Relationship between game objects and components

[frostney]

Currently, there are a few software design-related problems in Lyria:

• Prefabs are just a scene (in fact, they do provide too much overhead currently as prefabs do have some events and methods that don't make sense in this context)
• Game objects and their relationship to other objects is non-existent
• Game objects have no purpose currently - it's easier to either to a prefab or write all the needed stuff in the scene itself
• Objects that should have GameObjects as its base (lyria/sprite) only exist as a shell

What I propose is the following structure:

• GameObjects have markup and code like scenes & prefabs (definition of an object)
• GameObjects can attach components to them
• Components only have code and no markup (logic for an object)
• Prefabs can attach GameObjects and Components to themselves
• Scenes can attach Prefabs and GameObjects to themselves
• GameObjects can bind to an object and load its default values from it
• Sprites would logically be a GameObject with a or multiple components attached to it
• It should be easy to interact with a GameObject from a container object (Prefabs, Scenes)

In my opinion, this helps to separate each aspect of Lyria and gives it a specific purpose. (And it resembles the entity-component pattern to a high degree.) Let's take a player as an example: Instead of it being a markup and code in every scene/prefab we need it to be, it would a GameObject and can be inserted in any number of scenes and prefabs reducing maintainability.

@Polooo2 I would really appreciate your feedback on this.

[Polooo2]

Sry for late answer.

I have the same opinion. In my experience you often need a prefab by several scenes and some "components" from several prefabs. Currently I often created small prefabs (e.g. slider elements or some ui element with minimal logic) to be used in "bigger" prefabs.

I would only change the structure a little bit:

• GameObjects a only a shell
• components are logic only (code)
• some other elements (templates?) are markup only
• a GameObject should consist of at least either one component or one template(?) or both and can combine some markup with some logic

Furthermore I think it would be nice if one component could be used by several GameObjects (same for template). It would create the possibility to have several GameObjects with similar functionality.