IdentityLinkedList purpose

[Kallin]

What is the purpose of using the IdentityLinkedList? I swapped it out for a regular linkedlist and noticed that just one test failed. It's fairly unusual to see an obscure data structure like this used, perhaps we could find another solution? Any light shed on the reason for its use would be appreciated!

[oyachai]

There can be multiple minions of the same type at once on the board. So, in order to distinguish the minions, the minions would either have to be individually id'ed or their board positions kept. Keeping their board positions updated is a lot of work because minion positions change all the time, and manually id'ing all minions with unique ids is wasteful because Java does that for you with object ids already.

I think the test that failed is the only test that has duplicate minions.

I'm not a great Java programmer though... so if you have an idea on how to improve it, I'd love to know.

[Kallin]

Dude it's pretty great what you've created so far! I'm doing my best to grok what's there and I'll offer some pull requests soon to simplify things if possible.

[MrHen]

FWIW, I added more explicit tests around the IdentityLinkedList support that highlight why it exists. The actual linked list implementation seems rather memory heavy so it may be worth looking into an alternative since we'll potentially have millions of instances at any given time.

But in the meantime, this issue can probably be closed. :)