I am building a part of a tower defense game in a strictly console environment and i am stuck at the moving of a creature lets say "c", i would like the letter "c" to start on the left and move a space at a time to the right on the same line basically:
c (one second later)
c (one second later)
c and so on....
i thought that this could be implimented with an array but am lost, i want to be able to use simple code, not weird libraries and weird methods, just simple as possible. Thank you
One method is display all the characters, then a carriage return ('\r') and then reprint the line.
This allows you to "walk" characters across. This will only work on video terminals that do not advance a line upon receiving a CR.
Another method would be to print 10 backspace characters, a space, then your 10 'c'. This may not be as fast as the carriage return method above, but worth looking at.
As others have said, you may want to look into a terminal library such as ncurses. The library allows you to position the cursor on the screen, based on the terminal type. This may require setting up the console window to emulate a terminal.
Related
I'm making a game in C++ console using UTF-16 characters to make it little bit more interesting, but some characters are different size then others. So, when I print the level, things after character are moved further than others. Is there any way how to add spacing between characters with some console function, I try to google something helpful, but I have not found nothing.
I tried to change font size by CONSOLE_FONT_INFOEX, but it changed nothing, maybe i implement it in the wrong way, or it not work with UTF-16 characters.
// i tried this
CONSOLE_FONT_INFOEX cfi;
cfi.cbSize = sizeof(cfi);
cfi.dwFontSize.X= 24;
cfi.dwFontSize.Y= 24;
Unfortunately I expect that this will heavily depend on the particular console you're using. Some less Unicode-friendly consoles will treat all characters as the same size (possibly cutting off the right half of larger characters), and some consoles will cause larger characters to push the rest of the line to the right (which is what I see in the linked image). The most reasonable consoles I've observed have a set of characters considered "double-wide" and reserve two monospace columns for those characters instead of one, so the rest of the line still fits into the grid.
That said, you may want to experiment with different console programs. Can I assume you are on Windows? In that case, you might want to give Windows Terminal a try. If that doesn't work, there are other console programs available, such as msys's Mintty, or ConEmu.
So, after some intense googling i found the solution. And solution is fight fire with fire. Unicode include character Thin Space, that is 1/5 of the normal space, so if i include two of them with one normal space after my problematic character, the output is diplaying how i want. If anybody runs into some simliar issue, unicode have lot of different sized spaces. I found Website that shows them all of them, with their propperties.
fixed output picture
I have a list of instructions in my program and they are activated by entering a string. There are a large number of possible instructions. You could call them commands if you like.
I already have a program that can successfully execute the instructions I've added so far.
For example, adding a person to the database would require the user to enter add "John" "Doe".
This would output to the screen Added John Doe to the database, ID#1234. The IDs are random.
I know how to add colors; in this output text, "John Doe" would be colored green.
What I'm wondering is, can I make it so that color changes as one types? Because I learned how to use some kind of keyboard mode change so that when I type a password, all characters are displayed as * of any color I desire, or even nothing displayed at all, through "display" of \0, and I know how to do that. I was wondering if the color could change before the complete string (extracted with std::getline(std::cin, str);) is typed.
The first reason I want the colors to change is because when there are so many commands, and I already have more complex commands than that, I want to provide a way for the user to be able to correct syntax mistakes before they press enter. Something like Windows PowerShell, perhaps, which was written in C#. I know that C# is a very different language than C++, but if C# can achieve something like that, I want to see if C++ can as well. My hope is that it doesn't require thousands of lines of application-specific code, especially considering that PowerShell is an actual application and not a simple terminal-run executable. And while PowerShell appears to be open-source, I don't understand C#. See the bottom for the second reason.
I have no idea if this is possible, but because similar manipulation of entered text is possible (as I said, I know how to add colors and also mask text as some other single character like *), I want to know if this is also possible.
Simple examples:
Firstly, the user should know when they have not entered a valid command, and when they have. I want the text to be in red until the letters entered so far consist of an actual keyword, like add. So, the text would be red until the second d is added, when it reverts to white, and if another letter is entered, it becomes red again.
Example 1: add "John Elias" "Doe"
After the space, the text after "add" should be red no matter what, unless the character after the space is a quotation mark. In order to tell the user that they have not terminated the string, the text beyond the (orange?) quotation mark should be orange. When the final quotation mark is entered, the entire content of the quotation marks (including the quotation marks) should be some other color (probably green?) to tell the user that they have successfully entered an argument. The same applies to any instances of quotation-mark arguments. Note that a space is allowed in a quotation argument.
Example 2: list-info 1234
In this command, it gets more complex. list is a separate command, so the text should be red until t is entered, and it turns white. But then it turns red again after that, until o is entered, and it turns white again. The numerical argument following it should be red if the entered character isn't a digit. If it is, it's still red, because the only valid IDs are 3- or 4-digit numbers. It should turn green(?) once a third digit is entered, and still stay green when another digit is entered. But if a fifth digit is entered (or another character for that matter), the number turns red again. Although this would better be implemented as returning an error if the entered number is invalid, I would still like to know if this can be done as well.
Example 3: add "John" "Elias" "Doe" "fourth-string"
Since there is an overloaded function that enables an explicit first-middle-last name to be stored as well, it should be ok if there is a third string. But if there is a fourth string added, then it should be in red no matter what because add cannot take more than 3 arguments.
My question is, are any of these things possible? And yes, I am aware that it is almost certainly better to just implement an error system, but my intention is to expand my coding ability, and that is the second reason, and coding an error system will not do that because I have already done that for every command.
For reference, I'm operating in Linux Ubuntu 18.04, I compile with g++, my code conforms to C++17, I use ANSI escape sequences for color, bold, etc., and for masking characters with something like * I use a pointer to a char array (passed by address as char**) and a C-style FILE* to reference the input stream stdin (because I haven't bothered to conform it to a typical C++ implementation yet, learning ways to advance my current skills is my priority at this point in time).
I find it hard to explain but I will try my best. Some times in Linux- in the Terminal- things get printed but you can still write over them. eg when using wget you get a progress bar like this:
[===================> ]
Now if you type something while it is doing this it will 'overwrite' it. My question is how to recreate this in c++.
Will you use something like
cout <<
or something else?
I hope you understand what I am getting at...
btw I am using the most recent version of Arch with xfce4
Printing a carriage return character \r is typically interpreted in Linux as returning you to the beginning of the line. Try this, for example:
std::cout << "Hello\rJ";
The output will be:
Jello
This does depend on your terminal, however, so you should look up the meaning of particular control characters for your terminal.
For a more cross-platform solution and the ability to do more complex text-based user interfaces, take a look at ncurses.
You can print the special character \b to go back one space. Then you can print a space to blank it out, or another character to overwrite what was there. You can also use \r to return to the beginning of the current output line and write again from there.
Controlling the terminal involved sending various escape sequences to it, in order to move the cursor around and such.
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/historic-linux/ftp-archives/tsx-11.mit.edu/Oct-07-1996/info/vt102.codes
You could also use ncurses to do this.
I would like to write 80 (standard conole width) characters in one line without the cursor go to next line. It is only problem when I want to print 80 characters in the last line of console. It cases scrolling that I dont want.
Take a look:
I dont want the newline. any way to do this? :/
Im on Windows, DEV-C++, using WinApi for colors and moving the cursor (the window resize too).
Thanx for any answers.
Instead of using standard output functions use the Windows Console API to set the cursor position and draw characters. Specifically, take a look at WriteConsoleOutput.
MSDN Console API Docs
The only reason why you are on a new line is because the console is not big enought to support the eighty stars.
So it pushed the cursor to the next line.
through one or two "\b" at the end it moves the cursor back.
For the system-critical console window, the cursor should always stay visible, and the only way for it to do so after you've reached the max number of chars in a line, is to pop up on the next visible line (without actually making any new lines).
filter the output either in the originating program or with another program through a pipe. When you have outputted too many characters on a single line, do whatever you like (i.e., drop characters, overwrite, etc....).
I am trying to create a rougelike, and I am using windows for the different layers. The bottom most one is the map, and the one above that is the entity layer. I have the player character, and I want to move them around on the screen. I am printing a new # (the way the player is represented) to where they move, and I am trying to put a blank space to where the character was, so that you can see the map layer where before you couldn't. I tried using NULL, but it outputs ^#. Any idea what I can use?
Use a blank character, ' ', or if you prefer just 32 or 0x20.
NULL is actually defined as:
#define NULL 0
So you are writing the character with ASCII code 0, that is a NUL character, sometimes represented as Ctrl+#, or ^#.
On modern day machines clearing the screen and redrawing the whole screen completely after each edit would probably not cause too much performance issues. I know it's not the most optimal solution, but it gets rid of that kind of trail artifacts for good.