XianForce's Blog

So maybe you noticed, I changed the blog template. I got sick of the dark theme of the last one, so I chose one that was a bit lighter.

Anyways, the current ideas rambling around in my head are regarding Players and Weapons.

First of all, I'm now using a position vector + width/height variables instead of a rect, which makes a few things a bit simpler.

Also, I've removed the IDs from Entities. Seeing as I'm using a list (No random iteration) to hold the entities, the ID would become virtually useless, and would serve no purpose.



Anyways, so onto the rambling thoughts. So I'm at a friend's house right now, and don't have access to any IDE, and I don't feel like downloading one on his computer. He's playing Call of Duty MW2 at the moment, and I'm rambling on =D.

So with players, I definitely want to make it at least two player co-op, but I may add more. To do this, I wanted to make it quite easy to create player control schemes. In my other games, I simply hard coded the different controls in, and it wasn't the slightest bit graceful.

To accomplish this, I'm going to have the player hold 5 SDLKeys, 4 for the standard directions, and the 5th for shooting.

I'll of course have some keys blocked such as ESC and 'p' (which will be used for exiting and pausing). So with that I'll be sitting pretty.

The other thing I've really been thinking about is the WeaponSystem, and how it will work. I've decided that all Entities will be registered into the EntitySystem. The EntitySystem will Update and Render everything. Alongside the EntitySystem will be the PlayerSystem, which will handle input for any players. The WeaponSystem will be invoked via the PlayerSystem or AI. When invoked (e.g. when player or enemy decides to shoot), the WeaponSystem will initialize the bullets, based on a flag. This flag will dictate what type of weapon that Actor currently holds, and will create the correct bullets/weapon accordingly. Then the bullets themselves will be updated/rendered via the EntitySystem.


So I'm really excited for this, since everything seems to be falling into place nicely =D!