Designing generic render/graphics component in C++?
- by s73v3r
I'm trying to learn more about Component Entity systems. So I decided to write a Tetris clone. I'm using the "style" of component-entity system where the Entity is just a bag of Components, the Components are just data, a Node is a set of Components needed to accomplish something, and a System is a set of methods that operates on a Node. All of my components inherit from a basic IComponent interface.
I'm trying to figure out how to design the Render/Graphics/Drawable Components. Originally, I was going to use SFML, and everything was going to be good. However, as this is an experimental system, I got the idea of being able to change out the render library at will. I thought that since the Rendering would be fairly componentized, this should be doable. However, I'm having problems figuring out how I would design a common Interface for the different types of Render Components. Should I be using C++ Template types?
It seems that having the RenderComponent somehow return it's own mesh/sprite/whatever to the RenderSystem would be the simplest, but would be difficult to generalize. However, letting the RenderComponent just hold on to data about what it would render would make it hard to re-use this component for different renderable objects (background, falling piece, field of already fallen blocks, etc).
I realize this is fairly over-engineered for a regular Tetris clone, but I'm trying to learn about component entity systems and making interchangeable components. It's just that rendering seems to be the hardest to split out for me.
