I've been scouring information on Entity-Component-System designs for weeks to try to figure out how to implement it in C++, and there are lots of wonderful explanations for different aspects of it, but the one thing everybody seems to overlook in examples is how you actually access whatever the data members are in a specific derived Component class when all you have is a list of base class pointers in your Entity. I'm still new to programming in general, so if that's something that's "common knowledge," it's not common enough for all levels of skill.

The only way I can think of is to have a virtual function that returns an enum for the type of component and then cast it to that, but that seems like a hack job, and I can't help but feel like there must be a better way.