Weapons and Armor

Added new Weapon and Armor classes.  The Weapon class contains an attack value, recoil rate, shot distance, and a List of Sockets.  The Armor class contains a defense value and a List of Sockets.  I have subclassed Armor has for each body location, which are head, hands, body, and feet.  These subclasses currently don’t have any unique properties which may be bad coding style, but I think it is better than having a “type” value in the Armor class.  Plus, it opens the possibility for adding unique characteristics for each armor type.  I also made sure that the instance variables in the Armor class are set to protected so that those are accessible to the subclasses.  The EquippedSockets class has constants for the body parts, but I’m planning to remove the EquippedSockets class once the new Armor system is implemented.  Both the Weapon and Armor classes have an ID variable, which will make it easier for reading and writing save game files.  A cost variable is also included in both Weapon and Armor, which determines how much it costs to buy or sell the item.  The Player class now has a List of Weapons and a List of Armor that the player has acquired.

I also created an EquipmentCatalog class which contains instances of every Weapon and Armor in the game.  When a new weapon or armor is acquired, I’ll probably just clone one of the objects in the Catalog and assign it to the player.  I could have the player’s acquired Weapon and Armor Lists point to references in the Catalog, but that won’t allow the equipment to have unique properties like a Socket list.  I may also want to add a durability value that would be unique to an item instance, which decreases the cost value of the weapon.  Also included in the EquipmentCatalog class is a method to return random Weapons and Armor.  In the future, I’ll probably add parameters so that a random item can be generated within a specified level range for enemy drops.

Currently, I’m using the SI metric prefixes for the names of the weapons and armor.  I’m not that creative, and these names may actually teach the player something educational.  To keep things simple, I’m going to display item properties graphically as bars (or something similar) instead of raw integers.  Therefore, the first weapon will have one bar for attack, recoil rate, and distance.  The next weapon will have two bars for attack.  I may mix up some of the weapon statistics so that each excels in one of the three statistics.  There may also be a bonus for equipping all weapons and armor in the same level series.

While the weapon’s first name will determine the level and attack value, the weapon’s second name will describe the other attributes.  For instance, “Blaster” will be a balanced weapon, “Zapper” will have a higher recoil rate but lower distance, and “Ray” will have low recoil rate and high shot distance.

I also extracted out the socket information into its own class.  Previously, all of the socket information was contained in the EquippedSockets class, but that only allowed one socket to be equipped to each body part.  For the Weapon and Armor classes, I added a variable that tracks the maximum number of sockets that can be equipped on that equipment, and the actual Socket instances are kept in a List for each piece of equipment.  The new Socket class only contains the socket ID, name, and type (body location).

The Collectible class has also be subclassed with CollectibleWeapon and CollectibleArmor classes.  These classes serve the same purpose as Collectible, which is a collectible item on the game screen.  However, the subclass contains one additional instance variable which is a Weapon or Armor object.  When the player collides with the collectible, that item will be added to the player’s weapon or armor List.

Modified the enemy death code, so that a new Collectible is instantiated at the location of the enemy.  The enemy calls the dropItem method on the room object, which takes the drop location as parameters.  The dropItem method uses the random methods in the catalog to get a reference to a random item, which is assigned to the collectible.  Then it adds that collectible to the room’s collectible list.  In the future, I would like to have the defeated enemy determine which item is dropped.  One decision I had to make is the location of the EquipmentCatalog.  The room does not have any references to anything outside of itself, however it needs a reference to the EquipmentCatalog to assign to the Collectible that the enemy drops.  I am now creating a new instance of EquipmentCatalog in the dropItem method, but that will very wasteful of memory since it will need to be cleaned up every time an item is dropped.  I will have to think about this some more.  The EquipmentCatalog may need to be a static class, but I currently have all of the Weapons and Armor defined in dynamic Lists in the Catalog constructor, which may not be allowed in a static class.  I haven’t created graphics for weapon and armor drops yet, so I’m using the standard money drop shaded green for weapons and blue for armor.  The name of the item appears above the collectible on the game screen.  On the equipment screen, the list of all acquired weapons and armor are displayed.  However, I have not implemented the ability to equip those items yet.

Aside from the equipment changes, I added a boolean in the room class that determines if the lights are on in the room.  Only rooms with this value are drawn dark with the radiant value.  There is a slight glitch here, because once the player crosses the screen boundary the whole screen turns dark (including the portion of the previous room that was lit).  I will need to resolve this later to give it a gradual transition from light to dark.