Yeah. There is a lot of routing/binding action going on in an engine when you get past the "hardcode everything for a single context" stage. I'm currently mixin

Yeah. There is a lot of routing/binding action going on in an engine when you get past the "hardcode everything for a single context" stage. I'm currently mixing about four big ideas together in my engine - they haven't all been deployed in the actual game project I have right now, but they're getting developed alongside what's there: * Unix-esque hierarchical path routing - the addressing system I alluded to in parent comment. It's used as a mapping substrate - you can swap out parts of the route to quickly change what's being addressed, and it stores just a little bit of data so that leaf nodes mostly act as keys into other containers. I changed it from int-per-node to int-array-per-node today, which may or may not have been a great idea, but came up because it was irritating to have to make a special store for string keys. * Micro-database system for allocating various types of engine data. This is the biggest source of friction in the engine right now - each data type has a custom container, and in theory, when allocated it'll automatically map to a path address. Engine scenes are currently loaded up through a script saying "allocate these things, relate these things together", but the addressing isn't present, you just access the containers more-or-less directly(ad-hoc per container). * J. Paul Morrison-style "classic FBP" to compile data graphs. This is more of a "I want to program with Lego Bricks" kind of goal - it's the most directly interesting one for the keybinding problem, and it's used in existing engines for aspects of rendering graphics and sound. But it ultimately depends on having the addressing system functioning on real assets, so it's on the backburner. * A "stack of small compilers" as in the VPRI STEPS project. This is used to turn game design assets(event scripts etc.) into runtime data by way of a behavior tree compiler that emits opcodes for a small VM interpreter. This is the stuff I'm really using the most, right now, and it actually inspired the addressing system, as compiling all that stuff created a need for it.