CODEWITHSUNDEEP
java2d
Kavan
Kavan

Reputation: 340

Storing large variety of objects with different functionalities

I'm developing a game in Java which I can only describe as a variant of The Sims.

The main interface for the game consists of a level and will have a large variety of furniture which can be placed on the map. My problem is that whilst I can think of ways to construct a system which will allow me to assign properties to each item of furniture, I want to make sure I do it the correct way before I head down a long path to completing it. For example, if I referenced an object with an identifier of "sofa", the furniture object's members could be accessed through searching through all available objects and finding the one with the matching identifier.

My method would be to make a very large .java file with instances from a base furniture class for each item of furniture, with each one having an identifier and all its different properties assigned, such as image, position, rotation etc, plus their own unique code for each different function they provide (eg. sitting, sleeping).

For saving/storing these objects in a text file, I would just store the name of the identifier in the string array in the text file and when loading, I could just create the object by instantiating the object the identifier points to.

Would I be correct in using most of these methods, or are better ones available? If you've found it a struggle to comprehend what I've written (and I had trouble writing it clearly), then a more simple question would be:

How are items of furniture managed in The Sims with respect to the sheer amount available and the many different variations/rotations they can be placed in (and stored/saved)?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 106

Answers (2)

Java Devil
Java Devil

Reputation: 10959

I think what you need to do here is try and abstract as much of the common functionality to the base classes and then each item should extend as necessary. 

Eg
A Sofa... Seat extends Furniture extends Object
A Office chair would be the same
A DiningTable would be different tho... Table extends Furniture extends Object

You will also want various Interfaces so that a Sofa implements Sittable think of the functionailty that might be common to different objects, like they might all be Placeable

Also for saving and loading you might want to make your objects serializable.

Read up on Abstraction, Interfaces and Serialization

Upvotes: 1

Daniel Kaplan
Daniel Kaplan

Reputation: 67310

Component-Entity-System may be a good thing for you to look into. It's basically what you're describing. There's a large collection of entities, each entity has a collection of Components, and there are systems which know what to do with certain components.

EG: A piece of furniture is an entity named "chair". It has many components, one of them is "Renderable". And your game loop passes all renderables into the "renderer" System which calls the Renderable.render() method.

Note, this isn't very object oriented, but I find it's tough to design games like this in an OO way because the object hierarchies explode. Everything has some things in common with everything else. You'd end up with generic classes like "Unit" and "Thing" which isn't very OO either.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions