When to use components

[indygoof]

@John Alcatraz;238843

When exactly do components make sense to use?
…
So Zak put something like a “2DMovementComponent” on the enemy and also on the player. But the exact same thing I can achieve by just creating a blueprint actor like “Ship” which contains the movement stuff and let “enemy” and “player” both use “Ship” as parent.

Every enemy would inherit from “enemy”, and inside of enemy the score stuff is done and every enemy would have a variable like scoreAmount, so I don’t need any ScoreComponent.

Same with “TakeDamageComponent”, this stuff would be inside “Ship” since every ship can take damage, and if not I would let every ship have a boolean like “bCanTakeDamage” which would be on by default and I could set it manually in every blueprint which inherits from “Ship”.

“HurtsToTouch”, well, same! Put it into “Ship” and if necessary make it possible to disable with boolean.

Yes you can do that. And then you end up with a monolithic gigantic thing that somehow does everything and is only controlled through a few checkboxes, and then suddenly you need some functionality or changes in one part that breaks the whole system.

A very nice description of the downsides of pure inheritance is this one.

Though you should actually always think about what your really need and what makes sense, and use a combination of inheritance and components.

Cheers,