I am creating a roguelike which will use an ASCII based tile set. There is a text file that represents the map (ie. walls, floor, items). I believe the next steps are to read this file in and use a 2D array to hold objects that represent each of the characters.
My question is, is there a more efficient way to parse through that file and create the object map without using one huge switch statement to create the proper object? If not, is there a better approach I can take overall?
Any modern compiler will almost always convert a large Switch statement into a jump table; not into a succession of nested IF's. This may be ugly code, violating your sense of aesthetics, but is the most efficient means to parse such a structure. If you were to use a Lexer- or Parser-Generator tool such as LEX or YACC or any of their modern descendants, that is exactly what they generate.
Note that if you have different classes to represent the different terrain types, then you have replaced a multitude of repetitive switch statements during game operation with a single switch statement at class generation time. That in and f itself is a very significant performance improvement.
Can you set them up as a generic Dictionary<String, Object>?
private readonly Dictionary<String, Object> _tileDefinitions =
new Dictionary<String, Object>
{
{"_", nothing},
{"#", wallobj},
{"$", treasureobj}
};
public Map Parse(string fileContents)
{
var x = 0;
var y = 0;
var map = new Map();
for(var i = 0; i < fileContents.Length; i++)
{
x++;
if(fileContents[i] == Environment.NewLine)
{
x = 0;
y++;
continue;
}
Tile tile;
if(_tileDefinitions.TryGetValue(fileContents[i], out tile))
map[x, y] = tile;
else
throw new Exception("Invalid tile " + fileContents[i]);
}
return map;
}
