How could components communicate effectively with each other?

Question

I'm designing a component-based system and everything works well, but a critical feature is missing and that is to be able to obtain a type of component from within a class of type Object, whereof this class can be added/removed components. In the Object class there exists a vector of components thus:

vector<Component*> pComponents;

And in the Component class, a Component has to have a name. So, a component such as Drawable would be called like so:

pPlayer->addComponent(new Drawable("Drawable"));

And that's all that's required for the player to be drawable. Now this is the problem: when it comes to adding loads of components that rely on other components, is there a settlement in how components communicate with one another?

Currently, in my Game class (which is not of type Object, although I might have it derive from Object albeit not sure if that's a good design decision) I have this code in the update function:

void Game::update()
{
    pPlayer->update(0);

    pSpriteLoader->getSprite()->move(pPlayer->getVelocity());
}

I'm using SFML2 solely because it's easy to use for the 2D graphics. The player update function calls the components' respective update functions. And the sprite loader is also a component and it is in charge of handling the loading of sprites through textures/images that can be read from file or memory. If I were to omit this line of code then the sprite would not be able to appear moving on the screen. As you can see, it's odd that pPlayer has a getVelocity() function and it's because I haven't moved all the physics stuff into its own component. What is dreading is that once I have moved the physics stuff out of the Player class into a Physical component class, how can I get these components to communicate with each other without having to resort to the lines of code ascribed above?

My solution is to create a component manager which registers each component and any component that requires another component will have to consult with this component manager without having to do so directly. Would this be a viable solution, and how can I proceed with the logic of such a component manager then?

Answer 1

Well, I suppose you would start by designing a messaging system.

It appears that you want to heavily decouple code and create components as much as possible. This is fine, I suppose, but the answer to having dependencies without coupling is probably something among the lines of message passing.

Say you need an Achievement system. This is a perfect example of a system that needs to stick its hand into as many nooks and crannies as possible in order to allow for the greatest flexibility in designing achievements. But how would you be able to stick your hand into, say, the Physics, AI, and Input system all at the same time and not write spaghetti code? The answer would be to put listeners on event queues and then run them by certain criteria based on the contents of the messages.

So for each component, you might want to inherit a common message sending/receiving component, possibly with generics, in order to send data messages. For example, say you shoot a laser in a FPS game. The laser will most likely make a sound, and the laser will most likely need an animation. You will probably want to send a message to the sound system to play a certain sound, and then send a message to the physics system or such to simulate the effects of the laser.

If you're interested, I have a really, really crude library for modeling a event system based on queues, listeners, and generic messages here: https://github.com/VermillionAzure/Flexiglass You might get some insight from fellow newbie code.

I really suggest taking a look at Boost.Signals2 or Boost.Asio as well. Knowledge of signals/networking can often help when designing communication systems, even if the system is just between game components.

Answer 2

I've recently been working on an entity-component system in SFML and came across the same problem.

Instead of creating some sort of messaging system that allows components to communicate with each other I ended up adding 'System' objects to the mix instead. This is another popular method that is often used when implementing component systems and it's the most flexible one that I've used so far.

• Entities are nothing more than collections of components
• Components are POD structs and have no methods (e.g. a PositionComponent would have nothing more than X and Y values)
• Systems update any entities that have the required components

For example, my 'MovementSystem' iterates through each of my entities and checks if they have a VelocityComponent and an InputComponent. If it does, it changes the velocity of the current entity according to the current key being pressed.

This removes the issue with components communicating with each other because now all you need to do is access/modify the data stored in the current entity's components.

There are a few different ways that you can work out whether or not the current entity has the required components - I'm using bitmasks. If you decide to do the same, I highly suggest you take a look at this post for a more thorough explanation of the method: https://gamedev.stackexchange.com/questions/31473/role-of-systems-in-entity-systems-architecture