Basic Data Types

With your development environment set up now, we can delve a little further into programming with C# by covering some of the basic data structures:

• Integers
• Single precision (floats) and Double precision (doubles)
• Characters and Strings
• Booleans
• Enumerations

For a detailed description of every available data type (reference and value) available to you, check out Microsoft’s Developer Network.

C# is what is known as a strongly typed language (that is, you have to tell the compiler what type of data your variables are storing). For this tutorial and on I will attempt to give the explanations from a gaming perspective (that is, how would what we are talking about be used in a video game?).

Integer Values

Integer values store whole numbers, and are declared as follows:

int currentHP = 500;

Integers are invaluable for storing data related to numbers that should never be fractional (number of items in inventory, number of quests remaining, experience points, gold amount etc.)

Floats & Doubles

Floats (32-bit) and doubles (64-bit) can store very large and very small numbers, but are only accurate to a certain number of digits and are declared as follows:

float percentofhealthremaining = 0.5f;
double attackSpeed = 0.25;

Floats and doubles should be utilized to store information relating to any data member that might end up as a non-integer value.  This could range from a percentage (health remaining, mana remaining) value to calculating a player’s damage per second.

Characters & Strings

Characters and strings store text related data:  A character represents… an individual character or symbol (‘A’, ‘d’), while a string represents an array of character values (“Cloud”):

char battleGrade = 'A';
string charName = "Cloud";

String and character values can be used to store the names of virtually everything in a game environment.

Booleans

Booleans store “True” or “False”:  That’s it!  They are declared as follows:

bool isDead = false;
bool isAggressive = true;

Boolean values should be used to store any value that can simply be true or false (is the character dead, in a town, a criminal, etc.)

Enumerations

Last but not least (and my personal favorite): Enumerations.  Enumerations consist of a series of named values called the enumerator list.  Enumerations are initialized as follows:

enum PlayerClass { Mage, Warrior, Thief, Rogue };
enum MonsterState { Attacking, Dead, WaitingForPlayerInteraction };

Enumerations can add an incredible amount of readability into your code if they are used intelligently.

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Next time we will cover basic program flow, and how to control it.