deadalnix wrote:
That is totally broken design. The fact that mothership inherit from ship is a pretty good example of misusing inheritance. The fireMissle is useless unless you KNOW that you are manipulating a MotherShip, so you totally break all the abstraction the OOP could provide.
Other objects can contain references to MotherShip types directly, while the main update loop works with the base type. Or, perhaps more relevant, an object could execute "fire()" on a list of Ships, which MotherShip can be a part of because it IS a Ship, regardless if weather it can overwrite Ship's functions or not. I can't imagine a different way of defining this relationship short of inheriting from a common interface which would require duplicating the fire() function in both types (given that fire() is designed to ensure common behavior among all Ship types).
This is not a broken concept at all. I'm always open to different ideas, but I'm fairly surprised you're arguing this case. Being able to extend a type, even when the extensions are entirely additive, is a fundamental principle of OOP design.
