Complete roguelike tutorial using C++ and libtcod - extra 5: more generic items

Complete roguelike tutorial using C++ and libtcod -originally written by Jice Text in this tutorial was released under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported and the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts) on 2015-09-21.

part 1: setting up part 2: map and actors part 3: dungeon building part 4: field of view part 5: preparing for combat part 6: going berserk! part 7: the GUI part 8: items and inventory part 9: spells and ranged combat part 10.1: persistence part 10.2: game menu part 11: dungeon levels and character progression extra 1: about editors and IDE extra 2: debugging extra 3: scent tracking extra 4: makefiles extra 5: more generic items

This article is an optional "extra" that implements more generic items, making it possible to create new items with less code. It can be applied on article 9 source code.

In article 9, we brought more variety to the items, but each new item required a new class inheriting from Pickable. Yet, we can see some pattern in the way pickable actors behave :

They all select one or several targets :

• the wearer of the item (health potion)
• the wearer's closest enemy (lightning bolt)
• a selected actor (confusion)
• all actors close to a selected tile (fireball)

A fifth way that is not yet used but might be useful would be :

• all actors close to the wearer of the item

They all apply some effect to the selected targets :

• increase or decrease health (all but confusion)
• temporary replace the target's Ai (confusion)

So instead of implementing the target selection and the effect in a class inheriting from Pickable, why not add a TargetSelector and an Effect directly to the Pickable class ?