Dict and dict operations

[MaanooAk]

For openage dicts will be very useful in order to deal with what in the engine are called ResourceBundle.

In nyan creating a set of something like ResourceAmount would be very verbose, but with dict(Resource, float) a collection of resources can encoded very nicely:

Unit():
    cost : dict(Resource, float)

Knight(Unit):
    cost = {Food: 70, Gold: 75}

However, there is a need to be able to access the dict values separately. I would suggest something like that:

CheaperKnights<Knight>():
    cost[Gold] -= 20

Sidenote: Time (training time) could also be modeled as a Resource and be included in the cost

[TheJJ]

I was always unsure about adding a dict-type, because it may have <gmanvoice> unforseen consequences </gmanvoice>:
Currently you can implement dicts by using a set of objects, and the objects then have some values. Those objects are always referencable, as they have a name. Thus they can always be patched. When we add a real key-value type, values can get lost. If valueType is an object, the object is always referencable. Non-object values can get lost when it is updated in the dict. Which may not be desirable.

I guess that we should add dicts, though. Intuitively they seem a good addition, and loosing non-object values is probably okay, because who cares for a "random string" or a number like 235. If you overwrite it, you likely won't revert.

So all in all I think you are right and we should add a dict-type.

[MaanooAk]

Yes but its huge

Something():
    FoodCost(ResourceAmount):
        resource: Food
        amount: 50
    WoodCost(ResourceAmount):
        resource: Wood
        amount: 50
    cost: {FoodCost, WoodCost}

My first thought was some kind of an anonymous object, but then you have something that cannot be referenced so why not just dicts.

Also having a bunch of prebuild WoodCost50, WoodCost75 but again you cannot patch them.

Maybe having a way to inline it, but then it gets ugly...

[TheJJ]

Yea indeed, so let's go for dict :)