Better use of entity lists?

[Trumpcard]

The type of collection you use really needs to be defined by the bulk of the operations you are going to be performing...

Are you searching, adding/removing elements to the front/back of the collection, etc..

Our list does all of those pretty regularly..


Consider the performance impacts of how we do it now, everytime you make a combat hit, the iterator has to loop through the entire entity list (lets say 20 clients, 400 mobs, 200 doors, 100 objects), find all the clients (performing an isClient check on each entity), check their distance from you, and if they're within a certain range, spit out a message to your client to inform you of the hit...

As you can imagine, this is highly unoptimized.. Will a new collection help? Only for searches (look at GetMob) really...

I think probably the simpliest and best solution is to just split the lists up, entity_list for mob, client_list, etc, and the calls changed to use the right one, this way youre drasticlly reducing the number of objects your having to compare against to find the one you want.

Since we regularly insert/delete (spawn, mob dies, etc), the efficiency boost of a sorted list like a hash map is questionable (will the speedup in searches offset the decrease in efficiency of inserts/deletes, a sorted list has to resort the entire table everytime something changes)

Ultimately, probably not, a hashmap or binary tree is probably the best option, and splitting the lists out, even if we stuck to linked lists, would improve the performance immensely... That in itself would probably give us the most bang for the buck (the biggest hike in performance with the least amount of effort)

I like a RB binary tree personally, but it might be a pain in the ass to implement...