Gah! I’ve been doing it all wrong!

I’ve been spending some time checking out these new fangled design methodologies that throw out typical object oriented programming and replace it with an “entity component system” or ECS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entity_component_system)

TL;DR , an ECS system creates uses components to compose objects rather than using elaborate “is-a” relationships. This allows programmers to more easily mix and match components which makes your game more flexible.

The holy grail is the end point, where you’ve got such a wide breadth of components that you can let your game designers simply mix and match them to create new content. Each game object’s component composition is stored as data which can be manipulated outside of the program. And each component can contain knobs that allow the game designers to change things on a per component or per object basis. Quite powerful.

It turns out that my head has been in the sand and this trend has completely passed me by, its been vetted first by Dungeon Siege (http://scottbilas.com/games/dungeon-siege/) and now large scale frameworks such as Unity embrace this model. (knowing the motivation behind the model would have helped my adventures in Unity) =P

It’s currently ‘too-late’ to incorporate much of this into the civcraft project, but for my next project, this will be fun to play with!