The title is a little obscure, but I'm trying to find out if there's an easier, more extendable way of going about creating objects. The situation is this: I have an object that generates planes at random. Currently, it only generates one type of plane -- EnemyPlane. Now, EnemyPlane makes a great generic class and what I'd like to do is make a few of its members virtual and have subclasses of EnemyPlane, which will create planes with different behaviors. There's a problem, though: ideally, I'll have several subclasses of EnemyPlane (as an example, let's say I have AccurateEnemyPlane which shoots bullets aimed at the player instead of straight down the screen, or MissileEnemyPlane which fires missiles instead of bullets, etc). Now, my Generator class needs to be able to create these planes in a more or less random manner, and I was hoping that there might be a better way of doing this than my first thought: Not only is doing this tedious, it seems rather unextendable. If I wanted to add a new plane type, I'd have to manually edit the code every time. Any suggestions on how to avoid this? Or should I just bite the bullet and go for it anyway? Thanks!

I think the easiest way to do this would be to use the random number generator functionality of whatever language you're using.

What's the language? Perhaps we can provide you some resources. If you're using C++ for example, head over here:
http://www.fredosaurus.com/notes-cpp/misc/random.html

Basically, you can generate a random number, and if it's within a certain range you select one type of plane over another.

So the switch would be similar, but instead of determining the type on the plane's internal ID you could determine it based on a randomly generated number. Whatever it chooses, you make a new instance and place it in the world.

Hopefully this helps. Let us know what you're using and we can point you to some more specific solutions for your particular programming language.

Sneftel's right. I think what you're looking for is something similar to the composite pattern. Make weapons objects, targeting logic objects, propulsion objects, etc. Then, allow a single plane object to be able to have these different components.

Composition sounds like it's exactly what I'm looking for, but I'm a little fuzzy on how to go about implementing it.

So I should have a concrete class called EnemyPlane, and then EnemyPlane will have pointers to pure virtual classes (which are generic in nature, like WeaponSystem, EngineType, etc), which are then subclasses into concrete classes?

Then composition is a matter of creating instances of the subclasses?









Is that roughly the correct way of doing it?

That's pretty much what I'm getting at. Going about it this way, you can add weapon, engine and AI components without ever having to change your EnemyPlane class.

There's many ways you can go about this depending on what your needs are. I'd imagine that you want each plane type to be rendered differently so a single concrete EnemyPlane class may not be the best solution. One solution may be to have different child classes of EnemyPlace that set their pointers to the correct objects upon initialization. Another approach may be to make them more data-driven (which may also add a lot of unnecessary complexity). Using factory methods may help as well but, like I said, it all depends on your needs. There's no need to make things more complicated than necessary. At least going this route should allow you flexability.

Actually, I think this will do quite nicely :)

Thanks for the help.