How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State Machine

Re:How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State Machine by psyc on Monday February 26, 2018 @11:32PM (#16471093)

I agree with you up to a point, and that point is when the game becomes "large" in the number of rules and entity varieties. Eric is approaching this very much like a compiler developer. We always have the option of 'lofting' concepts out of the code and into types. E.g. we usually start by writing:

  int a = 1;
  int b = 1;
  int c = a + b;

And we have the option of writing, alternatively:

  class Integer { ... }
  class Operation { ... }
  class Expression { ... }

Or something 'meta' like that. The upside is that it's flexible, powerful, expressive to turn code into data. The downside is that it's slower, and there's a whole extra system to maintain.

However, in my experience as a game developer, past a certain large size, pretty much all systems seem to want to converge to Lippert's solution. You want to be able to put the entity data and the rules into tables, and not have to edit code to change the game rules. For small games, not worth it. But for large games, and also for game engines that aspire to be generic, it makes everything a lot easier.

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Re:How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State Machine by badsectoracula on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @07:45AM (#16472891)

I wanted to stick with the language side this that is what the original article was about. But yes, in large games you wouldn't do all that stuff in C#/C++/etc, you'll most likely use a data driven approach. However this can still be put at the gameplay side of the engine to provide the base. For example if you look at the mod tools for RPG engines like Aurora, Creation Kit and REDEngine you'll see that they have inherent knowledge about base item types like armor, monster, etc, but they rely on data for the specific items (and scripts for the exceptional behavior). The easiest to see that is with the Creation Kit based games like Skyrim since it gives you a nice GUI to create/edit each different item type.

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Re:How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the State Machine by professor_plum on Tuesday February 27, 2018 @11:01AM (#16474598)

Thanks for helping to qualify when the proposed solution starts to become appropriate. I'd still really need a solid example of when this starts to be beneficial. Could anyone oblige?

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