It will work, but is extremely limited not only in it's verbosity (which entry was Fireball again...?), but as well as its extendability and robustness. It also isn't very memory friendly (why am I storing all these 0s?)

Might I suggest a component based design, conjoined with a scripting language, instead?

This way you can define what the entity is able to do based on components, and re-use abilities in terms of scrips. So Human Mage and Troll Shaman may both be able to perform magic (both have a spellBook component?), but their fireball spells may be different (different scripts)...

Quote:Original post by Plethora

So I was thinking that I could just build in a boolean array of static length (length = total # of abilities in the game) for each monster and have each ability with a static key number. Then each monster just has a y/n in each spot in the array which corresponds to a given ability.

Make sense? Good way to do it?

That's one way. You can use bitfield to store 8 flags per byte too. This would be optimal approach if you plan on having monolithic logic - one which changes as a whole, or not at all.

As you scale such approach, you'll find that adding new abilities or updating existing ones becomes cumbersome. In addition, you cannot specify per-instance behavior. For example, all humans have Attack ability, but John, an instance of human, has StrongAttack instead.

Quote:It also isn't very memory friendly (why am I storing all these 0s?)

No, it's quite memory friendly. Assuming there are 8 different abilities. What is the minimum information one needs to carry to fully describe all abilities a particular entity has?

Given there are 256 different possibilities, the entropy is 8 bits.

If each entity will never use anything but a subset, then the required storage will be entropy of this subset instead. How this is implemented is irrelevant, the amount of information will always be the same.

Quote:Original post by Antheus
No, it's quite memory friendly. Assuming there are 8 different abilities. What is the minimum information one needs to carry to fully describe all abilities a particular entity has?

Given there are 256 different possibilities, the entropy is 8 bits.

If each entity will never use anything but a subset, then the required storage will be entropy of this subset instead. How this is implemented is irrelevant, the amount of information will always be the same.

Given that the OP said he was going to use a boolean array, I think it is fair to assume he wasn't using an encoding scheme. Information entropy wasn't really the nature of the question. Given the limited extendability of the OP's solution and the limited data that could be conveyed in his method, I still think my point holds: an array of booleans is a waste of memory given its flexibility and limited verbosity. Sure, at the end of the day, it probably won't be the make or break memory foot-print on his system, but given that it wasn't the crux of my argument against it, I would say it is a moot point.

Though my understanding of information entropy in terms of data representation is limited -- perhaps I am still making an invalid point.