Question

I need to display some stats, numbers, and graphs about various game objects on the screen.

(examples: camera position, field of view, frames per second, fill rate, number of objects culled, etc… )

Currently any object which wants to be graphed or displayed implements an interface along these lines:

public interface IGraphable
{
    float GraphableValue { get; set; }
}

Then that object can be sent to a graph component to be displayed. This has some obvious drawbacks like not being able to graph 2 different pieces of data which belong to the same class.

What I want is a way to pass a pointer to where the data is located or a pointer to a function which knows how to return the data instead of passing the object to the display component.

I believe that this is what delegates are for but I don’t understand how to use them in this context (Actually I don’t understand them very well at all). Also, is there another (smarter/better) way to do this?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I have decided to do the following:

public class GraphComponent
{
   private Func<flaot> _function;

   public GraphComponent(Func<flaot> function, ...)
   { ... }
}

This allows me to specify how the data is retrieved by writing something like this:

FPSComponent fpsc = new FPSComponent();    
GraphComponent fpsg = new GraphComponent(delegate() { return fpsc.ApproximateFPS; }, ...);