Difficult C programming projects

[ndrewxie]

Hello,
Could anyone recommend a few difficult projects to me? Ideally, they would be complex (meaning that I can spend a fair amount of time and effort on, NOT a weekend project), original (not one of those projects that everyone does), cross-platform (not reliant on any platform-specific API or library) AND DIFFICULT, meaning that it can't be one of those projects where you just call a bunch of libraries instead of doing the work yourself.
Thanks!

[tonic]

Nice idea, I would say for many Projects , no matter if its a Game, or something with Audio/Media and stuff, we have nowadays Engines wich gives you a great boost to whatever Project you start.
But I have a great Idea , wich includes , a bit of everything.


-Network
-Gui
-Bunch of futures..

if thats what your looking for after a (Difficult Project).
I have one word ....... RAT = Remote Admninistration Tool. Not for maliciouse use.
Features:
-Remote Desktop
-RemoteFTP
-etc..

My opinion. Hope you like that Idea.
and I also could help you .

Regards,

[Golden Lizard]

Voxel rendering for CT scans, if you are interested in graphics.

[ndrewxie]

All of those are great, BUT they aren't cross platform. Many GUI libraries do run on major platforms, but it should run on ALL platforms with a C compiler, and the GUI libraries does all of the rendering for you, which destroys the purpose of this project - to reinvent the wheel :)

[helios]

The most original hobby projects I've worked on have been things that I wanted but didn't exist (at least at the time):
* A software-based audio player for Android. When I made it the hardware decoder on my phone at the time didn't do gapless playback, and there were no software players that supported ReplayGain. This is still my main player for daily use.
* An image viewer with no window borders, to make the most out of screen real estate, and with proper transparency support. I also use this on a daily basis.
* An image catalog system for large collections. Still working on this, on and off.
* An automated backup system for Windows with differential archives (rdiff-like algorithm). Kind of lost interest.
* A modern C++ port of an old (c. 1995) game that was originally written in Assembly; the point is to have a codebase that can be easily hacked and studied.

You should look at how you use your computers and see if there's something you're missing that you could solve with software.

[48T7M4Gy]

Join up with GIMP or Blender on one of their project teams?

[jsheley]

Google the old "mastermind game". The "mastermind game" that I refer to is a child's game has colored pegs. Write code that resolves the riddle in the least amount of guesses.

This is not a "cut and dried" project. There are essentially infinite strategies, but there is only one methodology that will result in a minimum number of guesses. When I tried this, I could only reliably guess the correct result in 4.5 to 5.5 guesses (average for all 256 combinations)