Time to Reflect

It's time to start putting some enemies into the game.

This raises some questions about what exactly is the best way to do that.

The basic components:

• Enemy spawner - creates enemies from one of several "prototypes"
• Enemy path - curve enemy should follow
• Path chooser - binds one of multiple possible paths when an enemy spawns

 I've been trying to figure out the best way to implement this in the component system. 

Ideally, each of the path components would exist separately from the enemy object, so they only need to be created once.  The Bezier curve component does a lot of pre-tessellation of the curve that I don't want to duplicate every time an enemy is spawned, so it can't live directly inside each enemy instance.

I already have a fairly decent system for binding objects by name, so I can probably use that.  The question is whether to create a unique GameObject for each path and link to the GameObject, or to embed a set of the BezierPathComponents in a single GameObject.  The system for handling multiple components of the same time in a single GameObject is slightly underdeveloped, but this is a pretty obvious way to create "sets" of paths.

The next thing then would probably be to create some sort of "chooser" component that can select a particular component at random and plug it into the GameObject.

Along this line, I've also been wondering about the best way to animate values in certain components.


For instance, in the spawner itself, there is a Rate value that specifies the number of GameObjects to spawn per second.  Ideally, I would like to animate this value on a curve so I can essentially turn it on and off at different points in the level.  I would typically have changed the Rate variable from a float (effectively constant once the object is spawned) to a different type that can either bind to a curve or script or something similar and be evaluated each time it is referenced.

I'm thinking this is the wrong way to do things.

What I want is a separate component that animates the value and writes it into the Rate variable directly.  The advantages to this are that any variable can potentially be animated, and there is no overhead for variables that are not animated.

The trick is to do the data binding properly.  I don't really have any sort of reflection available, so I don't have any data-driven way to bind to a specific member variable by name.  I either need to add that or find a good place to add custom code that binds the source and target together. 

I'm not exactly enthused about doing either of those :) but some sort of reflection interface seems like the "correct" choice.  Ideally I could hook that up to the construction code that pulls things out of the attribute files too, but it will have to be introduced piecemeal, because I'm not going back to put it everywhere today.