No C++ at all today

I've only done a little bit of work on whatever it might be that I am working on today, but I did make some promising progress. I decided I might not be able to use the map and instead might use the vector, the only problem with vector is that it doesn't seem to have a find() function or anything similar.

I will work on it some more tomorrow and try to write some more.

No more C++ today

Alas, I was not able to write what I wanted to today, so I will not be able to post anything explaining what the hell I'm doing.
I will try again tomorrow though, maybe I'll be able to find some more then.

I know there's 2 people per year or something that stumble down here, but in case someone just happens to stumble down here tonight, here's my problem:
I've made a very simple class with only a few properties. I put this class in a set and when I try to do this:

myClass myclass;
mySet.insert(mySet.end(), myclass);

of course in what I'm working on this class is filled with data, but this is just a quick post. I might be missing something, since I'm tired and the NetBeans error messages confuse me.

Anyway, maybe a night of sleep and a day of work will improve my thinking capacity.
I think it might have something to do with comparison, since one of the messages I see when looking at Netbeans' output it seems to say that it doesn't have a > operator for __y > __x.

Hmm, must quit now, more to follow tomorrow.

C++: Some more stuff

I thought it might be best to write some extra info on the stuff I wrote yesterday about reading and writing stuff from and to files.

First thing is that I started off with a header (*.h) file. For those who really don't know C++ (pretty much like me then), these files are used to kind of 'define' the corresponding source files.
What we did in there was let whichever other file includes this one know that the source file that should come with this header file contains 1 class with 2 public functions, both returning void.

We then write those functions in the *.cpp file (which we should have named the same as the .h file, except change it's extension from .h to .cpp). In this file we use className::functionName to indicate that this function we're writing belongs the that previously (in the .h file) defined class. The '::' being the scope operator, you can use it to tell what which variable belongs to within your code.

I also seem to have forgotten to post the actual main.cpp file, sorry for this, It was late and I was both rushed and tired, but here it is:

#include "filerw.h"

int main()
{
    FileRW filerw;
    filerw.read();

    return 0;
}

We include our header (.h) file so that the compiler knows where to look for that class we instantiate.

Now this is where it gets kind of weird for me. I'm used to writing in C#, so that first line would create a warning that filerw was never instantiated and at runtime an exception that filerw is null. Here though this seems enough to declare and instantiate. We then call the read() function from the class we wrote and it should work.

Our application will return 0 to let everything involved know that it exited correctly, any other value would mean that our application crashed.

As you can see I don't do anything with the write() function. We could, you could add a line write("anything"); there and it should do what you expect (append "anything" to the end of the file, if the file didn't exists yet, it should now have been created).

So I think this is all I can tell you right now, I'll try to write some more once I've written some more code.

Blue Dragon

A while ago I finished playing through Blue Dragon on the XBOX360. I've told myself that I should write something about each game I finish to improve on my writing skills.

Now Blue Dragon is a fun game that unfortunately suffers from some faults. It has a very typical story, typical main-character and of course the trademark look and feel from Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragonball.
Being from Akira Toriyama it is fun to walk around the world and see all the different species of creatures living together and co-operating with each other.

The battle system is old. It is unfortunately very repetitive and can get on your nerves from time to time. The thing that really bugged me is that none of the characters in the game have any real weapons or armor, so nothing changed on them through the entire game.
Monster fights are fun though, but they are (to me at least) too much of a hassle to get together all the time.
Balance is a little out of whack though, mostly Disc 1 is easy and you don't really have any trouble with anything or anyone, then Disc 2 becomes slightly annoying since there are a lot of fights and they take a few turns, and though the battles have ok animations they take a while to execute and you start falling asleep after a while, this is the point where I left my XBOX on for 2 weeks without playing.

Story is fun, but nothing spectacular. Boy and friends want to save village, they get lost, they get back, they leave for a big 'ol adventure.

I don't really have much else to say. I liked playing it, I loved getting through it (finally) and that's about it, it's not very remarkable in any respect (other then it's made by Akira Toriyama).

C++: Reading from and writing to a file

Me being the idiot that I am, I am not satisfied that I have just recently finally really gotten my random wallpaper script working with Python. Nooo, now I feel like a sell-out since I'd already written it in C++ once and unfortunately lost that somehow.
So now that it works in Python, of course I just had to decide to write it in C++ again too.
I found, though, that I am severely lacking in C++ knowledge. All the tutorials I followed almost a year ago now (I think it was at least 3) have all been next to lost from my mind.

Fortunately I had decided on completing a very simple task for today, since it was already 10pm when I started on this: Read all lines from a file and be able to write a line to a file, the rest will come later.

I started out with creating a header file that looked like this:

#include <string>

class FileRW {
public:
   void add(std::string filename);
   void read();
};

Declaring a class called FileRW and 2 public functions: add, read

Now for the simplest of implementations of these functions we're going to read a file with read() and add a line with write()

first we have to include

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
#include "filerw.h"

That last one is, of course, to include the header file I wrote before, which I called filerw.h

to keep it simple we'll also be

using namespace std;

otherwise we'd be writing std:: everywhere, which is just not so much fun really...

then the functions:

void PaperConfig::read() {
        string line; // string where a line will be stored
        
        // Open the file for reading
        ifstream myfile("test.txt");
        // If the file was opened
        if (myfile.is_open()) {
            // Until it reaches the end of the file
            while (!myfile.eof()) {
                // Get the next line
                getline(myfile, line);
                
                // If it's not an empty line, print it
                if (line != "")
                    cout << line << endl;
            }

            // Close the file
            myfile.close();
        }
        // If the file was not opened
        else
            cout << "Unable to open file";
}

We use ifstream (in file stream?) to open the file for reading.
We use the line variable as a temporary variable to store each line we read in so that we can write it to the console (or do something else with it). We use myfile.is_open() to check if the file could be opened, if not then it'll tell us and we use myfile.eof() to check if we have anything left to work with.
If the currently read line does not equal "" (an empty string).
When we're done we close the file.

void PaperConfig::add(string filename) {
    // Open file for writing and set the append flag
    ofstream myfile("test.txt", ios::app);

    // Write filename to file
    myfile << filename << endl;

    // Close the file
    myfile.close();
}

Here we use the ofstream (out file stream?) to open the file for writing and the ios::app flag to tell the stream to append whatever we write to the end of the file.
Then we write our parameter string to the myfile object like we write a lot of other things to cout and we add an endline character (endl)
Finally we close the file, this way we don't keep things in memory we don't need to.

Now I hope I have explained enough in this post, I don't often write things like this (in case you don't get it this is my version of a tutorial, but even I can't really call it that because it is writting in about 30 minutes) so if you see room for improvement please let me know. I will try to write more things like this in the future and hope to get better at writing, C++ and software development in general.