Summary

In this chapter, we have explored many different ways to create a game object. We have seen the problems with using monolithic objects or large inheritance trees. We now know that neither of those approaches scale when creating a large game. They both suffer from the problem of giant bloated classes and dependencies in our code.

We have also seen the flexibility that using the Component Object Model can bring to our games. It lets programmers focus on writing new code, while allowing designers to use that code to create new object types, even at runtime. Since we can now define objects completely in a file, we can create a tool that will let our designer, or even players, make completely new objects, or possibly a new game.

We also briefly touched on the performance issues related to using the Component Object Model. While these can be a problem, it is much better to focus on algorithmic optimizations then very low-level CPU instruction optimizations. We will revisit these problems...