Too many 'if' statements?

Question

The following code does work how I need it to, but it\'s ugly, excessive or a number of other things. I\'ve looked at formulas and attempted to write a few solutions, but I

Answer 1

I don't like any of the solutions presented except for JAB's. None of the others make it easy to read the code and understand what is being computed.

Here's how I would write this code -- I only know C#, not Java, but you get the picture:

const bool t = true;
const bool f = false;
static readonly bool[,] attackResult = {
    { f, f, t, f }, 
    { f, f, f, t },
    { f, t, t, t },
    { t, f, t, t }
};
[Flags] enum HitResult 
{ 
    Neither = 0,
    PlayerOne = 1,
    PlayerTwo = 2,
    Both = PlayerOne | PlayerTwo
}
static HitResult ResolveAttack(int one, int two)
{
    return 
        (attackResult[one, two] ? HitResult.PlayerOne : HitResult.Neither) | 
        (attackResult[two, one] ? HitResult.PlayerTwo : HitResult.Neither);
}    

Now it is much more clear what is being computed here: this emphasizes that we are computing who gets hit by what attack, and returning both results.

However this could be even better; that Boolean array is somewhat opaque. I like the table lookup approach but I would be inclined to write it in such a way that made it clear what the intended game semantics were. That is, rather than "an attack of zero and a defense of one results in no hit", instead find a way to make the code more clearly imply "a low kick attack and a low block defense results in no hit". Make the code reflect the business logic of the game.