hello i am trying to get a simple line to animate across the console screen here is the code i got so far. // includes and function protocols and such in here int main() { linemaker(); return 0; } void linemaker() { char x = 179; gotoxy(1,1); cout << x; gotoxy(1,2); cout << x; gotoxy(1,3); cout << x; gotoxy(1,4); cout << x; gotoxy(1,5); cout << x; gotoxy(1,6); cout << x; } it displays the the line but show do i get the line to move across the screen.

Quote:Original post by dk32321
hello i am trying to get a simple line to animate across the console screen here is the code i got so far.
// includes and function protocols and such in here



int main()

{
linemaker();

return 0;

}
void linemaker()
{
char x = 179;
gotoxy(1,1);
cout << x;
gotoxy(1,2);
cout << x;
gotoxy(1,3);
cout << x;
gotoxy(1,4);
cout << x;
gotoxy(1,5);
cout << x;
gotoxy(1,6);
cout << x;
}

it displays the the line but show do i get the line to move across the screen.

Think about the code logically, it is moving the curosr and then drawing a line, here's how I would do it:



Note the Sleep for 100ms, if you don't sleep the line will move so fast you won't notice it.

EDIT: Sleep is in windows.h, when time comes it isn't too hard to write a version of it with ctime.

That would work but i cant use system("cls"); cause that would get rid of everything else i got on my console at that time of the program? anyother way.

see i want a line drawn with char x = 179; but the thing is i want to line to be longer in the yaxis so i made a function called line drawer which uses the gotoxy function to connect the lines together, then i want to move that function which contains a bunch of lines, how would i do that.

I would honestly say, forget about manually specifying everything with gotoxy(). Instead, make a 'back buffer' char[][] that represents the whole set of things you want to draw; then in your main game loop you behave like

while (true) {  update(backbuffer); // actually make changes to the buffer contents according  // to what happens in game  gotoxy(0,0);  for (int i = 0; i < BACKBUFFER_HEIGHT; ++i) {    cout << backbuffer << endl;  }}

In general this is a cleaner way of managing the complexity here, assuming your game is going to be anything like I imaging.

Note that this is one case where std::string objects would *not* be appropriate: the backbuffer data is really an "array of characters", and doesn't really represent textual data. However, you might want to write a function to "blit" the contents of a std::string at a specified location within the buffer.

This sort of exercise, BTW, is probably a good way to make the transition towards 'real' graphical programming (where back-buffer techniques are normally used all the time, too).