Question

I’m writing a game, which uses two different dice. They are both 12-sided, but
contain different values (specifically animals) on their faces. I wrote a base Dice
class, which looks like this:

    public abstract class Dice
    {
        private DieFace[] faces;

        public DieFace RollDie()
        {
            //return random value from faces
        }

        public abstract void FillDieFaces();
    }

“DieFace” is an enum with different names of animals which I’ll use for the dice.

Now I want to write two classes, which inherit from Dice – RedDie and YellowDie, which
are identical except for the values they can produce. The problem I’m having is that I’m
not sure how to access the faces array in the inheriting classes. I can’t implement
FillDieFaces() in the base class, because it’s meaningless without specific values.
Can you please recommend a good way of doing what I’m trying to do?

Thanks for any help you can give.

Best regards,
Bertold

Answer 1

As well as Mark’s answer (make the array protected), you could also override a method that returns the values instead and call that from FillDieFaces

public abstract class Dice
{
    private DieFace[] faces;

    protected abstract DieFace[] GetDieFaces();
    public void FillDieFaces()
    {
        faces = GetDieFaces();
    }
}

public class AnimalDice : Dice
{
     protected override DieFace[] GetDieFaces()
     {
         return new DieFace[] { DieFace.Panda, DieFace.Unicorn };
     }
}

or even move the FillDieFaces code into base class constructor instead.