Question

I have an enum that looks like the following:

public enum EnumWeapons
{
    Fists = new WeaponFists(),
    Sword = new WeaponSword(),
    Bow = new WeaponBow(),
    Staff = new WeaponStaff()
}

Which are derived from the base class Weapon.

Is it possible to use an enum in this way?

If so, will I be able to do something like the following? :

public Weapon weapon = (Weapon)EnumWeapons.Fists;

My attempts haven’t worked as intended, and any help or guidance is appreciated :). Thank you!

Answer 1

This is not possible, the underlying type of an enum are various integral types. From the documentation:

The approved types for an enum are byte, sbyte, short, ushort, int, uint, long, or ulong.

Also, I don’t even think what you are trying to do makes sense. When you want a weapon, do you really want the same instance every time? I doubt it.

What you really want, I think, is a factory. In it’s most naive form, you can say:

public enum WeaponType {
    Fists,
    Sword,
    Bow, 
    Staff
}

public class WeaponFactory {
    public Weapon Create(WeaponType weaponType) {
        switch(weaponType) {
            case WeaponType.Fists:
                return new WeaponFists();

            case WeaponType.Sword:
                return new WeaponSword();

            case WeaponType.Bow:
                return new WeaponBow();

            case WeaponType.Staff:
                return new WeaponStaff();

            default:
                throw new ArgumentOutOfRangeException("weaponType");
        }
    }
}

Now you can say:

var weapon = weaponFactory.Create(WeaponType.Fists);