Concatenate strings to form variable reference

Hi everyone,

I want use a function to change variables in Object A. The function is supposed to look up the value in Object B. For that I want to compose the variable reference from some strings, but I cant get the syntax right to have the function understand when it's a string and when a reference.

Hope I'm making myself clear here.

imgur.com/ZfncmIo

btw how are images supposed to work now?

hey dop2000! yeah I was afraid so.

I have enemies that have a rather large set of instance variables that define their behavior and how they go through a shared state machine. those are things like reaction ranges, fire rates, weapon type, etc, based on their archetype.

To further make them more flexible i want to exchange the full set of instance variables, to basically swap out their entire behavior, like going from ranged to melee combat.

The way i go about it so far is by swapping the enemy out for a separate object entirely, same enemy with different variable values. But that creates a huge configuration overhead that i'd like to get rid of.

So i was hoping to just fetch those value sets from some kind of config table; i was looking into dictionaries, but found them unwieldy to set up and maintain for each archetype and all their variations.

i now wanted to just use empty enemy objects for data storage, that via family would be easy to get set up and update. but not being able to reference them dynamically kinda breaks the concept.

I've decided to go with a json table, which is at least somewhat convenient to edit and traverse.

I'd be happy to hear about other ideas though! (Sorry for the long read ...)

I would recommend using a dictionary. Hear me out:

You need to assign each instance of Enemy its own unique instance of dictionary. If you have only one Enemy object, it's super easy - put the dictionary and enemy objects into the same container. If you have multiple Enemy objects in a family, containers will not work. You'll have to "manually" create a dictionary instance and link it with enemy instance, for example using Enemy_UID instance variable.

.

Dictionaries have a few advantages over instance variables:

• they are expandable, add as many keys as you need
• you can access keys using strings - that's what you want!
• you can easily swap data - Dictionary1 load from JSON Dictionary2.AsJSON
• it's easy to save them in local storage
• etc.

• you can easily swap data - Dictionary1 load from JSON Dictionary2.AsJSON

dop2000

Oh, now wait - I missed that bit earlier.

Do I get you correctly there, each enemy type could have an instance of the same dictionary via their container, hence the state machine can reference the variables/keys - since its from the same dictionary for everyone.

I'd load the enemy type's data into it upon spawning, and also swap the data per instance when needed?

But where would I store and edit the different configurations before loading them into the instances? I would still need an external json file, right?

Now that would mean rewiring the entire state machine to the dictionary, but it does sound great. If that's what you're saying?

each enemy type could have an instance of the same dictionary via their container

No.. Since you have several enemy sprites, you can't add one dictionary object to their containers. You will need several dictionaries (one for each enemy type), and this will only make things more complicated.

What I suggest is that you don't add the dictionary into enemies' containers. You create one dictionary object "Stats", add an instance variable "Enemy_UID" to it. Then do this:

On EnemiesFamily created 
 -> Create Stats
 -> Stats set Enemy_UID to EnemiesFamily.UID