I threw together a simple application to test out drawing tiles to the screen. This is nothing new, but I had never drawn more than three or four different tiles at once, so I wanted to test out using sixteen different tiles (just for fun). Anyway, each tile's data is stored in a text file and uses an integer to represent a particular tile. For example, "10" would represent a water tile. However, I've run into an issue with tiles with a value greater than nine. It seems to treat "10" as both "1" and "0", thus scrambling the screen.

main.cpp

map.h

map.cpp

map.txt

10 10 10 10 10 10 10
10 3 5 5 5 4 10

10 7 9 9 9 8 10

10 7 9 9 9 8 10

10 7 9 9 9 8 10

10 1 6 6 6 2 10
10 10 10 10 10 10 10

I've attached an image of what it results in. Any ideas why it's screwing my map up? Should I not use any tile above nine, it works just fine... But that would limit me to 10 (0-9) tiles.

Thank you for the reply. I see where you're going with that, but your code did not work. I read up on the getline function too, but haven't managed to get it working just yet. It seems to work if I use a char* instead of a string for buffer, but then I can't clear it. Here's what your suggestion returns me:

C:\Users\Eric II\Desktop\games\mld-40\new\map.cpp||In member function 'bool Map::load(const char*)':|
C:\Users\Eric II\Desktop\games\mld-40\new\map.cpp|38|error: invalid conversion from 'const char*' to 'std::basic_istream<char>::char_type* {aka char*}' [-fpermissive]|
c:\mingw\bin\..\lib\gcc\mingw32\4.6.2\include\c++\istream|599|error: initializing argument 1 of 'std::basic_istream<_CharT, _Traits>& std::basic_istream<_CharT, _Traits>::getline(std::basic_istream<_CharT, _Traits>::char_type*, std::streamsize, std::basic_istream<_CharT, _Traits>::char_type) [with _CharT = char, _Traits = std::char_traits<char>, std::basic_istream<_CharT, _Traits>::char_type = char, std::streamsize = int]' [-fpermissive]|
||=== Build finished: 2 errors, 0 warnings (0 minutes, 0 seconds) ===|

It looks to me as though it wants a const char* instead of a string, but like I said earlier, I wouldn't be able to clear a const char*.

You don't need to remove the spaces. Get the integers one by one from the ifstream and it will work. Like this:

EDIT: Try compiling this code and testing it with the following input file. You'll see.

knowing the number of columns, it's easy:

for(i=0;i<num_tiles;i++){
   x = i%columns;
   y = i/columns;

   map[x][y] = tile[i];

}

You may want to make the two first integers of your map file to be the map size. That way you can make it easier for you to get the entire map later.

On a side note: This is only an example. You should get the integers directly into your matrix, instead of passing them to an array first, witch is a not very smart redundancy. But I guess you know that

I see. Dumping them directly from the ifstream will ignore any spaces and newlines, so it's not a nice sollution. Instead, get the lines using getline(the global one, not istream's), and then dump them using a stringstream, just like if you used the ifstream. I'll code an example right now(and this one's more complicated ), so give me a minute.

EDIT: Finally done

Spaces delimit columns, newlines delimit rows.
Note that there's a LOT of room for improvement here. For instance, it will get the number of columns from the last row, i.e.: It doesn't check for any(incorrect) larger or smaller rows. Said that, that map1.txt file I posted will fail(since the first line has 4 ints, and the second has 5). Use this one instead:

yup, that's it.
Try to look at the reference for istream to get a better understanding on input streams(ifstream and istringstream inherit from them). I know that reading trough the reference may be a bit overkill for a beginner, but you should get an idea of what is what by looking at the info there.

EDIT: looking again:

you should rephrase that to:

if j is not reset, it will contain the number equivalent to width*height. Your map file probably has a newline at the end of it(another problem that the code doesn't check for), and that is making j reset just before reaching the EOF.

In case you're still stuck, a sollution for that is to check if the streamed line is empty. That's easy: It will be empty if j == 0. Add these lines, right after the second while loop:

if(j)
   h = j;
else
   break;

and remove the line:

h = j;

down bellow. Note that this fix will make any empty line simbolize "stop reading". That means, anything after an empty line will be ignored.

Actually, you could use a string, no prob. Using a stream just makes your job easier(You're not doubling the memory usage, per se: istringstream just holds a pointer to the string, instead of copying the data). One way of getting data directly from the string(altough really old) is to use g' old C's sscanf. It will also ignore spaces.

EDIT: The reason to use an istringstream is to be able to use the overloaded extracion operator("<<") to get the data from the string.

EDIT2: Correcting myself, sscanf will not ignore spaces, unless told to do so. A working example:

I know that.

Hi again. I appreciate the replies guys, truly.

I went out and learned all about vectors and whatnot, and threw together another tile system, which worked much better than my last one... Then I came back here and saw Edgar Reynaldo's post; you knocked it out of the park man. Your approach is so much smaller and easier than I had going. Ha. I appreciate it! That's pretty damn nice.

I come from a PHP background, so I'm still adjusting to C++... Vectors are so nice guys.

Well, technically I suppose they do (array lists are essentially vectors), but they are somewhat different than C++'s; that's what I meant.