I'm building a turn based RPG game as a hobby. The design is becoming increasingly complicated and confusing, and I think I may have tendency to over-engineer simple things. Can anybody please check my problems-solutions and point me to more elegant solution?
Every item/character/room is a separate object. Items/characters need to have references to room they are in, and room needs to have a list of references to items/characters that are contained within. I decided to use weak references. That way I can destroy object by deleting it, I don't have to destroy all references as well. In each object's __init__() that object is added to game_object list, and in each __del__() they are removed from game_object list. This mechanism keeps them safe from garbage collector. How pythonic is this design? In turn-based games, the order of action execution in battle can give unfair advantage to players. For example, if player's arm is crippled before his action is executed, he would do less damage. To offset this, I first execute all players' actions and calculate effects in first pass, then apply the effects in second pass. The effect can be health decrease by 15HP, item pick-up, 30p experience gain, etc. This means the player deals the same amount of damage no matter what happens to him in that turn. The difficult part is keeping track of various effects. I had to make separate class for various types of effects (ChangeAttributeEffect, GetItemEffect, LooseItemEffect). Each class stores weak reference to target object and has apply() method that applies the effect to object. I'm not satisfied with this as it's limiting, error-prone and uses metaprogramming. Is there a design pattern that would remember changes to an object, and apply them later? Sorry for the wall of text. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
