Access a multidimensional array inside an array

Questions & Answers
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1

Hey all,

I am working on a voxel engine and I have an array of chunks, which is actually just a 4dimensional array of blocks.
The first index in the array is a chunk index and the rest are the x, y and z indexes of the blocks inside the chunks.
Now I would like to loop through all the chunk indexes and pass the 3 dimensional array inside the chunks to a method, but it gives me an error. Here is an example:

Block[,,,] blockData = new Block[chunkIndexes.Length, chunkSizeX, chunkSizeY, chunkSizeZ];
  
for (int i = 0; i < chunkIndexes.Length; ++i)
{
    // Here I would like to pass the 3dimensional array to a method but it gives
    // me an error saying that blockData requires 4 indexes.
    DoSomeyhingWithTheChunk(blockData);
}

I want to avoid using a List or something like that, does anyone know how i can achieve passing the 3dimensional arrays to a method?

2

I don’t know of any way of doing exactly what you’d like to in c#, you could probably write a method for cutting up an array like that, but it would involve effectively copying bits of the array, which is rather inefficient.

The closest solution (other than a List) would be an array of arrays:

Block[][,,] blockData = new Block[chunkIndexes.Length][,,];
for(int i = 0; i < chunkIndexes.Length; i++)
    Block = new Block[chunkSizeX, chunkSizeY, chunkSizeZ];

for (int i = 0; i < chunkIndexes.Length; ++i)
{
    // Here I would like to pass the 3dimensional array to a method but it gives
    // me an error saying that blockData requires 4 indexes.
    _DoSomeyhingWithTheChunk( blockData );
}
Alternatively, you could pass the block index into the function as an argument, and have the function only operate on the that block, while passing it the entire array as a parameter.