Dumb Design Decisions 101

Feeling dim this morning.

I realised I'd done something really stupid. OOP is supposed to be about Classes and Object Instances, right ? In a 'hack' designed to get round the problem of attaching game objects to instances of executives, I'd designed it so that when you created a new GameObject Class to subclass (the Executive:createClass() method) you provided an instance of a parameter.

So .... all instances of that class now belonged to one, and only one, instance of the executive.

Fortunately this dumb mistake has been fixed and the executive is where it belongs in the object constructor. When you create an object of some sort, you tell it which executive it is to be added to.

This is a hangover from SOE, which is the same basic idea, except there is one, only one, executive, it's a singleton.

I'm writing a scene sort of thing. The idea is that there is a Factory Class for executives, this is the equivalent of a Corona Scene. This factory class has a constructor/destructor (for resources), and methods to create a new 'scene' (e.g. create an executive and populate it with objects', start it, and methods to stop it, and tidy up (delete the executive). The last two don't do much, as the executives objects are responsible for actually stopping it (as in, say, Flappy Sphere, the game stops when there are no bird objects left).

These belong to a global class, probably called 'Game' which is a collection of such, and it just transitions between them using an FSM and the TransitionManager library.

To this end, I've added a couple of things ; there is a very simple finite state manager, which just maintains a list of states and states events , and broadcasts messages as you switch between them. Additionally, every executive now has, on demand an owning displayGroup object - I need this because there needs to be some way of having all the graphics in a particular setting together so  you can transition them in or out.

With a bit of luck it will be dead simple. I will end up with a FSM for the game outline, which has attached Executive Factory objects, and the FSM just switches from scene to scene automatically.

You can see the outline of this at the end of Flappy Sphere (at the time of writing)