Help suggest a data structure to hold objects so I can quickly look for the object by Keys

submitted by Fizz to learn_programming 2 points | 1 comments

I want to preface this by saying that I think I got cooked by AI here.

I have a game where I am working on a job system. The job system has a job objects which I need to put into a data structure that can be searched via id, location, or work type. At first I was building with the mindset of “do whatever to solve this problem and make it work” but it became very hard to implement new features because I would break everything. So I started trying to think ahead and design ways of doing things that would handle all the different jobs and things.

At first I put all jobs into an array and iterated through. Then I learned about dictionaries and started using them for way to many things and so i updated my job queue to be a dictionary with the Key as ID > JobObj

Then I decided to plan out the job system before writing anything and “do it properly”. I decided I needed to upgrade the data structure holding jobs because its a core part of the game and will be heavily interacted with. But I realized I only know array, dictionary and database, so I asked AI what data structure I should use and it suggested a nested dictionary.

Now im using multiple dictionaries but im really hating it. Its hard for me to work with and conceptually im not sure I can visualize how its even working.

How I am thinking about it is there is multiple layers of keys, 1st layer is work types, then once I find the work type it points to a dictionary of region IDs and that points to an array of jobs in the region.

Job def is work type like Planting Region id: the map is broken down into region IDs so i dont have to check every tile and can limit seaching

#python
var job_pool: Dictionary = {}

func register(designation: DesignationObj) -> void:
    var job_def = designation.job
    var region_id = designation.region_id
    if not job_pool.has(job_def):
        job_pool[job_def] = {}
    if not job_pool[job_def].has(region_id):
        job_pool[job_def][region_id] = []
    job_pool[job_def][region_id].append(designation)

Here is how I am picturing it in my head.

var job_pool {
    "plants": {
        "1": {
            "job1"
            "job2"
        }
        "2": {
            "job3"
        }
    }
    "mining": {
        "1": {
            "job4"
            "job5"
        }
    }
    "hunting": {
        "5":{
            "job12"
        }
    }
}

But now I want to add ID look up into this im stuck and im thinking the entire structure does not work for what it needs to do.