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[Will Vale]

The component analogy is a good one - the first thing I thought was "can I use my existing gameplay components to do this?"

[muku]

Exactly, I think that's where I was coming from with this. I experimented with components a while back for my Commonplace Book entry, and though I wasn't entirely satisfied at that time with my approach, I found the concept intriguing. So this time I kept the scope smaller and went at it in a bottom-up instead of a top-down approach, so to speak, and it was quite a success.

[Robotacon]

So this time I kept the scope smaller and went at it in a bottom-up instead of a top-down approach, so to speak, and it was quite a success.

Do you mean that you made small components that you combine into bigger ones as apposed to big components that you break up in smaller ones? That's how I'm working with everything now. I haven't got a real target for anything, I know I'm going to need this and that and slowly different game mechanics are growing out of the game engine. My plan is to spawn several game ideas that I then will work on top-down all within the same game engine.

[muku]

With my previous attempt, I tried to break entities up into individual components, making position, visual representation etcetera all separate components. It did work, but the way I implemented it didn't feel completely right.

This time, I had a more monolithic (though very lightweight) entity class fleshed out before introducing components, and using them only for a specific purpose: to control how entities move and behave. This seemed to feel more "right", probably stemming from my limited experience with the component model.

[Robotacon]

Today I disabled the player object and hooked up the HUD to follow one of the AI controlled creatures instead. Something about doing that made me feel real good, like I gave life to that guy.

EDIT: This is the most fun I've had in ages! It's like playing Lemmings! 

[increpare]

finally got about to reading up this thread.  i like the approach.  i'm trying to work out a plan for a behaviour system myself at the moment; though i think i'm going to go for a more signal/message-based approach [haven't quite figured out how it's going to work yet though hmm ].

awesome, thanks! I didn't know DMD supported mac.. maybe we can finally use D!!

let me know if you tried this and got it to work; back some months ago i was sufficiently intrigued to give it a try, but it turned out the version then current wasn't quite working right on osx for whatever reason.