I guess I've decided that I really like event handlers. I may be suffering a bit from analysis paralysis, but I'm concerned about making my design unwieldy or running into some other unforeseen consequence to my design decisions.
My game engine currently does basic sprite-based rendering with a panning overhead camera. My design looks a bit like this:
SceneHandler
Contains a list of classes that implement the SceneListener interface (currently only Sprites). Calls render() once per tick, and sends onCameraUpdate(); messages to SceneListeners.
InputHandler
Polls the input once per tick, and sends a simple "onKeyPressed" message to InputListeners. I have a Camera InputListener which holds a SceneHandler instance and triggers updateCamera(); events based on what the input is.
AgentHandler
Calls default actions on any Agents (AI) once per tick, and will check a stack for any new events that are registered, dispatching them to specific Agents as needed.
So I have basic sprite objects that can move around a scene and use rudimentary steering behaviors to travel. I've gotten onto collision detection, and this is where I'm not sure the direction my design is going is good. Is it a good practice to have many, small event handlers? I imagine going the way I am that I'd have to implement some kind of CollisionHandler.
Would I be better off with a more consolidated EntityHandler which handles AI, collision updates, and other entity interactions in one class? Or will I be fine just implementing many different event handling subsystems which pass messages to each other based on what kind of event it is? Should I write an EntityHandler which is simply responsible for coordinating all these sub event handlers?
I realize in some cases, such as my InputHandler and SceneHandler, those are very specific types of events. A large portion of my game code won't care about input, and a large portion won't care about updates that happen purely in the rendering of the scene. Thus I feel my isolation of those systems is justified. However, I'm asking this question specifically approaching game logic type events.
