Is OOP right for this situation?

Trs2988

I'm not at all a newbie to PHP, but OOP is a different story. I didn't even know PHP had OOP capabilities until about a week ago. Regardless, I've been trying to learn as much as I can about PHP's OOP. And almost everywhere I look, I'm seeing a main theme - PHP OOP is great in some situations, but it isn't right for everything.

Now, let me explain my situation. I run an online text-based game, and currently its all procedural. However, right now I'm going back through it and recoding it with a very organized "core," or sets of functions. For example, for characters, there's getName(), setName(), getHP(), setHP() etc. This very closely resembles accessor functions in OOP. But is it worth it to make "character" a class? What exactly would be gained by doing that?

I guess what I'm looking for is whether or not it would be worth the trouble to convert everything in my game to OOP, because I'm not really seeing the benefits of it. No matter how much I've seen people talk about how great it is, I can't find any specific examples where it would help me.

Thanks in advance for your help in this topic, I'm a little lost.

AstroTeg

Things that make you think of an object are good for OOP. A character could be considered an object. A character has attributes (has names, ect). You can do things with a character (create, delete, etc). A character could own other objects (like maybe a car?) and maybe other objects might own a character (a club/clan, group, etc).

OOP will give you the tools to organize your objects and maintain them easier. Plus, they'll be easier to transfer or re-use in other programs.

Roger_Ramjet

To OOP or not to OOP is a question not specific to PHP. When it first came along everyone went WOW!! But OOPS has been around for a decade and a half and still has not taken over the way everyone thought it would. One reason is the processing overhead that objects, classes and functions involve: the more general they are, and hence more 'efficient' for code-reuse, the more inefficient they are likely to be in processing terms.

Here are some links to blogs and articles on them specific to PHP

OOPS and performnace
Procedural PHP leads to slower apps
how efficient is PHP

What you have to realise is that IT is Tool Technology and choosing the right tool for the job is half the battle.

Trs2988

I doubt that I'd ever use any of the objects again in another code, but you never know. I guess the main thing that would help would just be the organization, so that you know getName() means get the name of the character, and then I can have alternate getName() functions for items, etc.

So then, how would that work? All of the information is currently held in the database, such as the examples I used above, name and HP. Would there really be a need for any variables, then, since get functions would just retrieve it from the database and set would put it into the database? And coding it is something else I'm unsure of. I assume that for each page I'll have to do something like

$thisChar = new Character($id)

to hold the information for the player currently playing the game. But sometimes I display lists of players (like a hall of fame sort of page). Am I required to do a new object for each of them, just to display their names? This is why I'm a little hesitant - it seems like I big project to convert EVERYTHING to OOP, or maybe I just don't know the proper way to use it.