Question

I’m making a very very basic game in C++ to gain some experience in the language and I have hit a bit of a brick wall in terms of progress.

My problem is, while I was designing a class for the player’s weapons, I realized I required a list, as I will only have a certain number of weapons throughout the game.

So I ask you, if you were designing this, what implementation would you use for storing all of the weapons in a game? Why?

Here is my code so far for the weapons. as you can see I was just about to start defining all of them manually, starting with the “DoubleBlades”… (Edit* I forgot to note that players should be able to have more than one wepaon, and they can pick up more or drop some, so the list can grow and shrink)

#ifndef __WEAPON_H__
#define __WEAPON_H__

#include <string>

class Item
{
  public:
    Item(const std::string& name)
     : name(name){ }
    const std::string& getName(void) const { return name; }
    int getID(void) const { return this->itemID;}
  private:
   std::string name;
   int itemID;
};

class Weapon
 : public Item
{
  private:
   int damage;
  public:
   Weapon(const std::string& name)
    : Item(name) { }
   virtual int getDamage(void) const = 0;
};

class DoubleBlades
 : public Weapon
{
  public:
   DoubleBlades(int ammo)
    : Weapon("DoubleBlades") { }
   virtual int getDamage(void) const { return 12; }
};

#endif

Also if you spot any bad habits I would really appreciate letting me know.

Answer 1

I would use the standard implementation (std::list<Item*>) because it’s easy to use (“out of the box”) and, out of the standard containers, it seems to be most suitable:

• You probably need support for fast adding/deleting of weapons (so no std::vector or C arrays)
• You probably don’t need support for fast searching of the list for a specific item (so no std::map)

BTW you need to have a virtual destructor in the Item class (this is a general rule on base classes in c++).

Oh, and another minor problem – i think the Weapon class does not need the damage member variable – the class doesn’t use it and it has private access, so the deriving classes cannot use it either.

You might have to use dynamic_cast in your implementation – a virtual environment such as yours will probably require “safe” casting of pointers from Item* to Weapon*.