How can I cleanly and elegantly handle data and dependancies between classes
- by Neophyte
I'm working on 2d topdown game in SFML 2, and need to find an elegant way in which everything will work and fit together.
Allow me to explain. I have a number of classes that inherit from an abstract base that provides a draw method and an update method to all the classes.
In the game loop, I call update and then draw on each class, I imagine this is a pretty common approach. I have classes for tiles, collisions, the player and a resource manager that contains all the tiles/images/textures. Due to the way input works in SFML I decided to have each class handle input (if required) in its update call.
Up until now I have been passing in dependencies as needed, for example, in the player class when a movement key is pressed, I call a method on the collision class to check if the position the player wants to move to will be a collision, and only move the player if there is no collision.
This works fine for the most part, but I believe it can be done better, I'm just not sure how.
I now have more complex things I need to implement, eg: a player is able to walk up to an object on the ground, press a key to pick it up/loot it and it will then show up in inventory. This means that a few things need to happen:
Check if the player is in range of a lootable item on keypress, else do not proceed.
Find the item.
Update the sprite texture on the item from its default texture to a "looted" texture.
Update the collision for the item: it might have changed shape or been removed completely.
Inventory needs to be updated with the added item.
How do I make everything communicate? With my current system I will end up with my classes going out of scope, and method calls to each other all over the place. I could tie up all the classes in one big manager and give each one a reference to the parent manager class, but this seems only slightly better.
Any help/advice would be greatly appreciated! If anything is unclear, I'm happy to expand on things.
