The importance of being lazy!

I will soon code a LOT, actually I’ve started already behind this scene but before I make it official and show it all to you I want to pull the breaks and look in the rear window so I got all of you with me. Why’s that? Because if you don’t get the structure that’s in my head, a big part of the next upcoming code will be just a copy and paste experience and you’ll probably learn nothing so let’s take a look and let me explain some things for you. (naah you’re all smart, I’m just repeating it to understand it myself!)

Lets start with an Image:

If we start from the bottom we have actually already created some of these “components”. The interesting thing as that all the words down there but “MESH” starts with an ‘I’. It’s because we are focusing the Interface of that component. Creating an interface makes it so much easier to code a bigger project as I don’t have to worry about how many different “transformers” I need to make or how they will be implanted. I don’t even have to create fully functional classes. This is called to “code towards the interface”. For OOP-experienced coders this is basic material but somehow Actionscript has attracted a lot of designers into the coding world and haven’t until AS3 really faced this way of programming.

So, now lets say I create a lot of controllers, transformers, weapons and shots (which will be the physical ‘bullet’ fired from the gun) I can now extend the AUnit (abstract class) into a unique unit, eg. Defender and place one of each component types in there.

As AUnit now already have the public function transformUnit() and also checkCollisions() it means that I can have as many units on the scene as I want to, looking different, behaving differntly, is controlled differently but still will be exactly the same to handle for the main core engine. Eg. Lets create 3 different units:

var arUnits:Array = new Array()
var player:AUnit = new Defender()
var computer:AUnit = new Tank()
var LANgamer:AUnit = new Soldier()

arUnits.push(player)
arUnits.push(computer)
arUnits.push(LANgamer)

for each(tempUnit:AUnit in arUnits)
{
	tempUnit.transformUnit()
	tempUnit.checkCollisions()
}

This simple code above creates 3 different units but they are all typed AUnit (!) this means we can treat them exactly the same and loop through them but they will react differently depending on which components they have inside them. Great!  I don’t have to code a loop for each unit! I don’t have to code the management for each controller, nor for each weapon.  I just code how they will behave. Now that I feel that I’ve sorted this out a little more I will start working on those weapons and clean up the previous code so we can focus on the fun part in here.