Inherit This

I really need to add inheritance of sorts to my World Weaver game engine. My demo game has far too much redundant definitions in it. For every door I have to rewrite a bunch of events, messages, and actions - or find a previous door and copy and paste. Inheritance will make this task much easier and changes to them all can be done in one place.

Unfortunately inheritance is a difficult task given how game definitions are parsed. I go through each file, parsing and inserting into the database, so I have to wait until it is done to perform inheritance. An this task involves a ton of getting lists of items, using them to get lists of child items, inserting items into the database, associated with the inheriting element. Items like Objects can have child objects, so I have to do those recursively.

All this database activity will cause the compiling of games to take a serious hit. It's just ugly. But the end result just might be worth it. Once it is in place I may be able to optimize and improve it.