Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Classified intel
In this section, we used the
IComparable<T>
generic interface to create a custom sort-
ing method to sort the generic
List<T>
objects. We know that the generic
List<T>
ob-
jects are similar to
ArrayList
, except with the specific type; in this case,
UserData
.
To be able to order
List<T>
, we will call the
List<T>.Sort()
method. This method
will automatically call the
CompareTo()
function, which is the method in
ICompar-
able<T>
. This method is used to compare the value between two objects, which will re-
turn only three values (less than 0 or -1, 0, greater than 0 or 1). The value less than 0 means
the first object is less than other object. 0 means both objects are equal. Then the value
greater than 0 means the first object is greater than other object.
In the
Hiscore
script in
SortByScore()
, we will see that we used the
Sort()
func-
tion for
_users
, which is the
List<UserData>()
array. The
Sort()
method uses
the default comparer,
Comparer<T>.Default
, for type
T
to determine the order of the
list elements. Then, the
Comparer<T>.Default
property will check whether or not the
IComparable<T>
generic interface is implemented, which we already implemented in
our
UserData
script.
The result from the sorting method will return
_users
from the lowest score to the
highest score. So, we use the
Reverse()
function to reverse the result, which will give
_users
order from the highest to the lowest score.
Note
List<T>
is in the .NET framework class library. We might want to check out the follow-
ing MSDN Microsoft library links:
• For more information about the
IComparable<T>
interface and the
Com-
pareTo()
method, visit the following links:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/lib-
