Game Development Patterns and Best Practices

Polymorphism refresher

In Hollywood, lots of actors and actresses take on many different roles when filming movies. They can be the hero of a story, a villain, or anything else as they inhabit a role. No matter what role they've gotten, when they are being filmed they are acting even if what they do specifically can be quite different. This kind of behavior acts similarly to the idea of polymorphism.

Polymorphism is one of the three pillars of an object-oriented language (along with encapsulation and inheritance). It comes from the words poly meaning many and morph meaning change.

Polymorphism is a way to call different specific class functions in an inheritance hierarchy, even though our code only uses a single type. That single type, the ...