Thread: help with class design

Hi,

I am finally starting to get to grips with OOP and i have been trying to structure real life situations into classes and objects and the relationship between them.

Can someone please give me an insight into how i may design a class Human in a game that can pick up other classes such as food or a key for example.

The problem i am having is what to put into
private:

Before the game starts i have no idea what the object human will carry.

What subject do i need to research to do the above?

Thanks

Mark S.

Hi there,

I had a lot of questions about exactly that, not too long ago.
That is, until I found out how many more questions I really had, about game structure, and C++ programming in general.

If you are serious about this, maybe you should check out a book, that someone here (thanks again, Dae) told me about:
Data Structures For Game Programmers, by Ron Penton.

Sounds pretty much like what you and I are looking for, eh?

I am shure going to check it out, after I finish Accelerated C++, by Andrew Koenig, and Barbara E. Moo.

Hope it helps!

Originally Posted by Zach L.

Derive all of these objects from a base class. Then, all you need to do is store objects of this base class type.

While this is true, the base class will only contain state and behavior that is common to anything the human can pick up.

For instance, you could have a class named ObtainableItem (or whatever) that things like Key objects or Food objects could be derived from. The "Human" class could have a private list of ObtainableItem objects. Then, when the human picks up something, it gets placed in the list as an ObtainableItem. The thing is, you would need to have a means of identifying the concrete type of the object when you retrieve it from the list because you don't want your human eating a torch or lighting up his food in a dark passageway. You could use run-time type identification (RTTI) or have some type of cross-reference table in ObtainableItem that tracks each type of item to an id number (maybe use a hash table).

All i ask for is a subject to research. Do i need to look into inheritance or maybe linked lists or maybe something else. Any help is much appreciated.

Thanks

Mark S.

Thinking in C++ by Bruce Eckel, which is available for free download online, might be a good resource for the type of information you are looking for.

Before the game starts i have no idea what the object human will carry.

A less complex solution might be designing your Human class to have an array for each type of object a Human can pick up, e.g.

Food f[10];
Weapons w[10];
Keys k[10];

you get the picture?

nope.