Flexible Decorator Pattern?

Posted by Omar Kooheji on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Omar Kooheji
Published on 2008-10-09T09:19:26Z Indexed on 2010/03/24 23:33 UTC
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I was looking for a pattern to model something I'm thinking of doing in a personal project and I was wondering if a modified version of the decorator patter would work.

Basicly I'm thinking of creating a game where the characters attributes are modified by what items they have equiped. The way that the decorator stacks it's modifications is perfect for this, however I've never seen a decorator that allows you to drop intermediate decorators, which is what would happen when items are unequiped.

Does anyone have experience using the decorator pattern in this way? Or am I barking up the wrong tree?

Clarification

To explain "Intermediate decorators" if for example my base class is coffe which is decorated with milk which is decorated with sugar (using the example in Head first design patterns) milk would be an intermediate decorator as it decorates the base coffee, and is decorated by the sugar.

Yet More Clarification :)

The idea is that items change stats, I'd agree that I am shoehorning the decorator into this. I'll look into the state bag. essentially I want a single point of call for the statistics and for them to go up/down when items are equiped/unequiped.

I could just apply the modifiers to the characters stats on equiping and roll them back when unequiping. Or whenever a stat is asked for iterate through all the items and calculate the stat.

I'm just looking for feedback here, I'm aware that I might be using a chainsaw where scissors would be more appropriate...

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