What's the best way to write this base class?

[John Salerno]

On Jun 19, 8:52 pm, Chris Kaynor <ckay... at zindagigames.com> wrote:

> Having a character class (along with possibly player character, non-player character, etc), make sense; however you probably want to make stuff like health, resources, damage, and any other attributes not be handles by any classes or inheritance in order to allow you to make such data-driven (ie, read from a file). Doing so makes the game much more extendable: using classes, you are likely limited to 5 or 'combinations and a few developers (plus, any designers need to know programming).
>
> A basic way to determine between using subclasses over a data driven approach is: is there significantly different back-end behavior or merely attribute differences.

Can you give a basic example of how this data-driven approach would
work? You don't have to provide any code, just a description would be
helpful. Such as, do I create a data file per character, and then have
each character instance read/write to that file? Is it good to have so
many files open at once, or would they only need to be read, closed,
then opened again at the end to write?