Polymorphism Issues

[tedgress]

Hi

I have class called BaseEntity. I also have a class Entity that inheritse from that. Then I have a class WalkingEntity that inherits from Entity. Then I have a class called IntelligentEntity that inherits from WalkingEntity.I also have a class called EntityFactory that is supposedd to take in a message and return one of these Entity types.

This is my factory:

.

            //execute the arbitration results
            Advisor v = arbitrationer.decide(arbitration_list);
            //assigns an entity to the Advisor
           
            
            
            
            switch(v.m.event)
            {
                case BASE_ENTITY:
                    v.e = new BaseEntity;
                    break;
                case ENTITY:
                    v.e = new Entity;
                    break;
                case WEAPON_ENTITY:
                    v.e = new WeaponEntity;
                    break;
                case WALKING_ENTITY:
                    v.e = new WalkingEntity;
                    break;
                case INTELLIGENT_ENTITY:
                    v.e = new IntelligentEntity;
                    break;
                case EMPTY_PAWN:
                    v.e = new EmptyPawn;
                    break;
                case PLAYERCHARACTER:
                    v.e = new PlayerCharacter;
                    break;
                case STATIC_MESH:
                    v.e = new StaticMesh;
            }
            */

And advisor looks like:

class Advisor
{
public:
    Message m;
    BaseEntity e;
    float weight;
};

And a message looks like;

class Message
{
public:
    BaseEntity entity;      //FSM to use
    PlayerInputEnum event;    //messages payload
    
    void* payload;    //dependent upon the event type. will look at this pointer
                       //for payload information
    int priority;   //used to calculate scheduling. 0 is immediately , 5 is slower, etc.
    void load_entity();   //loads an FSM into Base Entity entity;
};

I would like to use the factory to generate types of entities. But the code above - the inhertiance is all wrong. I just need to be able to populate the BaseEntity field of the Message class, with any of the Entity classes (WALKING_ENTITY) for examples.
Does that make sense?

[GCDEF]

entity is an object. It needs to be a pointer