Question

I’m starting a game project, my first, it’ll be like a civilization clone, with a big focus in war. I always worked with C# but for business apps (mostly web apps) so I have a doubt about what would be a good design to build the map positioning system.

I would like to each unit know where it’s positioned, and to the map to know all units at each point, a two-way relationship, but I can’t see what would be the best way to model this! I’d like some ideas and pseudo-code, if you could!

Thankz.

Answer 1

Make your map a two-dimensional array. At each position, put an array of all objects at that position. In addition, add position attributes to each object.

Yes, this will duplicate the information! So on each move you’ll have to change the object and update the map.

However, fast reading and fast finding of the objects is very important for that kind of game. In addition, this solution avoids any search routine (e.g. go through the map and look for a particular object), which is generally a good idea: Replace all search routines over large datasets with indexes. The map should be seen as some kind of index over the object’s position attributes.