----------------------------------- Taz Wed Sep 09, 2009 6:59 am New to programming. Program is not broken, but probably terrible. ----------------------------------- What is it you are trying to achieve? Essentially make a crude, text-based version of Pokemon's battle system. Program here : %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%%% OPENING STUFF %%%%% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% setscreen ("nobuttonbar") var playername : string var starter : string var action : string var actiontrap : int := 0 type Pokemon : record Name : string Nick : string HP : int Atk : int Def : int SpAtk : int SpDef : int Spd : int end record var poke1 : Pokemon var poke2 : Pokemon poke1.HP := 0 procedure battlescreen locate (1,1) put playername, "'s ", poke1.Nick, "(", poke1.Name, ")" put "HP: ", poke1.HP put "Atk: ", poke1.Atk put "Def: ", poke1.Def put " " put "VS." put " " put "Wild ", poke2.Name put "HP: ", poke2.HP put "Atk: ", poke2.Atk put "Def: ", poke2.Def put " " put "--------------" put " " end battlescreen poke2.Name := "PIDGEY" poke2.HP := 14 poke2.Atk := 8 poke2.Def := 3 %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%%% PROGRAM STARTS %%%%% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%%% NAME STUFF %%%%% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% put "Welcome to Pogeys." put " " put "What's your name?" put "Name: " .. get playername delay(1000) cls %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% %%%%% STARTER LOOP %%%%% %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% loop put "Choose your Pokemon by typing its name!" put " What is the problem you are having? I suck at programming and don't really know what I'm doing, thus I'd like tips, pointers. Things I specifically need help with would be: 1. When I ask a user for their Pokemon/Battle choice, it's case sensitive. I don't want it to be, but I don't know how to fix this. Please specify what version of Turing you are using 4.1 \ \ Anyway, just to maybe clear up why this is such a mess. Turing is my first language, thanks to a class I took for a while. Sadly, I was only in this class for about a month, and so I learned very little. slow class. I've read a bit of the tutorials. Whatever I understood. Not a lot really 'clicks' aside from the really basic stuff, and I think I'm more of a hands-on learner, which is why I just sort of dived into making an actual program that would interest me. Now I'm only trying to learn, simple for the fun of it, I guess. Generally being a gamer/geek and having a big interest in AI, it seemed like a good thing to try but I have absolutely no plans to take any classes in the future. Because of this, I would also really appreciate any books being suggested. [I did a quick search for a book on 'turing', but the only results I got were on the turing machine, which doesn't help me obviously.] About the program, it's obviously unfinished. I completed the 'core', I think, but there's so much that has to be added. I wanted to keep it mostly text based, but a bit of aesthetics would be nice. [Example; a health bar, different font for the entire program.] Also, I'm sorry I use so many delays. I wanted the user to be able to be given a bit of a chance to read, but I haven't looked into how to have the program wait until the user presses a certain key before it continues. And I'm sorry that my code overall probably looks horrid. It's a combination of my lack of sleep, being my first real program, and not sticking to any specific.. rules[?]. I'm pretty lost. Thanks in advance. ----------------------------------- DemonWasp Wed Sep 09, 2009 9:06 am RE:New to programming. Program is not broken, but probably terrible. ----------------------------------- First piece of advice: your indenting is weird, press F2 to fix that. Turing's helpful indenter will fix your indenting instantly. 1. Make a function that converts a string to upper case or lower case. Convert user input to the same case as "FIGHT" or "fight", then compare them. The "actiontrap" idea isn't bad, necessarily, but it could be a little cleaner. Your flow of control is: exit will exit the innermost loop immediately, without proceeding to the end. If you were to use actiontrap, I might call it valid_action and make it a boolean instead; alternately, make it action_type and have different actions be represented by different values. 2. Most of the complexity you're seeing in your battle system is because you haven't used arrays. Find the Turing walkthrough and learn to use arrays. You can use arrays of records, as so: var pokemon: array 1..50 of Pokemon Doing so will allow you to avoid repeating code (such as code checking whether they have fainted, or having one attack another). 3. Once you've changed your combat code to use arrays, adding criticals is a matter of using Rand.Int() or Rand.Real() to get a random number. If it's above the critical percentage, then they get a critical and should have (as an example) double damage. Multiply the "damage dealt" variable by two. 4. Once you've changed your combat code to use arrays, you can easily select which combatant plays first by looking at each pokemon in the array, finding the index into the array of the one with the highest speed stat, and starting with that one's turn. If you have more than a few and they all proceed in speed-rating-order, then you should look into sorting. 5. The reason you can't have a timer running alongside user input is that you're using blocking user input. You can either switch to polling input (using Input.KeyDown), though this won't let you input strings easily, or adding another thread (using fork() ). Of the two, using Input.KeyDown is vastly preferable in Turing, because it's really really bad at multi-threading. 6. To wait until the user hits a key before continuing, you want to use getch or getchar. I don't recall how to use them, so you'll have to look them up in the Turing help yourself. In any case, don't feel bad. Everyone here has been a newbie programmer before, and everyone has written code worse than what you've got in your post. In fact, I guarantee I have terrible code still on my hard drive, from back in grade 9 or 10. Awful code. Code that would make you cry to look at it. Things to learn to make code prettier: - arrays - procedures / functions - you've already used one of these (battlescreen) but you could use one to, say, run fights, or another to check that user input is valid... - naming conventions - choose a way of naming things that isn't ugly and stick to it. Common examples are camelCasingVariables and underscores_separate_words. For constants (like Pi, the speed of light, etc), use CAPITALS_WITH_UNDERSCORES. ----------------------------------- Taz Thu Sep 10, 2009 2:09 pm Re: New to programming. Program is not broken, but probably terrible. ----------------------------------- I understand mostly everything. Removed almost all delays in favor of key presses. User can now input actions in any case, as long as the word is right. 'actiontrap' removed entirely, pretty sure I won't need it now. However, I'm totally stumped on the use of arrays in addition to records. I read the tutorials on them, and searched some other threads, but I'm not following. What it would do, how it would help in my program, etc. I imagine an example would be enough to help me understand. Well, hopefully. I believe I know the syntax, I just don't know how to make use of it. Really appreciate the help though, already helped to fix a lot. Would probably have more to say/and more coherently, but the lack of sleep has got me again, and I've still got a few hours to zombie through before I can crash. ----------------------------------- DemonWasp Thu Sep 10, 2009 3:54 pm RE:New to programming. Program is not broken, but probably terrible. ----------------------------------- Using arrays lets you deal with larger numbers of objects without duplicating code. That only made sense inside my head, so here's an example, done in fake-code: Let's suppose you have two combatants, and whichever has a higher .speed attribute goes first. Arrays to the Rescue! [code] var num_players : int := 20 % Or, y'know...100. var players: array 1..num_players of Player sort-players-by-speed ( players ) loop for i : 1..num_players do-player-turn ( players(i) ) end for end loop [/code] Well now that looks better, doesn't it?