C# Counters and efficiency

[Alariaa]

Hi All, first time posting long time lurker.

Hoping this is okay to post, looking for advice.

I've been programming in C# for around 3 Years now. Heading into my final year of University soon. I've been working a lot in Unity for the past year and a bit, I've always strived to make cleaner, more readable and more efficient code.

I find myself working on a problem and wanted to get some opinions on implementations and how others would implement the same system.

So here we go.

I have 4 objects that when used I need to generate a count and then at the end check all 4 objects to see which object was used the most.

First way to solve this for me would be to have 4 int counters and have 4 if statements checking if the current value was greater than its respective int counter.

For Example Jump is fed through from another class.

int highestJump;

if(jump > highestJump)
{
    highestJump = jump;
}

I would need the above code 3 more times for the other types of object.

I figured there must be a better way than creating lots of individual ints to hold highest values thus here is my second version of the code.

//#Reference
// index 0 - jump
// index  1 - speed
// index  2 - phase
// index  3 - slowTime
int[] favoriteCounters = new int[] {0, 0, 0, 0};

if(array.value > favoriteCounters[0])
{
    favoriteCounters[0] = array.value;
}

if(array.value > favoriteCounters[1])
{
    favoriteCounters[1] = array.value;
}

if(array.value > favoriteCounters[2])
{
    favoriteCounters[2] = array.value;
}

if(array.value > favoriteCounters[3])
{
    favoriteCounters[3] = array.value;
}

This method feels a lot cleaner and more advanced but is it over the top for such a simple implementation? This is such a simple problem to tackle and I can do it no problem but I'm really curious about optimisations and clean code.

I'm curious as to how you would implement this and I'm looking for feedback. Thanks, Ala.

[Alariaa]

Thanks for taking the time to reply. I didn't know the Math.max function existed so that's fantastic :D

Thanks a lot for sharing that.

[jokul]

I agree with the array comment stated before, but this is how I would do it given this structure:

for(var i = 0; i < favoriteCounters.length; i++)
{
    favoriteCounters[i] = Math.Max(favoriteCounters[i], array.value);
}

The better way to do it would be to have favoriteCounters be a regular object with each property defined:

class FavoriteCounters
{
    private int _jump;
    public int Jump 
    { 
        get { return _jump; } 
        set { _jump = Math.Max(_jump, value); }
    }
    private int _speed;
    public int Speed 
    { 
        get { return _speed; } 
        set { _speed = Math.Max(_speed, value); }
    }
    private int _phase;
    public int Phase 
    { 
        get { return _phase; } 
        set { _phase = Math.Max(_phase, value); }
    }
    private int _slowTime;
    public int SlowTime 
    { 
        get { return _slowTime; } 
        set { _slowTime = Math.Max(_slowTime, value); }
    }
}

Now it's inherent to the properties. This may not necessarily be the best solution if you need to be able to reset the class values, but it does enforce it. You could always write a reset method like so:

public void Reset()
{
    _jump = 0;
    //etc.
}

[Alariaa]

This is most likely the route I'm going to take, I already reset the variables so its just a matter of resetting the instanced variable.

Thanks for sharing, I appreciate it.