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I have been reading this article: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/component.html which describes how a game object should be constructed out of components. It also encourages the decoupling of components, which brings up a problem with input, collision detection, and things that cause events to be triggered.

If I have a game object, which is a player and this player has 3 components; PlayerSoundManager, PlayerCollisionDetection, and PlayerStateManager, how would I go about making sure they have no references to each other? If PlayerCollisionDetection detects that a player should die, messages should be sent to the other two components telling the player to play a death sound, and change it's state.

Would it be wrong to put collision detection methods throughout all components and perform each reaction separately?

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1 Answer 1

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No, but it will just be bad manners to write the same thing in every scripts and it can be a pain to debug if you have lots of function of collision detection in a lot of other scripts.

You can use the method SendMessage() to communicate between scripts (or inside a script). You can read its documentation here

e.g

if(player.health == 0){
  gameObject.SendMessage(playerStateManager.changeState, 'dead');
  //where playerStateManager is a reference to your class PlayerStateManager
  gameObject.SendMessage(playerSoundManager.play, 'deathSound');
  //where playerSoundManageris a reference to your class PlayerSoundManager
}
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