The concept is that the staff of a company ( or a division of the company, or any subgroup down to the project or team level ) is an inverted pyramid - not with the leaders at the top** of a pyramid, but with the workers at the top. Managment was viewed as support for the workers, providing them with any and all resources they needed to get work done.
** The illustration shown has a big red X through it because it shows a team leader being carried by the workers. No, no, no. A team leader should be providing support for the workers.
Admittedly, for that concept to work, the workers are dedicated to working in the best interest of the customer, producing efficiently and economically what the customer wants.
A Program's User is the Customer, and the Customer is Always Right
Extending the concept to a user-driven computer program such as an editor, the current edit mode is provided with resources by the application manager to do whatever the user demands. The user interfaces with the current edit mode, just as a customer in a store talks directly with the clerk, not with the store manager. The current edit mode manipulates the mesh in any way it can, in response to the user's commands. If the user wants to do something the current mode can't provide, the current mode tells the application manager to switch to the edit mode the user has requested.
That results in the top-down approach to Windows message handling described in my previous blog entry.
I.e.,
At each step along the way (the message procedures), the user's input is the priority, and each object (the current mode instance, the base mode instance, etc.) examines the user's requests. For those requests which the current mode recognizes, all the resources the program provides are available to or generated for that mode to accomplish what it must. If the current mode can't respond (or, rather, doesn't respond) to the request, the user's request is passed on to the next object in the chain. Each object in the chain either responds to the input, or passes it on. Eventually some object responds to the user's input. N.B., that response may be to create an object (i.e., change modes) that can do what the user wants.
Imagine a customer in a store talking to a clerk whose name-tag says "I sell shoes." After looking at shoes, the customer says: "I want to look at socks." The smiling clerk silently ignores the request, but the store manager is listening to the conversation. In the blink of an eye, the manager puts a new clerk behind the counter. That clerk's name-tag changes to "I sell socks" and the display case changes from shoes to socks.
The Windows API window procedure is (essentially) an event-driver, in which events occur through menu selection, key-strokes and mouse manipulations by the user. The architecture that I'm experimenting with, rather than immediately responding to those events through a set of OnSomeEvent routines, instead calls a set of specialized routines that can most likely handle the user's input at the current moment (the current mode.) The current mode routine then examines the input and (potentially) responds. If that set of routines doesn't respond, the system replaces that set with a set of routines that does respond.
I'm definitely not claiming that this architecture is better (or worse) than event-driven programming. Likely due to my own inadequacy, event-driven code I've done previously ended up with switch statements and conditional blocks to determine what specific routines to invoke. Those specific routines often had to further determine current conditions to behave properly.
Adapting L. Spiro's gamestate architecture for an editing environment in this way is proving interesting, primarily the "feature" of the approach that, when a new mode is to be set, the current state is actually deleted, and the new mode which is created, by its own initialization, provides known conditions for its own routines. For me, that provides both discipline (what must a mode do before it's destroyed?), and freedom (don't worry what the previous mode did).
lol, I came here expecting a post about people management, realized halfway through that the rest of it was actually about UI architecture. :D
Interesting, though. I've been working on a modeler of my own (called V2, haha.. as in 2D vector)... it's a quick'n'dirty HTML5 app, using the bloated JQuery UI libs which I was never fond of, but it gets the job done. Gives me more freedom than C++; it's not even strictly OO... but like L. Spiro my goal is clean separation of state. +1 for not using constructors/destructors, especially in C++. (I picked up on that from @EDI who also has a lot to say on this subject.)
My edit modes don't fit neatly into Spiro's architecture... for example I can select layers > draw/edit > position skeleton, then hit ESC to return to draw/edit. It's like a mode stack, but only 2-3 deep, totally ad-hoc. And I can imagine having multiple active modes, and so on - if my goal was to make a great editor, not just enough to build my game. :)
Anyway, enough rambling. I'll have to think about your main premise "a manager is there to protect modes from distractions" and see if it leads me to some kind of epiphany. Thanks for posting.