You might get some ideas from looking at the old classic Space Hulk. With a combination of "fog of war", scan blips for unknown enemies and high difficulty where something dangerous can surprise you at any time it does really well on creepiness.

Maybe you can use something similar to the scan blips for noises heard in the darkness outside the range of your torch.

Most of the calculations and updates of things to display in the GUI cannot be done until the player clicks "end turn" button. Of course I want to minimize the waiting time between turns, but as you say we are not really talking about noticeable differences so yes I was probably overengineering it.

I expect the amount of objects & calculations to grow over time if I keep working on the game and expand it further, especially with easy things like adding more items, so I was afraid I would lock myself into a design that would at some point limit the expansion possibilities.

Thanks, you are right of course that the iteration model should be fine here. Even if I have to iterate again for each object to check against a number of properties the check will not be that heavy. This will also give me the best flexibility to handle any special cases.

Linux here, but have Windows XP on one harddrive as well to play a few old games. And if you take that one step further I also have my old Amiga around to play even older games. Looks like I'm collecting one OS per decade on average.

Let's assume 100-200.

Hello forum, I'm new here. Was doing java development a number of years ago but has been out of it for too long and I'm now considering to start a little game project to get back in.

The plan is a turn-based strategy game with some RPG elements. You manage a smaller group with skills & personalities. There will be lots of items and resources. A lot of the challenge will be resource management and time management for your characters.

The game will be 2d and most things happen through selecting different options in events, moving around inventory and setting tasks to be completed. There will actually not be much graphics at all to begin with, I'm planning on using the Netbeans GUI builder to get most of the interface done

But there will be a lot of detailed simulation going on. You should have different tasks available to choose for your characters, for example to build something, but this will require tools, materials, skills etc. It all fits quite well into a nice OO structure with inheritance from less specialized object types etc.

But with my rusty java skills I'm still a bit confused about how to best go about this. For example, there will be a lot of possible tasks to do, but the selection needs to be limited based on character skills, tools available, raw materials etc. Some tasks will be unique, some can be repeated but they will all have different criteria for being selectable or not. What is the best approach here, do I keep task objects in a big list to iterate over every turn and ask each object if they are "selectable" based on the current world state or is there a smarter way?

The task selection is a good example of a problem that is coming up a lot in my design. I basically want to handle groups of object based on their properties (which could also change), but not have to keep the full objects in memory. Using a SQL backend would go a long way to help with the selection, but would introduce a few other complications and might be a bit overkill if there is a better way to do this.

I would be grateful for any general advice or pointers to similar examples.