Question

I’m programming a basic slot machine in Visual basic, and want to use a for loop to randomly choose the image for each slot, display the image in each slot, and change the slotName variable (so I can check later on which symbols are in the slots) for each slot.

The problem I’m finding with a for loop is that the variables and objects for each slot have different names (slot1Name, slot2Name, slot3Name, lblSlot1, lblSlot2, lblSlot3, etc). Is there any way I could have something like:

currentSlotName = "slot" & i & "Name"

This is the code at the moment, this code is repeated (with different variable and object names), for each of the 3 slots, which is pretty inefficient. How can I tidy this code up?

' Randomise numbers and assign images to slots based on random numbers, if the hold isn't on
    ' Slot 1
    If Not held1 Then
        slot1Value = Int(Rnd() * numbersGenerated + 0.5)
        Select Case slot1Value
            Case 0 To 5
                lblSlot1.Image = imgBanana
                slot1Name = "Banana"
            Case 6 To 11
                lblSlot1.Image = imgOrange
                slot1Name = "Orange"
            Case 12 To 16
                lblSlot1.Image = imgCherries
                slot1Name = "Cherries"
            Case 17 To 19
                lblSlot1.Image = imgSeven
                slot1Name = "Seven"
            Case 20
                lblSlot1.Image = imgBatman
                slot1Name = "Batman"
            Case Else
                lblSlot1.Text = "Error. slot1value = " & slot1Value
        End Select
    End If

I have searched around for this, but I’m very new to Visual Basic, and want to keep my code as simple as possible.

Answer 1

Too much to explain. Arrays is what you need to learn next.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/wak0wfyt.aspx