Java: Resizable Arraylists are won't stay parallel

Question

I have a situation where my 'agent' objects contain a vast amount of data, including graphics, physics, and now also ai.

I was previously coding components of these 'agents' in separate objects, that were parallel. Now I realize, since the agents are contained in a re-sizable ArrayList, that if one of the agents is destroyed, the indices will no longer be parallel to the ai components.

Truth be told, the agent class is already 10 pages long, and it is very sensible to contain the ai methods and data in a separate object. One issue with this, of course, is that the methods will be 'reproduced' in a way, because instead of having one ai object that will accept and process the data from the many agents, I need one ai object per every agent object.

I asked about this once before and was told that having multiple instances of methods has no effect on performance or memory bloat, so that shouldn't be an issue.

I am not sure how I can solve this problem, except by possibly storing an agent_id in the agent object as well as the ai object and then running a search on each list whenever I need to call them. Needless to say, that is terrible way of doing things performance wise.

In C++, the simple solution to this problem would be a pointer, where the pointer to the proper ai instance would be contained in the agent data. I don't know how to do this, so my best solution is to just cram more data into the agent object and have it passed as an argument to the ai object.

Is there any better way to solve this 'parallel mismatching' problem.

Edit>>>
I know I can stuff all of the data into the agent class. What I was taught, is having a 30 page class is an example of bad oop structure.

My question is, how can I create a /reference/ to store in the agent class, while keeping all of the ai data encapsulated in the ai module.

Edit>> Example

    public class Agent{

    //pseudo code that represents what I need (yes the class declaration order is wrong)
    AI_ref   = new Reference(ai_module);
    Graphics_ref = new Reference(graphics_module);

    int[][] physics_data; //Like I said, 10 pages of this

    void method1(){}
    void method2(){}
    //....

    }

    public class graphics_module{

    int[][] graphics_data; //this is also about 10 pages

    void method1(){}
    void method2(){}
    //....

    }

    public class ai_module{

    int[][] ai_data; //this will likely span 5ish pages

    void method1(){}
    void method2(){}
    //....

    }

}

Answer 1

To create your references, try

public class Agent{

//pseudo code that represents what I need (yes the class declaration order is wrong)
    ai_module AI_ref   = new ai_module();
    graphics_module Graphics_ref = new graphics_module();

    int[][] physics_data; //Like I said, 10 pages of this

    void method1(){}
    void method2(){}
    //....

}

As for your parallel arrays, your example doesn't really provide enough detail to demonstrate what you are trying to do.

//pseudo code that represents what I need (yes the class declaration order is wrong)

Do you mean defining Agent before defining ai_module and graphics_module is wrong? It's not. The java compiler will have no issue with that.

You should probably work through a basic java tutorial. I think it will address many of your issues.