Structuring game world entities and their rendering objects

Posted by keithjgrant on Game Development See other posts from Game Development or by keithjgrant
Published on 2011-03-18T03:14:06Z Indexed on 2011/03/18 8:18 UTC
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I'm putting together a simple 2d tile-based game. I'm finding myself spinning circles on some design decisions, and I think I'm in danger of over-engineering. After all, the game is simple enough that I had a working prototype inside of four hours with fewer than ten classes, it just wasn't scalable or flexible enough for a polished game.

My question is about how to structure flow of control between game entity objects and their rendering objects. Should each renderer have a reference to their entity or vice-versa? Or both? Should the entity be in control of calling the render() method, or be completely oblivious?

I know there are several valid approaches here, but I'm kind of feeling decision paralysis. What are the pros and cons of each approach?

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