I've been studying C for a couple months now, and now I want to start on a small project that'll keep me busy for a few weeks or so. What should I start on?
Write an reverse-Polish notation calculator that compiles and goes through Valgrind without any errors. Just for fun, along with a stack, make it have a stack of stacks so the user can keep a history of states of the stack.
>>30
I assume those are troll ratings? A new programmer is not going to enjoy programming a roguelike, it's a monumental task even for the most experienced of programmers.
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Anonymous2008-10-04 7:08
>>31
Those are good-idea ratings. A roguelike will keep him entertained and force him to learn all about data structures. He doesn't have to write the ultimate Angband clone with randomly generated towns, 80 monster classes and 50 character attributes. I agree that writing a good roguelike is a monumental task, but the monumental bit comes from the balance and the monster, item and spell collections part, not from the programming part.
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Anonymous2008-10-04 7:17
>>32
Roguelikes are prone to overengineering: Just consider all the modifiers you want for equipment! There's a million ways to do it with objects and XML and Enterprise-grade shit; most successful roguelikes have it more or less hard coded.
Sure, dungeon generation, path finding, etc. is fun and good for learning, but that's the easy part.
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Anonymous2008-10-05 20:21
Making a roguelike is a great way to learn a lot of stuff that ends up being very useful knowledge (especially in a language like C or C++). I did this myself, although I didn't actually know what I was doing was called a "rougelike" until way after I had finished. I just wanted to make a simple game using C++ and picked up a bunch of stuff as I went along.
It is also a very good way to scare someone off of programming anything ever again if the programmer takes it seriously. That shit takes forever to actually make the game itself any fun, fair, or balanced.
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Anonymous2008-10-05 20:47
Old programming contests have a bunch of fun little (in terms of code) problems.
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Anonymous2008-10-06 6:49
A Roguelike is a damn good idea. You might want to look into libtcod for console support, especially if you're doing development under Windows. Anyway though I second the Roguelike idea, it'll teach you a hell of a lot.
Console emulation has it's uses, but a strictly turn-based game is not one of them.
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Anonymous2008-10-06 10:46
>>37
Makes no sense, and libtcod provides, like, 9 things that are necessary but may be hard for a newbie to write.
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Anonymous2008-10-06 12:10
What I did was get something that allows for colored text and backgrounds (I forget what it was called), used the winmm library for sound and music, and coded everything else from scratch.
>>36 recommends libtcod for console development; ncurses is superior to libtcod's console emulation (which is a mess to accommodate a broken operating system without real console support). Obviously comparing a rendering library like ncurses to an entire toolkit is moot, but >>37 wasn't attempting to make that comparison.