like shopkeepers) pointers, which denote the two teams involved in the battle. The Battle will query those characters for actions in turn. This will probably return a pointer to an Action object. The Battle will then tell the Action to execute itself, deducting or adding HPs and MPs as appropriate. The Battle will then query the characters for their status and decide if the battle is finished or goes on.

Or you could have a completely different design.

Actually, that sounds like a very nice abstraction, provided you need such a flexible design.

Who is talking about the design?

Personally, I'm talking about the conceptual model of "Fight".

Where's the difference between design and conceptual model?

If the design is what CornedBee is alluding to then I would agree that Fight would then need to be a class since it actually represents a larger object than just a simple action and probably opens up a whole set of new actions. But if the characters just fight one another in real time then I cannot see how making Fight a class makes any sense. Are you going to make walk, talk, and eat a class too?

But without knowing the design it's impossible to say which is the best approach. It really depends on the circumstances.

I don't like the template idea b/c it will only allow a hero and a monster to fight. It won't allow two monsters to fight or two heroes to fight. It also does not account for other 'interested' parties to get involved in the fight. But again I'm coming from a real-time non Final Fantasy style of fighting. Oblivion style fighting would be a good example of what I'm talking about. Fallout 3 or the Final Fantasy series would be an example of the type of fighting CornedBee is talking about.

Originally Posted by phantomotap

If you have a flawed conceptual model you have no chance to design a reasonable model ready for implementation.

If you don't know the high-level design of the application, you don't even know what Fight is referring to. How can you make a reasonable conceptual model of it?