Thread: organizing data

No code to post... just looking for some ideas. Here's the situation. I have a linked list full of "settlements". Each settlement is of a certain type (village, town, or city). You can build certain structures in the various settlements, and some structures are unique to certain settlement types. For example, you can build a market in a village, town, or city. You can build a port in a town or city (but not a village), and you can build a wall in a city (but not a village or town).

During the CreateBuilding function, I want a simple test to determine if a building/structure is allowed to be built, based upon the type of settlement. I can think of some ugly ways to do this, but is there a pretty way?

Code:

Here's how I keep the data:
class Structure {     
 private:
// parallel arrays to keep track of the settlement's structures
   bool structure_status[MAX_NUM_BUILDINGS];  // 0 = does not exist, 1 = exists
   int structural_integrity[MAX_NUM_BUILDINGS];
   ...
};

What if you enumerated the possible settlement/building types?

Then just check against them, ie:

Code:

//pseudo..

enum Bldg
{
    Wall, 
    Port,
    Market,
} NewBldgType;

if(Settlement1==0)  //for instance 0 = village
{
   switch(NewBldgType)
    {
     case 0:    //wall
     case 1:   //port
         //not ok
        break;
      case 2:
        //ok, build it
        break;
                   
     }
}