Renaming item/relic/curse/companion variables

[emmeken]

The information about items, relics, curses and companions is currently held in variables that are simply named $item1, $curse10 etc. As a result, when reading the code it's not immediately obvious which item, curse etc. is being referenced. We could rename them to for example $itemWater, $curseHeight etc.

I volunteer to implement the rename if @FloricSpacer agrees.

[FloricSpacer]

Hmm, that sounds like a good change if you want to go through and edit it. I mainly used the numbered name list so it was easy to quickly create a bunch of passages with minimal differences that I could edit later. It may be a bit slower to add curses to the last 2 layers though, since it's much more annoying to use these names than just the numbered ones. It's probably a good change to make to increase readability of the code though.

Though, rather than a name like $curseHeight, maybe you could use the full curse name to minimize ambiguity, so something like $curseDizzyingHeights.

[emmeken]

The item renaming is more tricky than it looks at first sight, because of the way variables work in SugarCube: the $items array contains all the item objects, but these objects are effectively copied on every user action. In other words, $item1 and $items[0] both represent units of water, but if the count is changed on one, it won't affect the other.

The game code works around that behavior by using only $items[0] to access the item, but that means that renaming the $item1 variable has very little impact on the game: it is used only once, to initialize the $items array.

What aspects of an item can actually change? I've only seen the count being changed. If that is indeed the only thing that can change, it would make sense to split off the counts into a separate variable and convert all the $item1 etc. variables into constants (JavaScript objects assigned to the setup object). That would keep them out of the save data, which is more efficient and would be a step towards save game compatibility across game releases (one of many steps though).

The counts could be a JavaScript Map with as the key the item name and the integer count as the value.