For context, using C# inside the Unity3D Editor.
I have more and more often started using enums to loosely couple things to settings.
For example i am setting up an item, and i want to give it a visual from a pool of defined visuals. That visual is basically a class that contains a sprite, a color, and a model attached to an integer unique ID. From this Unique ID, i generate an Enum. And it takes some effort to verify that the UniqueID is actually Unique, and catch some edge cases regarding that.
The benefit of doing the above, is that the enum is all that has to be stored on the item, to link it to the visual. At runtime there is a dictionary created to lookup the enum, and then request the stored visual to be loaded/used. This loosely couples the visuals to the item, so loading the item list does not automatically load all of the visual assets associated with the item. The last part is unity default behavior and is really annoying, and it really slows down the game and consumes a massive amount of RAM in this default behavior.
As a result we have a lot of those enums for various purposes and a lot of lookup stuff happening. And currently we are having no big problems with it.
However, the enums and the editing/generation of those enums is error prone in the sense that when values are removed, the items (and any other interested parties) are non the wiser, which then has to be either tested before build, or runs into a safety catch/error at runtime.
My question is. Is this a blatant abuse of Enums? And if so, what would be a better way of approaching this problem of loose coupling? If it is not, what would be a better way to set up and manage these enums in a safe way? So alarm bells will go off if anything using the enum now has an invalid value, or the values meaning would change? Which i imagine is hardly possible, and requires code all over the place to "self check" on recompile?
Or does this just all boil down to team discipline to manage the values well, and know what the enums mean and represent? In which case, it would never be able to make this designer friendly unless i write a custom editor for each and every one of these.
Thanks for any insights you might be able to provide.
If I understand you correctly, you're trying to associate each item with one of multiple static visuals? If this is the case you can simply write each visual as a static readonly object inside the visuals class. In your "item" objects you can then make a field called e.g. "visual" and set this to reference the right visual.
I don't know what makes the visuals load, but if the constructor does, then I believe they will load when the visual class is first used at runtime.