Hello JGO! I need your opinion on how to structure my item system for my game.
So far, I have a few ideas: I could have a Item class, and make a sub class of it for every item in the game. But let’s say I have 1000 items, that would be 1000 classes. My next idea is to have a component bases system, and have a instance of a item properties class for every item. But that might take to much memory if there where a lot of items.
Do you have eny better ideas? Thank you.
An important question to consider is how many items you will actually make, and the complexity of said items.
If you have 1000 items (extremely unlikely), lots of them will be behaviourally identical, and could all use the same class with a few variables (or better, the same set of components).
Class-based hierarchies are easy to implement for a small range of items, but get harder and harder as new and more complex items (and therefore edge-cases) are added.
Component-based systems take a bit more work to implement for the first few basic items, but once a behaviour is defined you can reuse it as many times as you want with very little new code required.
This is where an ECMS and/or data oriented programming can come in handy.
I suggest you sit and design your items, see how many you got and go from there. If you only have a dozen or 2, then simply just make a base concrete class and make base classes from that, then from there make refined classes with specialised functionality.
You will be lost in this 1000 files )
need separate changeable values like NPC HP, Weapon Speed and DMG
and make 1-2 Files with Data that create Needed objects.
Also if you will do big project and have many ppl in Team that can change this values
They need to be separated from code
To external data format
Like XML, Excel, etc
(also its prefer separate all game Text external, for localization, etc)
p.s I use Excel to Xml and then to Code ^^
(because XML multy language format)
(for Excel i Use jexcelapi)
(also XML can be parsed to RAW data for fast load – but no one cares: its from couple ms to 1-2s load time for small project ^^)
Up:
I used something same -
this system is mega cool but you don’t need it for small project )
you can’t so simple create, alone, this 1000 different game object Types with Quality different texts, imgs, animations, sounds etc
(it will take so many time)
and you can implement it in any time later, so use time for something more real like playable game mechanics ^^
Really, the answer is that it depends entirely on you, your preferences, your programming style, etc. There are probably a hundred different ways to do this, and none of them is “right”. That’s the beauty of programming. It’s also part of what makes it so frustrating!
But I will say that one thing you should look into is the idea of favoring composition over inheritance.
Basically, your approach with the 1000 classes uses inheritance, and it would go something like this, where you inherit from a base class to create different items:
abstract class ItemParent{
public String getName();
public int getAttack();
}
class ItemOne extends ItemParent{
public String getName(){
return "Item One";
}
public int getAttack(){
return 10;
}
}
class ItemTwo extends ItemParent{
public String getName(){
return "Item Two";
}
public int getAttack(){
return -1;
}
}
But all of that could be simplified by using composition instead. You would create an Item class that is composed of the different aspects of an Item:
class Item{
private String name;
private int attack;
public Item(String name, int attack){
this.name = name;
this.attack = attack;
}
public String getName(){
return name;
}
public int getAttack(){
return attack;
}
}
And then to create a specific item, you would just create an instance:
Item itemOne = new Item("Item One", 10);
Item itemTwo = new Item("Item Two", -1);
Like I said, there are a hundred different ways to do this, even if you do try to favor composition over inheritance. This is just something you should keep in mind before you create 1000 mostly identical classes.
Save your item info in a database, bam, only need one or at most one class for every type, melee, ranged, armor pieces, potions, etc.
For classes you check what things has in common, and order them in classes.
All items have names, prize, whatever, so thats an item class. Weapons also got damage, etc, so thats a weapon class, but there might be different types of animation, so maybe a sub class sword, axe, whatever, but wouldnt need that if you can just specify animation in a variable instead.
Etc. etc.