ASCII roguelike game A.I

[Willo123]

Heya, I am a newbie working on an ascii roguelike, but I have not figured out how one can make BOT players move at the same time as players. Not after a player has moved, but also even if he stands still? Cause that would mean that two things is running at the same time, doesn't it?

I read that maybe it has to be done using threading?
If so I guess I assume it will be hard for me as a newcomer to create.

But I appreciate any thoughts on this!

[mbozzi]

No - threads aren't necessary.

Real concurrency was implemented as a performance hack. You should never use concurrency* except when you need the performance boost it may offer. You almost certainly shouldn't use it to apparently do more than one thing at once.

The difference is that instead of blocking to wait to see if the user presses keys, you will poll to see if any events are waiting for you to deal with. If there are, you can handle them, but if not, you will continue.

Games (well, event-based programs in general) usually have a main loop. Such a loop might look like this:

loop forever
  do 
    for each unhandled event 
      do 
        handle the event
      done
    update the screen
    run a program tick (i.e., update everything that you need to)
  done

There's other ways to do this, too, but notice that because calls to std::istream::operator>> (Of which cin >> garbage is an example) block while waiting for input, you will not be able to use them unless you get a bit clever -- you need to put your terminal in raw mode so that you will be able to receive characters as the user enters them.

You should consider using ncurses if you need to do this sort of GUI programming in the terminal. It will make things easier for you by hiding the required platform-specific code behind a uniform API.

*You can be a bit looser with things that mock concurrency like certain forms of continuation-passing and coroutines, since they won't require adding the error-prone synchronization code required to implement true concurrency.