Author Topic: Making a sprite move randomly accross screen (Read 4938 times)

gl0w · « **on:** June 21, 2011, 01:56:38 am »

Hello,

I need to make a sprite (ghosts) in pacman game move across the screen randomly. How can i do it ?

Thanks in advance

thePyro_13 · « **Reply #1 on:** June 21, 2011, 06:10:34 am »

Looks up the rand function, either in the standard library or in SFML.
You can get a random number within a range(ie 1 - 4) using this.

Then call each number a direction. 1 == North, 2 == East, so on. Use it to decide what direction to go.

David · « **Reply #2 on:** June 21, 2011, 04:25:02 pm »

But ghosts in pac-man don't move randomly :?

JAssange · « **Reply #3 on:** June 21, 2011, 06:51:43 pm »

Yeah the pacman ghosts have a set pattern, from what I remember, its:
Red chases player directly
Orange camps the bottom left corner
Pink heads to the square a few in front of pacman in his current direction.
Blue.... eh I think he follows red but with an offset but I forget.

gl0w · « **Reply #4 on:** June 21, 2011, 08:14:47 pm »

well guys, your right. But i'm making a game a little different from pacman, but inspired on pacman hah

Well, now that you talk about it, how can i make the ghosts, go after pacman following the correct path in the game.
I dont have even a game with paths, i need to create the path's first.

I just dont know how to make the path's... yet :x

thanks all

JAssange · « **Reply #5 on:** June 22, 2011, 11:51:34 am »

You'll want to use a path-finding algorithm like A* so you'll need to break your world up into tiles.

Nexus · « **Reply #6 on:** June 22, 2011, 01:13:00 pm »

By the way, don't implement such algorithms on your own. Reuse existing libraries such as Boost.Graph

KasHKoW · « **Reply #7 on:** June 26, 2011, 03:05:11 am »

Quote

By the way, don't implement such algorithms on your own. Reuse existing libraries such as Boost.Graph

Why shouldn't you? I know very well that rewriting code that's already out there is bad, but wouldn't you learn a great deal from this?

Reading this, I actually was inspired to do my own pac-man like game. As I thought designing the enemies would really improve my programming skills(or problem solving).

Nexus · « **Reply #8 on:** June 26, 2011, 04:34:57 am »

Quote from: "KasHKoW"

I know very well that rewriting code that's already out there is bad, but wouldn't you learn a great deal from this?

You would certainly learn something, the question is do you even want that and is it worth a much longer development time? Or do you just want to achieve a result as efficiently as possible?

You also have to consider that an algorithm isn't ready-to-use once it is finished. A lot of testing, bug fixes and optimizations are necessary to get a robust functionality, which requires very much time as well.

section_two · « **Reply #9 on:** June 26, 2011, 05:53:24 am »

Quote from: "JAssange"

Yeah the pacman ghosts have a set pattern, from what I remember, its:
Red chases player directly
Orange camps the bottom left corner
Pink heads to the square a few in front of pacman in his current direction.
Blue.... eh I think he follows red but with an offset but I forget.

WOW!!! I never realized this, and I played pacman "unsigned long" times.