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

[Benjamin Kaplan]

On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 9:04 PM, John Salerno <johnjsal at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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?
> --

I'm pretty sure he means that if the only difference between classes
is configuration (i.e. you aren't actually going to change code
between character classes, just base stats, growth rates, and a list
of available skills or something of that nature), then you should
store the configurations in a config file rather than making a new
class. So rather than having
class WizardCharacter(Character) :
    base_health = 50
    ...
class WarriorCharacter(Character) :
    base_health=70
    ...
You make a config file

--- characterclasses.ini ---
[Wizard]
base_health=50
[Warrior]
base_health=70

Then, when you make a new character, rather than doing a
WizardCharacter() or a WarriorCharacter(), you do a
Character(job='Wizard') and then look up the various defaults in your
config file. Doing it this way makes it trivial to add a new class. If
you want to use an old-fashioned INI file, you can use the
ConfigParser class to read them. If you want to nest attributes (for
instance, a list of sub-items), you'll probably want to go with XML
and ElementTree. I guess you can also use JSON (which uses a syntax
similar to Python's dictionaries) but I've never really tried to make
one of those by hand before so I'm not sure how well it will work out.