How to iterate through a list of enemies and display results?

Question

I'm making an turnbased RPG and I wanted to add a traditional multiple enemy system where a user could attack different enemies when it's there turn. I started by making a list of everybody who is going to attack and having that as the turn order. My question is how do I go through that list, and for every enemy that attacks display the damage they did and wait for the user input to continue to the next enemy.

Getting it to process all the attacks is easy, but a computer will do it in milliseconds and I need it to wait for the user input to continue.

I have started the following code:

for (int i = 0; i < turnOrder.Count; i++)
{
     if (turnOrder[i].isMonster)
     {
          ProcessEnemyChoice(enemyToAttack);
     }
     else if (turnOrder[i].isMonster == false)
     {
          ProcessUserChoice(enemyToAttack);
     }
     //enemyToAttack is assigned as a the enemy the user selected
}

I tried a do-while loop but that stopped my program from doing any updating, which makes sense. I'm at a loss here and any input from the geniuses here would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

I tried a do-while loop but that stopped my program from doing any updating

You don't need to do a while loop to wait for the input. You just maintain a global gamestate and whos_turn_is_it so that you know what to do on each update loop:

public override void Update(GameTime gameTime)
{
    if(gamestate == WAIT_FOR_INPUT)
    {
        if(turnOrder[whos_turn_is_it].IsMonster == false)
        {
            if(UserInput != null)
            {
                ProcessUserChoice(UserInput);
                gamestate = WAIT_FOR_ANIMATION;
            }
        }
        else if(turnOrder[whos_turn_is_it].IsMonster)
        {
            ProcessEnemyChoice();
            gamestate = WAIT_FOR_ANIMATION;
        }        
    }

    // Do the animations
    // idle animation, NPC movement, fight/heatlh bar animation
    ProcessAnimations(gameTime);
}

public void ProcessAnimations(GameTime gameTime)
{
    // an example of health animation (as a form of input feedback)
    player.current_health += (player.current_health - player.health_after_fight) / 20.0f

    // an example of 2D graphic animation
    player.current_sprite_index = (int)(gameTime.ElapsedTime * player.animation.fps);

    // we need to stop the animation and current state after sometime when input feedback complete
    if(player.current_health - player.health_after_fight < 0.001f && player.current_sprite_index == player.sprite_frame_count_max)
    {
        whos_turn_is_it++; // next person's turn since our animation is now done.
        gamestate = WAIT_FOR_INPUT;
    }

    // do animations for other stuff
    DoOtherAnimationUpdate();
}

Answer 2

Since it's turn based, of course a single turn will take as much time as the slowest player spends to send input. You don't need to wait for everything else just for turn-related stuff.

If you want to make it independent form user input, then you have basically two options: 1- assign a max amount of time to act (the same situation as a real life chess game)

2- use some sort of real time system with filling action bars (like many RPGs do).

Using an action bar (the fill rate will depend on the unit's initiative) you'll get you a dynamic stack of actions and the game will solve the top action for each time step.

The game won't ever have to wait (beyond a defined amount), but a player that takes ages to decide his/her move could lose server actions.

Edit: Since there 1 human player, the enemies are considered AI players. The above still applies.

What should the human player be able to do while the cpu is computing? If you let the user send the next input while the cpu decides, the user won't be able to see the current turn result so it could be risky or simply wrong.

Or if your problem is just that the game hangs up completely, you just need to avoid having the AI loop inside the main game loop. That's just a common multi-threading problem. Look at this to get some more details (answers cover AI updates) :

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1941573/multithreading-in-xna-game