Reassigning position within an array - c++

Question

I've been working on a dungeon crawling game, and I've hit an issue with moving the player's coordinates throughout my 2-d array. Currently, when choosing a move, the move is passed into the function, but the position is not reassigned. I've tried both pass my reference and by value.
Currently as written, the program gets the players move, but I don't think it's actually being passed into the updateMove function. I tried having the function cout << playerMove, but it doesn't show anything. Am I doing something to cause the move to not be passed into the updateMove function? I'm guessing this is why the move isn't updating.
I've added my main and the function in question:
int main()
{
// initialize random #
srand(static_cast<int>(time(NULL)));
do // play again loop
{
// define variables
bool win, lose;
char playerMove;
char dungeon[MAX_ROW][MAX_COL];
int cash;
displayInstructions(); // display instructions
initializeDungeon(dungeon); // initialize dungeon
do
{
setTraps(dungeon); // set traps
displayDungeon(dungeon); // display dungeon
playerMove = getMove(playerMove);
// check for valid move
// reassign player to new position
updateMove(playerMove, dungeon);
//update map now that move is legit
if (!win && !lose)
{
updateDungeon();
}
} while (!win && !lose);
} while (repeat());
}
void updateMove(char & playerMove, char dungeon[MAX_ROW][MAX_COL])
{
int px, py;
int dx = 0, dy = 0;
if(playerMove == UP && px != 0)
{
dx--;
}
else if (playerMove == DOWN && px != 7)
{
dx++;
}
else if (playerMove == LEFT && py != 0)
{
dy--;
}
else if (playerMove == RIGHT && py != 8)
{
dy++;
}
if(dx != 0 || dy != 0)
{
dungeon[px][py] = SPACE; // I updated this to be an 'empty' space based on my variables
px += dx;
py += dy;
dungeon[px][py] = PLAY;
}
} ````

Answer 1

Needing to iterate over the entire map to find the player is rather wasteful and slow. It also makes coding harder as you're seeing here.
You should store the player's position somewhere so you know it at a glance and can refer back to it for clearing the old position.
Something like this:
int px, py;
void updateMove(char playerMove, char dungeon[MAX_ROW][MAX_COL])
{
int dx = 0, dy = 0;
if(playerMove == 'u' && px != 0)
{
dx--;
}
else if (playerMove == 'd' && px != 8)
{
dx++;
}
else if (playerMove == 'l' && py != 0)
{
dy--;
}
else if (playerMove == 'r' && py != 9)
{
dy++;
}
if(dx != 0 || dy != 0) {
dungeon[px][py] = EMPTY;
px += dx;
py += dy;
dungeon[px][py] = PLAY;
}
}