Question

I have a bunch of different npcs. They all have different properties and different AI, so I have made a separate class for each type, and derive it from a base class Entity. I want to make it so that I can assign an ID to each type of Entity, so I can just call CreateNewEntity(int id, Vector2 position). How would I do this? I also have a feeling that I’m designing this badly. Is that true

Answer 1

There are a couple of ways you could do this.
You could create an Attribute that will give the type some metadata such as ID
e.g.

public class RenderableEntity{
}

[EntityTypeAttribute(Name = "Wizard"]
public class Wizard : RenderableEntity{
}

you could then bundle them all in a namespace or a logical container and create the type as follows
pseudo:

//Create Entity
//Type Name
string entityName = "Wizard";

//Get the Type
from the namespace where the type has the custom attribute applied to it. Get the type

//Activator.Create(typeof(TheWizardType))

The other is that you could just get the Type where the name matches the string you passed into your create method.