Example Entity Editors?

There is a great tutorial in one of GPG books that explains how to have a property map for the entities.
If you cant reach it, here's an advice. You should create a base class CEntity that has the ability to add private/protected members of the derived classses to the map and also have get/set methods their modifications. There are some great classes that you can use (boost::property_map or boost::multi_map, or plain simple std::map) for those purposes (also with boost::variant), or you can simply have a list of all possible basic types with pointers to the original data. There is a great tutorial on CodeProject about a property editing (I believe its in Property Map section) that allows you to do just that and track when the value has been changed.

Good luck.

Quote:

Original post by HellRiZZer There is a great tutorial in one of GPG books that explains how to have a property map for the entities. If you cant reach it, here's an advice. You should create a base class CEntity that has the ability to add private/protected members of the derived classses to the map and also have get/set methods their modifications. There are some great classes that you can use (boost::property_map or boost::multi_map, or plain simple std::map) for those purposes (also with boost::variant), or you can simply have a list of all possible basic types with pointers to the original data. There is a great tutorial on CodeProject about a property editing (I believe its in Property Map section) that allows you to do just that and track when the value has been changed. Good luck.

Thanks for the response :) However, I'm not too concerned with the actual implementation (for general entity properties I'm already using a custom property grid to input files and lists and so on).

Also, the problem isn't editing properties of an entity .. it's editing and setting up game state transitions.

For example..

Entity is idle by default. If entity gets a 'run' event, entity switches into 'run' game state (with accompanying script or compiled code to make it move forward). While running, entity might decide to jump, which takes it into a jump state. Then I place in the restriction that says an enemy can only attack from idle and run state, but not from jumping.

Keeping track of these states are important and can get very cumbersome when done in code. For simple entities it's easy to express the restrictions in code, but for more complex entities debugging all the state changes is a horrible p.i.t.a.

I'm thinking I could take GameMaker's 'interface' of tying events to objects (entities), and add a new 'command' that says "Set State : Jump", and have a whole new event list for that particular state.

That way I can differentiate between getting the 'attack' command from an idle state vs a jumping state. Although this abstracts it away from code .. for sufficiently complex entities even this might get confusing.

Graf