Refactoring - that was it

I had to refactor the Spawner class. It's creating lists of items (or any object types) for later creation, because you need somehow determine which items are created in various places. The hard work is done in the initialization where lists are created, by going through object data for each object type.

The way I programmed Spawner class was somewhat dumb, because I used raw std::vectors to hold items. Nothing wrong with that, but it makes internal bookkeeping impossible, since there is no way to know what are actually stored in those lists.

Refactoring was quite simple. I made a Spawner_Item class which holds that std::vector with the name of the list. For some reason I thought it was a good idea to create a function for each item type, such as Spawner::Get_Land_Trap() which then returned a trap that can be created on dungeon floor. The problem is that after a while the number of functions increase. So in the refactored version there is one function to get a random item from a pool, in this case Get_Random_Item(spaw::Land_Traps) where spaw is the namespace for spawning applications.

There are quite lot of functions to replace with new implementation, but I was able to rewrite the new one on top of the old one so they are working at the same time. It's what you always hope that happens when you have to refactor something, that way you can still run the game without problems and slowly replace the old implementation.

The bookkeeping feature was useful right away when I noticed there were no traps for containers. They didn't exist so the spawner list was empty for them. Later it's also possible to write a debug function to watch the list of items, not just the amount of items per list and you can check out if somehow the list contains something it should not have.

Now, as I said something has changed in the development and I think it may be refactoring (or rewriting, it's the same thing). When I was rewriting Spawner class I had a funny feeling it was something I had been doing all these years and only recently I've been programming new stuff as well.