Sell me on interfaces (and components if unity)
Hello!
Sooo, for games I suppose the most common interface to think about would be something like health or damageable, or smth alike.
However suppose that every object that could be damaged (let's say characters, obstacles, towers??? buildings?? idk), already inherit a base class "entityBase".
Why not just add the functions those classes would have anyway because of interfaces to entityBase?
15 Replies
in this case i dont see any reason not to
i dont know about game development, but one example of interfaces is logging
where you have a generic abstraction for the logger, and then anyone can define their own implementation
but from my experience its hard to get conviced about things like these until you see them in real world applications
using inheritance for different entity types in games gets messy quickly
which is why components are more common
there will inevitably be a point where you have an entity that logically inherits from 2 or more other entities except that's impossible to actually do and now you're stuck
yeah, might need to see good examples
sometimes you want to write a function that only operates on IDamageable types
at that point couldn't you make it part of the base class?
and doesn't want to concern itself with all the other junk in the EntityBase class
functions should only have access to the minimal amount of stuff they need to do their job
'throw everything in one big base class that does everything' is an antipattern, because it leads to unclear separation of concerns
it's the quote about OOP where you want a banana, but instead you get the monkey holding the banana and the whole jungle as well
that makes sense, yeah, I can see why
composable objects are generally more flexible than trying to build a class hierarchy
because you can pick and choose which pieces you need instead of having to take on a whole hierarchy of behaviors
You mentioned an example about an interface IDamageable, what if I have two towers, one damageable and one that isn't, can't see how I would do that with interfaces without making a different tower that doesnt inherit from it
exactly
I could see simply making two Tower objects and giving a Damageable component to one of them
Still, when iterating for stuff to damage, Damageable would only care about the actual damage doing stuff, not targetting stuff
So that would also be a component? a Targeteable component?
yeah, you'd have different components for different independent behavors you'd want an entity to have
then you can mix and match however you want
and typically you can declare an interface as being a superset of other interfaces, which makes life a lot more convenient
so you could have an IReadyForCombat interface which itself derives from the IDamageable and ITargetable and IAttacker interfaces
making it shorthand for listing out all three of the individual ones
well, I must say thanks everyone for the help!
and if it's Unity (as your title says), you can pass things by references rather than copy by value in Unity and have them serialized via ISerializeReference :blobthumbsup: