I currently have an object that is composed from several simple objects. Each simple object is used to render a particular portion of the larger object as a whole. Think of it as building a 3D structure such as a house for rendering to the screen:
- House
- Walls
- Roof
- Windows
- Doors
Now, in most cases, we can just render a model and the work is done, but in this case I am essentially building the model from scratch. Each piece can be built using more simplistic objects already present such as Mesh. This however requires constructing the vertices and indices of each fundamental piece of the house.
The way the current code is set up I currently build each part of the house within the House class which prevents reusability (which isn't really too big of a concern here), and definitely makes the House class very hard to understand and maintain without spending half the day analyzing it. As a basic example:
public class House : RenderObject {
private Mesh[] walls;
private Mesh[] roof;
private Mesh[] windows;
private Mesh[] doors;
public void Initialize() {
// Build walls.
// Build roof.
// Build windows.
// Build doors.
}
}
My first thought is that the initialize method can be refactored into separate methods to handle building each piece; but, this conflicts with the thought that occurs simultaneously.
Should each piece of the House object be its own class?
- This would improve:
- Maintainability
- Readability
- Reusability
My concern is that perhaps moving each piece to its own class wouldn't really be worth the effort if it is never really reused, but then I begin arguing with myself along the lines of perhaps it could be, this is a public API after all.
