Hey,

I am trying to think of a way to store a characters inventory in an RPG style game. I wasn't sure how it's normally done, but what I could think of so far was the following:

Items have a unique ID number. This ID number corresponds to their position in a list.

Ex. a one-hand sword ID#4.

LDAMAG(4) would be the swords damage.
LCOSTS(4) would be the swords cost.
etc.

Issue being the name, since it seems I would need to store the alphabetical numeric in a list. This would mean you don't know the length of the name. I suppose you could have a name maximum, let's say 20 characters. So you would do ID#4 is position 80-100 in LNAMES. So you pull those 20, and drop the empty positions.

So, when the user goes to their inventory, you would loop through a list with their item IDs they own, and then pull the data from individual lists based on the ID to display and allow them to use.

Is there a much easier way to go about this?

I would suggest you try to compress information about the item into a single list entry to save on memory (and a bit of time). As a rather simple example, you could store the damage as the integer part of a number, and the cost as a decimal, and store the entire number in the list. So,


Code:


If the cost is more than 1 digit (greater than 9), then replace 10fPart( with 100fPart( or larger (10 to the power of however many digits). A more robust guide on general compression techniques can be found here. You are able to store up to 14 digits in a single list entry (28 if you make it a complex list), so take advantage of the space that you have.

Use a integer in place for the name to indicate its position in a list of strings which you can define using a string and a different list