Hi! This is my first post on the GameDev messages boards. I''m currently designing and programming a hard coded adventure game engine. My game is going to be like the old point ''n'' click Sierra and Lucas Arts games. I have a few theories about how I''ll do a lot of stuff, but I''d like a few opinions from other programmers on how to do stuff like Room Handling, Inventory, Flags, and Background/Character blending. If anyone has done anything like this before, please reply with your thoughts. Thanks alot.

Well, first you might know dynamic linked lists, classes, unions, pointers, do you?

Thanks, Arthur(rockslave)

Yeah. I''ve been studying up on my C++. I haven''t mastered the language yet, but I understand most aspects of it. Although I still don''t see the point of pointers.

Pointers are mostly used not have to send so much data as parameters... I''ll give u an example:

You tell your friend you know a real nice house somewhere... You want to tell him what it looks like. ok, u could talk forever about the windows, the color, the layout and all that stuff, or you could just give him the adress (= pointer ) and tell him to go there and look at it for himself.

another good point is for reference to structures:

ok... you''ve got a House structur, which maybe contains the number of windows, the color, the layout, etc....
now you want to tell him, that there''s another nice house of which u don''t know the adress, but u know that it''s 4 houses further than the other house (the upper example). so u just tell him the adress of the first house (=pointer) and tell him that it''s 4 houses further (= pointer + 4).

does that make sense?
You won''t be able to make a good (fast ) game without knowing how and why to use pointers ( i had to study that up too )

hope that helped,
cya,
Phil

Visit Rarebyte!
and no!, there are NO kangaroos in Austria (I got this questions a few times over in the states ;)

Pointers are also good for saving on memory. For example, instead of passing a huge object as one of your parameters to a function, and creating another copy of it, you just give the function the address of the object and let it use the same one. Much more efficient that way...

For your game, I would reccommend creating some classes like Player, Screen and that sort of thing. Get the basics working before doing all of the interactions etc. Dont fall into the trap of doing the easy stuff first either... then you'll never want to do the tough stuff. Good luck!

- Daniel
VG Games


Edited by - deakin on August 11, 2000 6:54:07 AM