Separating Player to Character and Player (extends Character)

[Diapolo10]

I'm not sure why I didn't do this originally, but the Player class should be divided to a more general Character class and have the Player class simply extend it. I'm still thinking if a separate Enemy class is necessary, although one could potentially be used as a shorthand for a Character with aggression enabled.

[sbordeyne]

The general way to do it is having an Entity class, that defines health, inventory, stats etc, have an EntityPlayer class that defines every player-related attributes and have every enemy inherit the Entity class.

[j9ac9k]

@Dogeek would the entity class be effectively a metaclass?

[Diapolo10]

That is actually a valid point. 🤔

[j9ac9k]

@Diapolo10 can I ask why you want to break up the two classes? I mean, do you see see the Player class inheriting from one of multiple Character classes (or vice versa?).

What do you envision to be class attributes of a Player object vs. what do you think would be a class attribute of a Character object?

[Diapolo10]

Well, what I'm thinking right now is basically that Character refers to any entity that a developer might want to give their own stats, whereas Player is a more specialised Character that is only controlled by the player and has access to, say, a quest list or a personal item storage (bank?).

The reason Character still has access to Inventory would be that it'd be easier to develop a "realistic" looting mechanic, in which an NPC wearing armour or weapons would drop them (or randomly some of them) on death. In fact, incorporating the LevelMixin into the Character class is another idea of mine, in which NPCs could potentially level-up during battle as well. Of course, this would be an optional feature, and I may end up creating a new class just for that.

[j9ac9k]

@Diapolo10 correct me if I'm mistaken, but you envision something like

Character

• has some amount of health
• has some combination of skills/abilities
• has X amount of assets

a Player, is a Character, but in addition to having everything the character has, t also has

• current quest line
• assets that the character is currently in physical possession of
• history of passed quests/objectives completed

So would it be fair to say that the difference between a Character and a Player is that a Character can be a NPC, where-as a player is the object that has everything a character has, plus whatever attributes would be needed for that Character to be controlled by a human?

[Diapolo10]

@j9ac9k More or less, yes.