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Lesson 5 - Warrior for the arena in Swift

In the previous lesson, Reference and value data types in Swift, we went over the differences between reference and value data types in Swift.

We already know how references work and how we can deal with objects. Which will be very useful for us today. We're going to finish up our arena in the next two lessons. We already have a rolling die, but we're still missing two essential objects: the warrior and the arena itself. Today, we're going to focus mainly on the warrior. First, we'll decide what he (or she) will be able to do, and then we'll write our code.

Fields

The warrior will have a name and a starting HP (which stands for health points/hit points, e.g. 80hp). We'll store his maximum health, which will vary each instance, and his current health, e.g. a wounded warrior will have 40hp from 80 total. The warrior will have a damage and defense, which will be both defined in hp. When a warrior, with 20hp damage, attacks another warrior with 10hp defense, he takes 10 points of his health. The warrior will have a reference to the RollingDie instance. We will always roll the die and add a particular random number to his attack/defense to make the game more unpredictable. Of course, each warrior could have their own rolling die, but I wanted this to be as close to a real board game as possible and show you how OOP simulates reality. The warriors will share a single rolling die instance, which will add an element of randomness to the game and make the game a bit more realistic. Last of all, we'll make the warriors send messages about what is happening in the fight. The message will look something like this: "Zalgoren attacks with a hit worth 25 hp." However, we'll put the message part off for now, we'll mainly focus on creating the warrior object.

Now when we've got a good idea of what we want, let's get right into it! :) Let's add a Warrior class to the ArenaFight project and add fields to it accordingly. All of them will be private:

class Warrior {
    private var name : String

    private var health : Double

    private var maxHealth : Double

    private var damage : Int

    private var defense : Int

    private var die : RollingDie

}

Of course, the RollingDie class has to be in our project.

Methods

Let's start off by creating a constructor for the fields so that our build would work. It's not hard.

init(name: String, health: Int, damage: Int, defense: Int, die: RollingDie) {
    self.name = name
    self.health = Double(health)
    self.maxHealth = self.health
    self.damage = damage
    self.defense = defense
    self.die = die
}

We assume that the warrior has a full health once he's created, so the constructor doesn't need a maxHealth parameter. It's easier to just set the maxHealth to whatever the starting health is. We require the health and maxHealth variables as Ints in the constructor but then convert them to Double internally. We do this to make it easier to divide them later.

Again, we should think about what our warrior will be able to do before writing anything. Let's start it easy, we'll need a textual representation of the warrior, i.e. a way of printing his name every time something happens. Let's create the description property which we already know (don't forget to add : CustomStringConvertible after the class similarly we did it in RollingDie). The property will return the name of our warrior. Then, we would need a method that returns whether the warrior is alive, a Bool value would work best, and will definitely come in handy. To make it a little more interesting, we'll literally draw the warrior's health to the console, so we'll have a cool little visual representation:

[#########    ]

The health shown above is at 70%. The methods we mentioned didn't require any parameters so far. We'll get into the damage and defense methods later. Now, let's implement description, alive() and healthBar(). We'll start with description. Which should look familiar, since we did the exact same thing last time:

var description: String {
    return name
}

Now, let's implement the alive() method, there's nothing difficult about it either. We'll just ask whether the health points are greater than 0 and act according to it. It would probably look something like this:

func alive() -> Bool {
    if health > 0 {
        return true
    } else {
        return false
    }
}

Due to the fact that the expression health > 0 is actually a logical value, we can return it and the code will become shorter:

func alive() -> Bool {
    return health > 0
}

HealthBar

As I've already mentioned, the healthBar() method will allow us to display the graphical health indicator. We already know it's usually not a good practice to let a method printing directly to the console, unless printing is its sole responsibility. That's why we'll rather add the characters to a String variable and return them to print them later. Let's take a look at the code and describe it:

func healthBar() -> String {
    var s = "["
    let total : Double = 20

    var count : Double = round((health / maxHealth) * total)
    if (count == 0) && (alive()) {
        count = 1
    }

    for _ in 0..<Int(count) {
        s += "#"
    }

    s = s.padding(toLength: Int(total) + 1, withPad: " ", startingAt: 0)
    s += "]"
    return s
}

We prepare a String s and assign a leading character [ to it. Then, we specify the maximum amount of characters the health bar can hold and store it to a total variable (e.g. 20). Basically, all we need now is the rule of three. If maxHealth equals the total number of characters, health equals the count number of characters. Meaning that, the count variable contains the number of characters representing the current health.

Mathematically, here's what the calculation would look like: count = (health / maxHealth) * total. We round it up to the nearest whole number.

It might happen that the warrior's health was so low, it would be printed as 0 characters, but the warrior would be still alive. In this case, we'll draw it as 1 character, otherwise, it'd seem like the warrior has already died.

Then we just simply concatenate the right number of indicator characters to the String s, using a for loop. We'll add spaces using padding() and make the length total + 1 long (we have to convert it to Int again) where the extra character is the first [ character. Finally, we add the trailing bracket and return the string.

We got to the padding() method, which we missed in the basic constructs course. Swift has only one such method that works quite simply, but can only add characters from the right side. If we wanted to add characters from the left side, then we'd have to write our own logic.

Now we'll put our classes to the test! We'll go to the main.swift file and create a warrior (and a "rolling die" since we need to pass one as a parameter in the warrior's constructor). Then we'll print whether he's alive and print his health bar:

let die = RollingDie(sidesCount: 10)
let warrior = Warrior(name: "Zalgoren", health: 100, damage: 20, defense: 10, die: die)

print("Warrior: \(warrior)") // description test
print("Alive: \(warrior.alive())") // alive() test
print("Health: \(warrior.healthBar())") // healthBar() test

The output:

Warrior: Zalgoren
Alive: true
Health: [####################]

Fight

It's time to implement methods for attack and defense!

Defense

Let's start with the defense. The defend() method will resist hits whose power will be passed as a parameter. The method should look something like this:

func defend(hit: Int) {
    let injury = Double(hit - (defense + die.roll()))
    if (health > 0) {
        health -= injury
        if (health <= 0)
            health = 0
    }
}

First, we calculate the injury. To do this, we subtract our defense and whatever number the die rolled from the enemy's attack (hit). If our defense wasn't enough to resist the enemy's attack, (injury > 0), we take points off our health. This condition is important, because if we endured the hit and the injury was -2, our health would increase instead. After reducing the health, we check whether it's not negative and eventually set it to zero.

Attack

The attack() method will take the enemy as a parameter. That's because we need to call his defend() method which reacts to our attack and reduces the enemy's health. Here we can see the benefits of references in Swift, we can simply pass instances and call methods on them without having to copy these instances. First, we calculate the hit, like in defense. Our hit will be the damage + whatever value the die rolled. Then we'll call the defend() method on the enemy and pass the hit value to it:

func attack(enemy: Warrior) {
    let hit = damage + die.roll()
    enemy.defend(hit: hit)
}

That's pretty much it. Now, let's try to attack our warrior and redraw his health in our program. To keep things simple, we won't create another warrior yet and just let our warrior attack himself:

let die = RollingDie(sidesCount: 10)
let warrior = Warrior(name: "Zalgoren", health: 100, damage: 20, defense: 10, die: die)
print("Warrior: \(warrior)") // description test
print("Alive: \(warrior.alive())") // alive() test
print("Health: \(warrior.healthBar())") // healthBar() test

warrior.attack(enemy: warrior) // attack test
print("Health after attack: \(warrior.healthBar())")

The output:

Warrior: Zalgoren
Alive: true
Health: [####################]
Health after attack: [##################  ]

It seems to work as expected. Let's proceed to the last part of today's lesson - messages:

Messages

As planned, we'll notify the user about attacks and defenses through the console. The printing will not be performed by the Warrior class, it'll only return messages as strings. One approach could be to set the return type of the attack() and defend() methods to String and return the message when these methods are called. However, what if we wanted to return a message from a method that already returns some other value? A method can't return 2 things and if it somehow did, it'd be very unreadable...

We'll make a universal solution, the message will be stored in a private field message and we'll create set and get methods for it. We could make the field public, but there's no reason to allow its modification from outside the class. Concatenating complex messages could also become problematic without the set method.

Let's add the message to the class fields:

private var message : String = ""

Now, let's create the two methods. Private setMessage() will take a string as a parameter and set the message to the private field:

private func setMessage(_ message: String) {
    self.message = message
}

There's nothing difficult about it. A public method for getting the message is easy, too:

func getLastMessage() -> String {
    return message
}

Let's upgrade our attack() and defend() methods to set the messages, now they look like this:

func attack(enemy: Warrior) {
    let hit = damage + die.roll()
    setMessage("\(name) attacks with a hit worth \(hit) hp")
    enemy.defend(hit: hit)
}

func defend(hit: Int) {
    let injury = Double(hit - (defense + die.roll()))
    var message = ""
    if (health > 0) {
        health -= injury
        message = "\(name) defended against the attack but still lost \(Int(injury)) hp"
        if (health <= 0) {
            health = 0
        }
    } else {
        message = "\(name) blocked the hit"
    }
    setMessage(message)
}

Let's add a second warrior, just for completeness' sake:

let die = RollingDie(sidesCount: 10)
let warrior = Warrior(name: "Zalgoren", health: 100, damage: 20, defense: 10, die: die)

print("Health: \(warrior.healthBar())") // healthBar() test

// warrior attack phase
let enemy = Warrior(name: "Shadow", health: 60, damage: 18, defense: 15, die: die)
enemy.attack(enemy: warrior)
print(enemy.getLastMessage())
print(warrior.getLastMessage())
print("Health: \(warrior.healthBar())")

The output:

Health: [####################]
Shadow attacks with a hit worth 27 hp
Zalgoren defended against the attack but still lost 12 hp
Health: [##################  ]

Now we have the rolling die and the warriors.

In the next lesson, Arena with warriors in Swift, we'll create the arena.


 

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Article has been written for you by Filip Němeček
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