So I got Game Programming Gems 5 and 6 last week, specifically for the articles on component-based game objects. I've read through both, but have only tried to implement the one from GPG5 so far. I must say I'm rather disappointed with the article. What is there is well written, but it lacks some pretty important information. It merely mentions the game object manager class, which happens to be the largest class in the system. It also doesn't do a good job explaining what the parameter nodes are. The article also doesn't get into creating objects dynamically. All of the objects in the article were parsed from a file and loaded at once at startup. I think to create objects dynamically you need a way of storing parameter nodes. Also, the author does not provide the code for "ObjectBuilder.exe", which creates the binary file format he uses, so it's hard to figure out what exactly is going on in the code. Another downside to the article is that it relies heavily on the game. It is hard to abstract out and reuse.
However, GPG6 provides a bit of hope here. It offers a simpler solution that isn't as tightly coupled to the game, and appears to be much easier to implement. There's also no message passing in this system, which grey will be happy about. The xml file example in this article creates templates for objects, which can then be created dynamically, so that issue is addressed in this article. Maybe tomorrow night I'll have a go at implementing that system. It should be simpler to do than the GPG5 article, which just seemed like the author was on the right track, but hadn't completely thought the system out yet.
Disappointed
Oct 21 2007, 02:05 PM
