In case you aren't familiar with the idea of the scene graph, I highly recommend looking into it, even if you ultimately end up not using it, it's a good thing to at the very least consider.
An example of a simple scene graph, illustrating a child/parent relationship for position and more
However, I recently encountered the Unity editor, learned it, and worked with it extensively, and discovered that they don't seem to use a scene graph. The only parent/child relationships going on appeared to be done primarily through the transform components exclusively.
Now I thought this was a pretty intriguing idea, and with my recent focus on extreme simplicity in coding, I thought, "Well why not? A scene graph does make things more complicated and difficult to search through..." and the train suddenly left the station. What if I returned to using a simple list to represent my scenes?
Returning to the earliest example of a scene graph that I had seen, Morrowind, I suddenly realized something. Morrowind is a huge game, having to represent seamless landscapes that cover large amounts of land. Fitting all that data into a single list is impossible, and more or less has to be stored in a hierarchical fashion to facilitate loading.
Now, while I would love to make games on the scale of Morrowind, as an independent hobbyist developer, I don't. Mine are extremely small levels that are easily represented by a basic list, isn't a scene graph overkill? I think it is.
I'm working on a 2D framework for ImagineCup 2011, and have already started implementing this idea. I guess we'll see how it goes =D
