Game Objects Talking To Each Other
What is a good way of dealing with objects and having them talk to each other?
Up until now all my games hobby/student have been small so this problem was generally solved in a rather ugly way, which lead to tight integration and circular dependencies. Which was fine for the size of projects I was doing.
However my projects have been getting bigger in size and complexity and now I want to start re-using code, and making my head a simpler place.
The main problem I have is generally along the lines of Player needs to know about the Map and so does the Enemy, this has usually descended into setting lots of pointers and having lots of dependencies, and this becomes a mess quickly.
I have thought along the lines of a message style system. but I cant really see how this reduces the dependencies, as I would still be sending the pointers everywhere.
PS: I guess this has been discussed before, but I don't know what its called just the need I have.
Answer
EDIT: Below I describe a basic event messaging system I have used over and over. And it occurred to me that both school projects are open source and on the web. You can find the second version of this messaging system (and quite a bit more) at http://sourceforge.net/projects/bpfat/ .. Enjoy, and read below for a more thorough description of the system!
I've written a generic messaging system and introduced it into a handful of games that have been released on the PSP as well as some enterprise level application software. The point of the messaging system is to pass only the data around that is needed for processing a message or event, depending on the terminology you want to use, so that objects do not have to know about each other.
A quick rundown of the list of objects used to accomplish this is something along the lines of:
struct TEventMessage
{
int _iMessageID;
}
class IEventMessagingSystem
{
Post(int iMessageId);
Post(int iMessageId, float fData);
Post(int iMessageId, int iData);
// ...
Post(TMessageEvent * pMessage);
Post(int iMessageId, void * pData);
}
typedef float(*IEventMessagingSystem::Callback)(TEventMessage * pMessage);
class CEventMessagingSystem
{
Init ();
DNit ();
Exec (float fElapsedTime);
Post (TEventMessage * oMessage);
Register (int iMessageId, IEventMessagingSystem* pObject, FObjectCallback* fpMethod);
Unregister (int iMessageId, IEventMessagingSystem* pObject, FObjectCallback * fpMethod);
}
#define MSG_Startup (1)
#define MSG_Shutdown (2)
#define MSG_PlaySound (3)
#define MSG_HandlePlayerInput (4)
#define MSG_NetworkMessage (5)
#define MSG_PlayerDied (6)
#define MSG_BeginCombat (7)
#define MSG_EndCombat (8)
And now a bit of an explanation. The first object, TEventMessage, is the base object to represent data sent by the messaging system. By default it will always have the Id of the message being sent so if you want to make sure you have received a message you were expecting you can (Generally I only do that in debug).
Next up is the Interface class that gives a generic object for the messaging system to use for casting while doing callbacks. Additionally this also provides an 'easy to use' interface for Post()ing different data types to the messaging system.
After that we have our Callback typedef, Simply put it expects an object of the type of the interface class and will pass along a TEventMessage pointer... Optionally you can make the parameter const but I've used trickle up processing before for things like stack debugging and such of the messaging system.
Last and at the core is the CEventMessagingSystem object. This object contains an array of callback object stacks (or linked lists or queues or however you want to store the data). The callback objects, not shown above, need to maintain (and are uniquely defined by) a pointer to the object as well as the method to call on that object. When you Register() you add an entry on the object stack under the message id's array position. When you Unregister() you remove that entry.
That is basically it. Now this does have the stipulation that everything needs to know about the IEventMessagingSystem and the TEventMessage object... but this object should Not be changing that often and only passes the parts of information that are vital to the logic dictated by the event being called. This way a player doesn't need to know about the map or the enemy directly for sending events off to it. A managed object can call an API to a larger system also, without needing to know anything about it.
For example: When an enemy dies you want it to play a sound effect. Assuming you have a sound manager that inherits the IEventMessagingSystem interface, you would set up a callback for the messaging system that would accept a TEventMessagePlaySoundEffect or something of that ilk. The Sound Manager would then register this callback when sound effects are enabled (or unregister the callback when you want to mute all sound effects for easy on/off abilities). Next, you would have the enemy object also inherit from the IEventMessagingSystem, put together a TEventMessagePlaySoundEffect object (would need the MSG_PlaySound for its Message ID and then the ID of the sound effect to play, be it an int ID or the name of the sound effect) and simply call Post(&oEventMessagePlaySoundEffect).
Now this is just a very simple design with no implementation. If you have immediate execution then you have no need to buffer the TEventMessage objects (What I used mostly in console games). If you are in a multi-threaded environment then this is a very well defined way for objects and systems running in separate threads to talk to each other, but you will want to preserve the TEventMessage objects so the data is available when processing.
Another alteration is for objects that only ever need to Post() data, you can create a static set of methods in the IEventMessagingSystem so they do not have to inherit from them (That is used for ease of access and callback abilities, not -directly- needed for Post() calls).
For all the people who mention MVC, it is a very good pattern, but you can implement it in so many different manners and at different levels. The current project I am working on professionally is an MVC setup about 3 times over, there is the global MVC of the entire application and then design wise each M V and C also is a self-contained MVC pattern. So what I have tried to do here is explain how to make a C that is generic enough to handle just about any type of M without the need to get into a View...
For example, an object when it 'dies' might want to play a sound effect.. You would make a struct for the Sound System like TEventMessageSoundEffect that inherits from the TEventMessage and adds in a sound effect ID (Be it a preloaded Int, or the name of the sfx file, however they are tracked in your system). Then all the object just needs to put together a TEventMessageSoundEffect object with the appropriate Death noise and call Post(&oEventMessageSoundEffect); object.. Assuming the sound is not muted (what you would want to Unregister the Sound Managers.
EDIT: To clarify this a bit in regards to the comment below: Any object to send or receive a message just needs to know about the IEventMessagingSystem interface, and this is the only object the EventMessagingSystem needs to know of all the other objects. This is what gives you the detachment. Any object who wants to receive a message simply Register(MSG, Object, Callback)s for it. Then when an object calls Post(MSG,Data) it sends that to the EventMessagingSystem via the interface it knows about, the EMS will then notify each registered object of the event. You could do a MSG_PlayerDied that other systems handle, or the player can call MSG_PlaySound, MSG_Respawn, etc to let things listening for those messages to act upon them. Think of the Post(MSG,Data) as an abstracted API to the different systems within a game engine.
Oh! One other thing that was pointed out to me. The system I describe above fits the Observer pattern in the other answer given. So if you want a more general description to make mine make a bit more sense, that is a short article that gives it a good description.
Hope this helps and Enjoy!