Hi Veterans :)
I've been going over the next step in my project trying to come up with an approach in theory first, to think about implications and potential of different approaches.
I would appreciate your opinions on how to do this best, by which I mean simple but flexible and easy to work with going forward.
The goal is this:
I have a guitar fretboard with 12 x 6 possible notes that will pop up during the game. I'm planning to document the reaction times the player needs to answer the correct names, not only for every single note but for five distinctive regions that overlap horizontally, meaning some notes belong to two regions and will have two reaction times based on context.
In the long run I would like to append all reaction times and create statistics from that, which can be filtered by day/week/month etc..
My idea in each scenario is to create a big sprite for the actual fretboard and in top create text fields for the note names with instance variables that store an index, that I can use to read and write from arrays later on.
Now I'm considering 2 approaches:
1) 5 2D arrays for the different positions and 5 overlapping fields of sprites. (oredered horizontally, then vertically)
In this case the arrays would store
X: times
Y: note names
2) 1 3D array with the third dimension representing the positions
In this case the arrays would store
X: times
Y: note names
Z: the above for each position
I'm leaning towards the 3D array because I feel it's more logical to only have the actual number of note instances and only one array to deal with. On the other hand I've never before worked with 3D arrays and don't know the implications.
Is there anything you can recommend based on this information? And I guess my first question would be: Is any array actually a good way to store that amount of data in the first place, or how do you usually handle saving data like that for more than one session?
Thanks for bearing with me here! :)