Component-based Game Object System Research

Since the late1990s, component-based software engineering is a very popular area of research. However, most of them are applied to develop business-oriented information management systems, and focus on addressing issues such as distributed security and transaction-based business logic. Component-based development methodology for the field of virtual reality and video game is little aware and understood by developers. It is still in the development stage.For the strong demand of component-based development methods in virtual reality and video game field, this thesis presents a data-driven and component-based game entity system——CBES (Component-Based Entity System). The CBES framework uses a component-based architecture and transparently process game entities and components in the game. Finally we can build the entire game world and game logic with game components and the corresponding entity systems in CBES. The study of the subject content and innovation is mainly reflected in the following four points:1. Explore and analyze the problems and shortcomings of the traditional inheritance-based object-oriented methods in the process of developing a game.2. Totally analyze the existing design ideas behind the component-based object system, explore some current component-based game object system frameworks, analyze and compare the degree of code reuse, scalability and runtime performance of these systems. At the same time we specify the reasons why this method is superior to the traditional object-oriented and why it is particularly suitable for the development of video games.3. For the traditional component-based game development technology, a data-driven and component-based entity system CBES is proposed. It transparently handles game entities and components. Using CBES will not only reduces the complexity of building video games and virtual reality systems, shorten the development cycle, but also can improve the reusability of code. 4. A iOS game prototype is built on top of CBES and the open source game engine cocos2d-x which verifies the feasibility of the framework and the run-time performance. Meanwhile, the code reuse and scalability of the framework is analyzed. In addition, because of the CBES is built with standard C++, it can work with most of the existing game engines, thereby it greatly enhance the applicable range of the CBES.In the end, the thesis gives a summary of research work. It points out the CBES design shortcomings and inadequacies. At the same time, it points out the direction of future research work. There are37figures,4tables and62references.