Cleaning up my script and make it expandable

Unity Engine
1

Hi.

I’ve been working on a game with random based levels. I got a script which creates blocks (which represent the floor), coins and enemys. The chance for spawning the various things alters over time. Basically I define some breakpoints for the probability and betwenn those the current chance gets calculated. The script works fine but it is not very clean right now and if I wanted to add another spawnable gameObject, like a new kind of block, I’d have to go through half my script and add trivial lines and resize some arrays. I’m also planning an upgrade system and from what I can predict i would be running into the same problems there too.

My Question is: is there a way of keeping my code more clean, maintainable and expandable?

Thank you

Here are some snipets of my code:

[System.Serializable]
public class SpawnChanceCoins{
	public float startDistance;
	
	public float smallCoinChance;
	public float smallCoinRowChance;
	public float mediumCoinChance;
	public float mediumCoinRowChance;
	public float bigCoinChance;
	public float bigCoinRowChance;
}
[System.Serializable]
public class RandomVariables {
	public int minBlockLength = 2;
	public int maxBlockLength = 8;
	public int minGapLength = 2;
	public int maxGapLength = 8;
	public SpawnChanceCoins[] coinChances;
	public chanceCalculationMethod coinCalculationMethod;
	// more arrays of chances for blocks and enemys
	public enum chanceCalculationMethod { instant, linear, smooth}
	public void SortCoinChances () {
		for(int j = 0 ; j < coinChances.Length -1; j++){
			for( int k = j + 1 ; k < coinChances.Length; k++){
				if(coinChances[j].startDistance == coinChances[k].startDistance)
					Debug.LogError("Two coinchances have the same startDistance!");
			}
		}
		System.Array.Sort(coinChances, delegate(SpawnChanceCoins c1, SpawnChanceCoins c2) {
			return c1.startDistance.CompareTo(c2.startDistance);	
		});	
	}
	//Same function for blocks and coins

	//Here comes the ugly part:
	public float[] CalculateCoinChances (float distance){
		float[] output = new float[6];
		if(distance < blockChances[0].startDistance){
			output[0] = coinChances[0].smallCoinChance;
			output[1] = coinChances[0].smallCoinRowChance;
			output[2] = coinChances[0].mediumCoinChance;
			output[3] = coinChances[0].mediumCoinRowChance;
			output[4] = coinChances[0].bigCoinChance;
			output[5] = coinChances[0].bigCoinRowChance;
		} else {
			//here is a switch for coinCalculationMethod in order to calculate the chance between the breakpoints.
			// All in all you'll find the six lines from above four more times with another expression behind the =.
		}
		return output;
	}
}

public class FloorCreator : MonoBehaviour {
	public RandomVariables rnd = new RandomVariables();
	[System.NonSerialized]
	public float[] currentCoinChances;
	IEnumerator  Start (){
		currentCoinChances = new float[6];     //I'd have to chance this by hand if i wanted to add more coins
		//same goes for blocks and enemys;
	}
	//deep into the code:
	currentCoinChances = rnd.CalculateCoinChances(Statics.distance);
}
2

I’ve done some more reseatch and read about lists and dictionarys. I’m relatively unexperienced with coding and have no idea if this leads towards the right direction nor how to use them right. Any ideas are welcome. Thanks.

3

Any time you have more than one variable that’s used for the same thing, but contains a different value (such as smallCoinChance, mediumCoinChance, etc.), then they should be replaced by an array. I’d suggest some basic programming tutorials.

–Eric

4

Thanks for your reply. In fact my first version had an array containing the different chances for the coins. This however left me with an array containing arrays of floats. This looked horrible in the inspector so i decided that I have a proper name on my chances and then use those named floats to calculate my currentCoinChances array.

I’ve been reading through documentations about the dictionary type and I think I see an option there. Rough thought is to create a dictionary using ~chance as key and the corresponding float as value. I will try this out when the winter break starts.

edit: I’ve solved the problem by using a list and a void which fills the values of the coin chances into the list during start. I also defined a parent class for the SpawnChanceCoins class thus beeing able to always work with the parent instead uf writing individual code for all SpawnChance"Something" classes. All in all it saved me 100 lines of code.