When dealing with a node – tree architecture, there are several functions that need to be called recursively down the tree (mainly draw and update, but there are others, such as cull, exit, etc…) AND they need to be overridden in base classes, normally by the user.
Implementing either one of these things is trivial, but doing them together and while keeping the system secure from any slips by the user is not. One possible solution is to remind the user in the documentation that when he overrides update, he must always call update on all the children of the node. But this is playing with fire, eventually someone is going to forget, and put a sneaky bug in the system.
The easiest solution I’ve come up with is putting 2 functions of each: Update and NodeUpdate, Draw and NodeDraw… where the single word function is an abstract function for the user to override, and the double word function is the one actually called in the tree update, which calls to the simple function, does some extra necessary stuff and updates the children.
This method is transparent to the user, who just needs to override the function as expected, and doesn’t let him fuck up anything important. Similar solutions might be made with delegates or callbacks.
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