Back to General and Gameplay Programming

Can't find ANY info about how to get data from one part of an OOP to another.

Gwahir · 2002-12-08T11:26:35

It''s driving me nuts. I''ve read three books on the subject, and none of them address the problem specifically, but rather ramble on and on about abstraction and encapsulation and other useful yet irrelevant subjects. All about how hiding data is so great, yet I can''t hide every variable from every other variable lest my program become inoperable, but they give no hints as to the proper ways to share data. I am left with a firm conviction that information hiding is good, but have no clue how to share the information that it is neccesary to share, or how to make classes know how to call other classes. Their example programs aren''t even any help, since they seem to always be some lame finance program that has no complex data structures and no complex output to the screen. For instance, I am currently in the concept stages of a simple hack''n''slash RPG. I''m trying to figure out what kind of code structure I''m going to use, and I''ve pretty much decided OOP is the way to go. It''s go so many nice features. So I lay out which classes I need. Well, it''s pretty obvious I''ll need classes for the game world, the current map, the player, monsters, items, ect. And a class to put everything on the screen, and to a class to recive input from the player, and a class for file IO. But these classes are not all self-sufficient entities. The player class needs to know about the game world. The monsters need to know about the player. The player needs to know about items. Most importantly, the display needs to know everything, and everything needs to be able to get input. I can''t figure it out... The only way it could work at all is if all the instances of classes were global variables and every class knew the name of every other class, hardcoded into it''s methods. But unless I misunderstand my books, this goes against all the principles of information hiding and encapsulation. If every class knows all about every other class, then what''s the point of using OOP at all? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

General and Gameplay Programming Programming

Started by Gwahir December 05, 2002 10:34 PM

19 comments, last by Gwahir 21 years, 4 months ago

Kylotan

10,510

December 08, 2002 11:26 AM

quote:Original post by Gwahir
The only problem I can see with this is if two of the inherited classes share a method name... From the examples in my books, things can get very messy very quickly.

But that is how the interface works... derived classes have the same method name, but slightly different behaviour. The idea is that the ''outside world'' only needs to know the interface (ie. the method name, defined in the base class) and the individual classes take care of the differences by executing the correct function for each object.

[ MSVC Fixes | STL | SDL | Game AI | Sockets | C++ Faq Lite | Boost | Asking Questions | Organising code files | My stuff ]

Can't find ANY info about how to get data from one part of an OOP to another.

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

Can't find ANY info about how to get data from one part of an OOP to another.

This topic is closed to new replies.

Popular Topics

Recommended Tutorials

Reticulating splines