Question

Basically, I am creating a pseudo-RPG game where a player has an inventory of items and a character doll (to know which items are currently equipped).

What do you recommend is the best way to handle the collection of currently equipped items?

What I currently have is an EquipmentSlot enum that contains all of the possible locations for equipped items on the player, which I can set as a property on each Item that the player has.

public enum EquipmentSlot
{
    Head,
    Chest,
    Arms,
    Legs,
    Feet,
    OffHand,
    MainHand
}

Then I have a dictionary that contains each enum as a key, initializing them all to be null in the Player constructor:

PlayerEquipment = new Dictionary<EquipmentSlot, Item>(7);
PlayerEquipment.Add(EquipmentSlot.Head, null);
PlayerEquipment.Add(EquipmentSlot.Chest, null);
PlayerEquipment.Add(EquipmentSlot.Arms, null);
PlayerEquipment.Add(EquipmentSlot.Legs, null);
PlayerEquipment.Add(EquipmentSlot.Feet, null);
PlayerEquipment.Add(EquipmentSlot.OffHand, null);
PlayerEquipment.Add(EquipmentSlot.MainHand, null);

But as I’m coding this I’m starting to realize that it won’t work because I can’t access the keys as enumerations in other methods of my Player, because they are added in the constructor. I’m not sure where else I could add them to have them available to the rest of the class.

Is my dictionary approach the wrong way to go about this?

Answer 1

Provided you define PlayerEquipment as a class member, and not a local variable, you can access it anywhere in your class:

public class Player
{
     public Dictionary<EquipmentSlot, Item> PlayerEquipment { get; set; }

     public Player()
     {
         PlayerEquipment = new Dictionary<EquipmentSlot, Item>(7);
         PlayerEquipment.Add(EquipmentSlot.Head, null);
         // ...
     }

     // In other methods, you can use this as needed... ie:
     public void DropItem(EquipmentSlot slot)
     {
         this.PlayerEquipment[slot] = null; // Remove the item here...
     }

     //....Rest of class

Note that, if you define the enum inside of your class, you’ll have to fully qualify it when using it from other classes, ie: Player.EquipmentSlot.Head. If, however, its defined outside of the class, you can just use EquipmentSlot.Head (assuming the same namespace or the appropriate using clause exists).