Thinking about game boards

Sparrow Forum » General Discussion

Thinking about game boards

(6 posts) (4 voices)

Started 9 months ago by ipadfan
Latest reply from ipadfan

Tags:

ipadfan
Member

Not a sparrow question, but I was wondering how people represented boardgame boards (chess, checkers, etc.) in objective c in a way that made checking for valid moves relatively straightforward.

An array makes sense to me for something square (with a loop to check horizontal and vertical moves). Maybe the same would be done for diagonal moves?

What about where the shape is more like a diamond? Eg., row 1 has 4 boxes, row 2 has 5 boxes, row 3 has 6 boxes, row 4 has 5 boxes, row 5 has 4 boxes. Now valid moves are little more complicated. Box 1 of row 1 can move to box 1 and 2 of row 2. etc.

Is there a tried-and-true method for thinking about this? (maybe the fox&chicken guy has some thoughts...?)

Posted 9 months ago #
alex_h
Moderator

Not strictly the same thing as what you are asking, but is related - breaking the screen into tiles is a common approach to building many games. Particularly one's where the user can move a player around to explore an environment, and maybe enemies also navigate around automatically. This is normally done through a path-finding mechanism, eg astar. This works by assigning different weights to each tile that flag whether it is navigable and possibly other attributes. The principles of pathfinding should be pretty similar to what you are looking for. If you have a look at some of the following links they should help give you some ideas about how this sort of stuff can work:

http://www.policyalmanac.org/games/aStarTutorial.htm
http://www.tonypa.pri.ee/tbw/start.html
http://flashgamedojo.com/wiki/index.php?title=Intro_to_Pathfinding

Posted 9 months ago #
dprijadi
Member

try this site http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/gameprog.html

Posted 9 months ago #
dprijadi
Member

this is Apple sample source code explaining CoreAnimation use on a board and card game :

http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/ipad/#samplecode/GeekGameBoard/Introduction/Intro.html

Posted 9 months ago #
Jugibur
Moderator

@ipadfan,
For every shape of board I use a single array that is divided internally to a width and a height.
Example:
Set a width and height of 4 elements, so your array has a length of 16.
Now build a helper class for accessing that array in a faster/simple way.
I.e. if you want the element of row 2 and col 2 your math is:
index = colCount * (row-1) + (col-1)
Here the index for accessing the array is 5.

Even for non-squared shapes you can use this principe.
The array is populated with elements, that can be enabled or disabled.
So i.e. for a diamond shape you can disable all unnecessary elements.

Of course to get valid tiles you must build a function in your helper class to check if there is an enabled or disabled element at the given index.

For hexa-tiles there is more adaption necessary, my source was this site:
http://www.tonypa.pri.ee/tbw/tut25.html

Posted 9 months ago #
ipadfan
Member

Thanks, all -- lots of reading to do.

Posted 9 months ago #

RSS feed for this topic

Reply

You must log in to post.