I have been looking at game engine design (specifically focused on 2d game engines, but also applicable to 3d games), and am interested in some information on how to go about it. I have heard that many engines are moving to a component based design nowadays rather than the traditional deep-object hierarchy.
Do you know of any good links with information on how these sorts of designs are often implemented? I have seen evolve your hierarchy, but I can't really find many more with detailed information (most of them just seem to say "use components rather than a hierarchy" but I have found that it takes a bit of effort to switch my thinking between the two models).
Any good links or information on this would be appreciated, and even books, although links and detailed answers here would be preferred.
Update 2013-01-07: If you want to see a good mix of component-based game engine with the (in my opinion) superior approach of reactive programming take a look at the V-Play engine. It very well integrates QTs QML property binding functionality.
We did some research on CBSE in games at our university and I collected some material over the years:
CBSE in games literature:
A very good and clean example of a component-based game-engine in C# is the Elephant game framework.
If you really want to know what components are read: Component-based Software Engineering! They define a component as:
A software component is a software element that conforms to a component model and can be independently deployed and composed without modification according to a composition standard.
A component model defines specific interaction and composition standards. A component model implementation is the dedicated set of executable software elements required to support the execution of components that conform to the model.
A software component infrastructure is a set of interacting software components designed to ensure that a software system or subsystem constructed using those components and interfaces will satisfy clearly defined performance specifications.
My opinions after 2 years of experience with CBSE in games thought are that object-oriented programming is simply a dead-end. Remember my warning as you watch your components become smaller and smaller, and more like functions packed in components with a lot of useless overhead. Use functional-reactive programming instead. Also take a look at my fresh blog post (which lead me to this question while writing it :)) about Why I switched from component-based game engine architecture to FRP.
CBSE in games papers:
CBSE in games web-links (sorted by relevancy):