Setting up a plist to store application data (not settings) for an iPhone game

Question

I am writing an iPhone game and have it working well with my level data hard coded but I would like to store the level data in a plist a load it at launch. I have never use

Answer 1

What you should do is create an NSDictionary with all of the applicable data that you want, and read it from and write it to NSUserDefaults.

Answer 2

• Add your plist file as a resource file in your project. Say, it's name is config.plist

• Get the path for the resource file. (Though, be careful of [NSBundle mainBundle] as it will not return the unit test bundle in a unit test.)

NSString *plistPath = [[NSBundle mainBundle] pathForResource:@"config" ofType:@"plist"];

• Your root object is an array of levels. Load it in a NSArray.

// this is autoreleased. you can retain it if needed
NSArray *levelArray = [NSArray arrayWithContentsOfFile:plistPath];

• Now you have the array of levels. Each level is a dictionary. Load the level i (counting from 0).

NSDictionary *level = [levelArray objectAtIndex:i];

• Now you can get the objects from level dictionary by using objectForKey method. For example, to get the sequence array:

NSArray *seq = [level objectForKey:@"levelSequence"];

• You can loop through the levelArray to alloc, init and add to levels array for all your levels.

Hope it helps. Please note that I have not compiled the code, so there might be some typos.