Hashtables in Unity

Questions & Answers
1

I am new to Unity and have a great project to learn on. I am trying to create a database or hashtable using Unity. I need to be able to type in the make and model of a car and retrieve All data associated with that model. Example: Ford Mustang- pricing, options, available colors etc. I also want to include a 3D image of the vehicle. This is for an iPhone app. Can anyone point me in the right direction please?

Sincerely, Pixeldust

3

Three answers for the price of one!

(1) To connect to an online SQL database, see this question.

(2) To create a hashtable in C#, you can do this:

using System.Collections.Generic;
...
Dictionary<string, object> carInfo = new Dictionary<string, object>();
carInfo.Add("name", "Ford Mustang");
carInfo.Add("price", 40000);
carInfo.Add("color", Color.yellow);
...

For more information on dictionaries, see MSDN.

(3) You may prefer to create a class with all the attributes you care about:

class Car
{
  string Name;
  float Price;
  Color Color;
  ...
}

And then you can create a list of Cars:

List<Car> Cars = new List<Car>();
Car car = new Car(); // I always wanted a new car!
car.Name = "Ford Mustang";
car.Price = 40000;
car.Color = Color.yellow;
Cars.Add(car);
2

I don't mean to sound negative, but are you sure Unity is your best bet for this? I don't know if unity has any real way to make a database or hashtable outside of just making an array, and unless you are going to be doing some sort of manipulation for the 3d images of the vehicle, you could just use a simple image. Or use that quicktime 3d thing where you can rotate using many images spliced together.

Since this is for an Iphone App, and you'd need to buy a bunch of stuff from Unity to get it to publish to iphone, and you still need a mac to do it.. I suggest just using the regular Iphone SDK that comes with the mac. Its not as robust or graphically intuitive as Unity, but if you're making tables and storing data the graphic interface doesn't really apply.

Just a suggestion.