I was going along, working on a iPhone port of HamQuest, when I wandered into the same goofy chain of dependencies that I ran into the first time. This time, I hope I have done better, but you can be the judge.
Player specific information(equipment, statistics, etc) is stored in a class called, appropriately, Player.
The representation of the Player on the map is a MapCreature, as are all other types of creature.
MapCreature has some creature instance information(wounds, mostly).
The Player class knows about the MapCreature instance for the player.
The MapCreature instance has a reference to a CreatureDescriptorBase, for which there exists a special PlayerCreatureDescriptor as a subclass. For normal creatures, CreatureDescriptors are used (another subclass of CreatureDescriptorBase).
All of the various CreatureDescriptor instances and the PlayerCreatureDescriptor exist in a CreatureTable, which is used to populate a maze.
The PlayerCreatureDescriptor knows about the Player, so it can query it for statistics important to the operation of a MapCreature (mainly attacking and defending).
So, unfortunately, there is a circle: Player->MapCreature->PlayerCreatureDescriptor->Player. I get around having an actual circular dependency by using a base class.
It is improved from the last time, however. MapCreature only held a CreatureIdentifier, which would then be used to look up the CreatureDescriptor in the CreatureTable. I realized today that it was silly, because then a MapCreature needed a reference to the CreatureTable. So, cut out the middle man.
Thanks for listening.
