I'm in a situation where a player can be given the control of small parts of an entity (i.e. Left missile battery). Therefore I started implementing sub entities as follow.

Entities are Objects with 3 arrays:

• pointers to components
• pointers to sub entities
• communication subscribers (temporary implementation)

Now when an entity is built it has a few components as you might expect and also I can attach sub entities which are handled with some dedicated code in the Entity and Component classes.

I noticed sub entities are sharing data in 3 parts:

• position: the sub entities are using the parent's position and their own as an offset.
• scrips: sub entities are draining ammo and energy from the parent.
• physics: sub entities add weight to the parent

I made this to quickly go forward, but as I'm slowly fixing current implementations I wonder if this wasn't a mistake.

Is my current implementation something commonly done? Will this implementation put me in a corner?

I thought it might be a better thing to create some sort of SubEntityComponent where sub entities are attached and handled.

But before changing anything I wanted to seek the community's wisdom.