Totally just kidding... I like this Christmasy theme!
Been working on scene management tools. I'm currently struggling with how far I want to abstract things. I'm also trying to think of the best way to handle entity creation and configuration. Here's the basic entity creator that I've come up with:
shared_ptr CreateEntity(string Name, entity_type Type, string Parameters) { switch(type) { case ENTITY_GEOMETRY: return shared_ptr(new AXMeshInstance(Name, Parameters)); case ENTITY_LIGHT: return shared_ptr(new AXLight(Name, Parameters)); /* ... more ... */ } EntityMap[Name] = out; }Parameters is a string of configuration variables. For a mesh, you could pass "name=ball;shader=effect01". It gets a little messier with a light with so many options. I don't really think I like this way (I haven't spent anytime implementing it either because of this). Though it's appealing because I wouldn't really need to serialize configurations.
So, I guess the function could just return a default object. The annoying thing about this is that it returns an AXEntity object, so you'd have to cast it to your requested type to configure it (using dynamic_cast of course).
The only way around it is doing something like this, but I typically don't like this style for some reason. perhaps it's because I have to declare the variable beforehand.
void CreateEntity(string Name, entity_type Type, shared_ptr &EntityOut);Hmm.. gonna think of how I want all this to look a little bit more.
