I have a bunch of different enemy classes that move and behave differently, and often more than one instance of them is spawned on the screen as it's essentially all random, so I need to use an ArrayList so that I can control the behaviour of each individual enemy class.
But, this leaves me with a bunch of ArrayLists like this:
//Example:
ArrayList<Enemy1> enemies = new ArrayList<Enemy1>();
ArrayList<Enemy2> enemies = new ArrayList<Enemy2>();
ArrayList<Enemy3> enemies = new ArrayList<Enemy3>();
ArrayList<Enemy4> enemies = new ArrayList<Enemy4>();
ArrayList<Enemy5> enemies = new ArrayList<Enemy5>();
Is there any way to change the kind of data the ArrayList will store so that I can just empty and re-use different instances of the same ArrayList? Or anything, just so I don't have to have a billion ArrayLists in my code?
Additional info: I'm doing this using the Java Processing library, not sure if it changes anything.
Sorry if the answer is blatantly obvious to you, please don't be rude.
All your EnemyX classes must inherit from one interface or abstract class, then you can use a List<Enemy> that can hold any EnemyX object
Interface Enemy{}
Class Enemy1 implements Enemy{}
Class Enemy2 implements Enemy{}
Class Enemy3 implements Enemy{}
Use
List<Enemy> l = new ArrayList<>();
l.add(new Enemy1());
l.add(new Enemy2());
l.add(new Enemy3());
you can define an Enemy super class as (abstract or without abstract) with required methods and extend all other Enemy... classes from it and then access sub-classes from super-class:
public class Enemy { }
public abstract class Enemy { }
class Enemy1 extends Enemy { }
class Enemy2 extends Enemy { }
class Enemy3 extends Enemy { }
class Enemy4 extends Enemy { }
public static void main(String[] args) {
List<Enemy> l = new ArrayList<>();
l.add(new Enemy1());
l.add(new Enemy2());
l.add(new Enemy3());
}