Finally ... :-).
I had a look at the code and there are a couple of things that I
noticed. Hope I'm not too picky ;-).
You're the architect. Picky is part of your job description. :) Also, if my code is ever crap, I want to know it, so I can fix it and learn from my mistakes.
1) Practically all of the ability, attribute, property and skill
classes have members name, cost and currentVal/rank in common. Having
this in a common, possibly abstract base class would avoid a lot of
code duplication.
2) Not so sure about that one. It might make sense to give the
property class a pointer to its underlying attribute. If the
implementation of getCurrentVal would be dynamically based on that
attribute, the property would always be up-to-date, even though the
value of the attribute changes.
I've noticed the similarity in the classes and the possible uses of tying properties directly to their underlying attributes. I'll work on getting properties pointer-based. As for the abstraction, I'll work on a way to do that as well.
3) Mostly cosmetic. Not sure if there are any standard naming
conventions in the C++ world. If so, Adonthell doesn't follow them
;-). However, we have our own set of rules that are followed more or
less throughout the codebase. Maybe they would be followed better if
they were documented somewhere ;-). Most importantly, class, method
and function names are all lower case, using underscore (_) as
delimiter between words.
I'm not sure if there are, either. I think it's more of a meta-standard, in which both camel casing and underscore usage are acceptable. I started into programming by learning Pascal in high school, then got into C++ and Perl, so I camel case extensively.
All in all, I believe implementing number (1) and partially following
(3) would be beneficial for now.
Changing the naming conventions will be the easier of the two, but I'll see to both and leave 2 for later.
I could also possibly zip my Windows dev environment and upload it
somewhere, if that would be of some use to you. I start to like how
the combination of CTD 4.0/Eclipse 3.3 has turned out (although I'm
also looking forward to XCode
3.0).
I played around with Eclipse a little before my machine when toes up. I'd probably use a MinGW/Eclipse toolchain once the option is open to me.