Text RPG: Help with assigning separate moves to enemies

[EpsilonJackal]

Hey there. I'm a bit of a newbie at C++ (roughly 2 months of experience) and my current college class is progressing slowly so I'm going ahead and doing my own thing.

I know a Text RPG is out of my league but it doesn't help to learn.

Basically, if I want to assign different moves to their respective type of enemy, what's the best way to take on that approach? I want to keep a hold of information such as:

-move damage
-resource cost
-various effects
-output message

I've considered doing things like:

-Using arrays to store the information
-.ini files
-Classes (though I need to study this more)
-Functions for each move

I'm just not sure what the most efficient way to do this is, or if there is even a better way.

Thanks.

[jchundt]

Definitely study more on object oriented programming (OOP). If I was doing this project, I would use classes to describe the RPG characters and store status info. There are a lot of good tutorials online. Try checking out this page as a basic overview: http://www.cplusplus.com/doc/tutorial/classes/ . There are many ways to use OOP in your program, so do some research before you jump right into coding.

[EpsilonJackal]

Thanks, will do. However it doesn't completely answer my question as to how I should handle enemy + player attacks.

Should I assign each attack to its own function? I can't make a single function for them all as there will be dynamic effects that some of them have. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Vidminas]

Yep, make separate classes for each type of enemy and the player. Then add functions for attacks within those classes and then make a completely different function where the player takes damage (say if you have armour it may affect the real damage)

Also you should learn about vectors, they come in handy, eventually.

[EpsilonJackal]

Thank you! That's exactly what I needed :). Appreciate it, guys.

[EpsilonJackal]

I'm stumped. If I have separate classes for each type of enemy, is there a way to call them based on a variable? The majority of fights would be random encounters, and I think it would get excessive using IF statements for each enemy to call each class and its objects.

[Vidminas]

You can use switches and cases instead of if conditions, but I'm not really into random encounters so I can't tell you anything more...

[EpsilonJackal]

Hm, okay. I'm going to experiment a bit and come back here later.