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I'm trying to create a text adventure game that 7 rooms, with the information saved in files. This question IS similar to Connect Rooms Randomly in Adventure Game however the answer didn't exactly help me. I've gone about my program in a different way than that OP so I'm not sure how to use that answer to help me.

The idea is you have 7 rooms, named say A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. After the rooms are created, I need to randomly connect them to each other. Each room needs between 3 and 6 random connections. If room A is connected to B, C, and D, each of those rooms should be connected to A. This information is then saved to a file which is read later.

The code I have for this section so far is: 

    char *connections[7];
    int j = 0;
    int randomRoom;
    for (j = 0; j <= randConnections; j++) {
             randomRoom = rand() % 10;
             if (randomRoom == randName) {
                     randomRoom = rand() % 10;
             } else {
                    connections[j] = names[randomRoom];
    }

randConnections is a random int between 3 and 6, defined earlier in the code. names is a string array that holds the names of the rooms, also defined earlier in my program.

I am pretty new to C (I'm mostly experienced with Java) so I can't figure it out. I should mention, this is all in one function defined as:

    void createRooms(FILE *fp)

I know there are probably more efficient ways to do this, but at this point I'm just trying to get the code working and deal with efficiency later.

I've done a ton of googling and am honestly beating my head against the wall right now. Any help would be greatly appreciated. If there's any more code I should post or any other information let me know.

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clb
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1 Answers1

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C-style strings can get a bit confusing. A "string" in pure C is a char array. Arrays in C are strongly related to pointers. In fact, instead of defining

char myCString[6] = "hello";

You could define

char * myCString = "hello";

In fact, in the first case, myCString used alone will just return a pointer to the first element. The [] operator is just a convenient dereference and increment operator. So &(myCString+1) becomes myCString[1]

So long story short, your "string" array in C is really an array of char* - pointers to the first element of an array of characters

You're trying to assign this to a single character, which doesn't make logical sense. If you mean for the connections to truly be strings, do like kcraigie says.

Here's some backup I found, I'm afraid there are more nuances and I'm not an expert, but that's the gist - https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/C_Programming/Pointers_and_arrays#Pointers_and_Arrays

This may seem absurd coming from java - that's C for ya. C++'s standard library includes a string construct like what you'd be familiar with. It's a class that wraps a "raw" C array and controls access to it and manages it like Java and C# strings. Modern C++ best practices try to stay away from the raw arrays. You'll also notice that nothing stops you from calling MyCString[4000], which is just going to grab a piece of memory from the middle of nowhere and do heaven knows what. There is no bounds checking on raw arrays in C. Be careful!

mock_blatt
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