Power-up System: Implementation

[antfarmar]

Current Implementation

The current implementation of the power-up system is fairly basic. It's design (or lack thereof) was mostly an experiment in inheritance, abstract/virtual methods, and faking GameObject states like inactive.

• uses basic OOP principles of inheritance and overriding methods.
• each power-up script controls granting/denying ship components its respective power in custom overridden methods.
• this requires that each power-up remains active in the scene and gets/has component references.
• power-up objects are never inactive, but are simply disabled/invisible.
  • i.e. only Colliders & Renderers are disabled.
  • this behaviour eliminates multiple instantiations/destroys, and can work with other designs.

A Better Implementation: Use Events

A better design would make use of more advanced techniques like _Events_. The power-up system is a perfect use case.

• Colliding with a power-up would fire off a respective power-up event.
• Ship script components that the power-up affects would be listeners/subscribers to the event.
• implemented using either delegate events or Unity's event system.

[antfarmar]

Fire Powerup Stacking

Could stack firing powerups using a delegate multicast on the Shoot() methods.