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Carsten
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Happy New Year!

Post by Carsten » 2013-01-02, 18:49

I wish you all a good and happy new year 2013 and all the best wishes!

:groupwave1: :groupwave2:


As things have been very exciting for those following our development branches in Git, but outwardly a bit calm for those who don't, let me take the opportunity for a brief review of recent developments, and an outlook on upcoming changes:

Better game development

Early in the second half of 2012, we have started to focus our efforts on improving the experience for game programmers, that is, for those nice folks who are responsible for the programming part in the development of a new game that uses the Cafu Engine.
In the past, our game code has grown as the features of the Cafu Engine grew, and eventually we had to realize that customizing the DeathMatch example code for other needs, or even adding new features to it, was more complicated than it should be.

As a result, we started to fix the situation:
Improvements to and a large redesign of our game/entity code was a very important first step that brought a great relief almost immediately. The related ticket #113 is still not closed however -- we have plans for further changes.

In parallel, we found that the time was ripe for switching our version control system from Subversion to Git.
The switch turned out to consume a lot of time and efforts, but as I've pointed out in my migration protocols (Part 1 and Part 2), the benefits especially for our users are so great that it was all worth it -- and such improvements were on our agenda anyways.

Component Systems

And finally, in the midst of all this, our new forum member midix suggested the introduction of "entity systems" or "component systems" to the Cafu Engine. I have to admit that I was at first highly skeptical to the idea, which essentially is a different way to organize and manage all the features that game entities have:

Previously, the classic class inheritance hierarchy of game entities was the main place and instrument to organize and implement the features of the game entities. It turned out however (not only for Cafu, but also for many other game engines as well), that such class hierarchies are very inflexible when it comes to reusing or recombining features in circumstances that are even slightly different than those originally foreseen.

With "component systems", the proposal is to remove the entire game entity inheritance hierarchy, except for the root class, and instead to implement features as "components": Each component implements exactly one feature, and each feature is implemented in exactly one component. A game entity is then provided with the list of components (or features) that is should have. Of course, each component can be configured by the user: conveniently with a nice user interface in the graphical map editor, or with powerful scripting commands, or an arbitrary mix of both.

As I said, I was very skepical about it, but I could also see how a component system would improve our situation and help our mission to make game development and programming with Cafu so much easier and more flexible. And then I realized that we not only have game entity hierarchies in Cafu, but also GUI window hierarchies in our 2D and 3D GUIs, and I could see an analogy in both: The GUI windows were a much smaller hierarchy than our existing hierarchy of game entities, but they too would much benefit from the perspectives of a component system -- and as the hierarchy was so much smaller, they were the perfect test case!

So my plan was to try out and implement a component system for our GUI windows first, gather experience, then evaluate the results. If everything worked well and our expectations were met, only then implement the component system for the game entities as well.

Well, today, after only a relatively short while of working on it, and while still being in the middle of implementing the component system for GUI windows, I can already say that I'm very very pleased with the intermediate results. Things look highly promising already, and 95% of the efforts that I've spent so far will immediately be useful again when we decide to extend the component system approach to game entities as well! It's really difficult to explain that all in proper thoroughness right now, bit if you're interested in the details, check out the gui-component-system branch in our Git repository.

In summary, I'm very happy with the current perspective, and very much looking forward to the new year!
:wohow:
Best regards,
Carsten
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