How to call value by key when key is an object?

Questions & Answers
1

I’ve been playing with dictionaries, array, hashtables, etc. but I can’t find just what I’m looking for.

basically I want to have a key that is from class Item, ex: Item.StonePick
and a value assigned to it for how many that player has in the inv, ex: 3

now StonePick is an item so it has a _name and lots of variables that would be great to access so I can display “Stone Pick” not StonePick etc. when I got through the list and print out the player inventory, or quests, or achievments or whatever.

I have it semi-working via linq with a hashtable _playerQuests:

public void Act(){
		if(Player._playerQuests.ContainsKey(Quests.Cliff01)) {
			int place;
			for (int i = 0; i < Player._playerQuests.Count; i++){
				if (Player._playerQuests.Keys.ElementAt(i) == Quests.Cliff01){ place = i; }
			}
			if (Player._playerQuests.Values.ElementAt(place) == 1){ _chat = "1"; }
		}
		else { _chat = "0"; }
	}

but that means it has to go through everything all the time just so I can call from the index number to access the Item._name etc.

There must be a better way??

What I really just want is:
Dictionary playerInventory;
and
Dictionary playerQuests;
etc.

Can anyone offer some suggestions?
Should I just setup predefined Arrays of 200 until my hard coded Quests go over 200 then change that array to 300 and keep a log of what quest is where? then I could hard call everything directly, but that would destroy any sort of loose search functionality…?

2

You can make your Item object implement System.IEquatable and override the method GetHashCode(). That way your Item can be used as a Key based on the ID or Name that you set to it.

using UnityEngine;
using System.Collections;
using System.Collections.Generic;


public class Item : System.IEquatable<Item> {

	public Item(string name) {
		Name = name;
	}

	public string Name {
		get;
		set;
	}

	public bool Equals(Item other) {
		return Name == other.Name;
	}

	public override int GetHashCode(){
		return Name.GetHashCode();
	}
}

public class ObjectKey : MonoBehaviour {

	IDictionary<Item, uint> items = new Dictionary<Item, uint>();

	// Use this for initialization
	void Start () {
		Item item1 = new Item("Item1");
		Item item2 = new Item("Item2");

		items[item1] = 2;
		items[item2] = 45;

		foreach (Item item in items.Keys) {
			Debug.Log(item.Name + " -> Qty: " + items[item] + " " + item);
		}

		Item dummySearchItem = new Item("Item1");

		Debug.Log("Search Qty: " + dummySearchItem.Name + " -> Qty: " + items[dummySearchItem]);

	}
	
	// Update is called once per frame
	void Update () {
	
	}
}

Other option is to create a wrapper object that keeps a reference to the item and the quantity of that item, and store that on a dictionary using the item ID or Name as the key.

public class InventoryItem {

	Item item;
	uint qty;

}