Project is making me go mad! Spirolaterals and SDL2.

[Kate Sendall]

Hello all,

I failed a project for my on-line course about 2 months ago, and just received a letter with a new brief (simpler than the first, which was kind of the Board). It's still in my amateur opinion a pretty tricky brief. I only just started learning C++ and I still struggle with basic concepts of programming, unfortunately.

Basically, I'm asking for your help - I DON'T WANT CODE FROM YOU. But I need some serious pointers (ha, pointers. Get it??). My tutors are on leave until the 16th, and my deadline is fast approaching. I need to get something DOWN that WORKS. Otherwise I will have to postpone my second year with them so that I can retake the programming class for a year... which might not be too bad, in all honesty. It would give me time to learn the language and get super good at it. But there's a price tag to postponing. :(


The brief is pretty straightforward: I am required to write a simple 'Turtle' graphics program that can do three major things. First, is allow the user to change its parameters so that the spirolateral colour, size, length of segments and/or iterations can change. Second, is to have several preset spirolaterals that the user can choose. Finally, is the ability to save the resulting spirolateral as an image file.


I'm using codeblocks, and have imported all my libraries and stuff for SDL2. I'm using the Lazyfoo website to guide me on how to do the basics, such as opening a window, splitting it into viewports etc so I can have my user input sliders and whatnot on the right hand side. I know the rules behind spirolaterals, but I'm not sure how to implement it into a c++ program with SDL2, haha. I also have NO idea how to produce lines from dots or points. The SDL documentation is hard to follow, and the descriptions on the website are pretty vague, and not written for beginners like myself.

As much as I hate to admit it, programming isn't coming naturally to me - I am really finding it hard to understand and follow basic ideas. I passed my mathematics exam with flying colours - almost a 'first' - I'm not stupid. But programming is catching me out. I always have so many questions, and I can't find any answers.

Thanks for taking the time to read and hopefully write back to me! :)

Kate L.

[Prroffessorr Fir Kenobi]

Programming is hard, write a simple application is on average possible after
5 years of coding or so

Yet worse programming is harder with a levels
of advance (it both becomes harder and easier)
Im not sure if people should do programming (except the very few suicide-maniacs who want to waste their lifes)

yet i doubt if women should do that.. woman by its nature is more interested in real life and programming is opposite to real life

So i really advice do not do programming,
study biology or arts or smthng..

I dont quite understand what your program
has to do, could do some advice.. if this has to be something like a lego turtle you must have a way to provide commands.. How would you provide this commands... as a fragment of your program when you call some api calls 9lige forward(10); left(5); forwar(10);) of your production?

if so this is not so hard.. dont know SDL, though i could look at it.. it should hhave routines for drawline.. then you should only store the state of the turtle and nearly nothing more, then write some simple api that would drwaw lines based on the state, and update it to new position

to set up the project with your ide and sdl
seems to be the hardest part..code itself
should be easy.. (if this is the form i guess,
small api which you could use from your c code, not from text file, yet worse, whole writing interpreter for lego-like cript)

[Prroffessorr Fir Kenobi]

W dniu piątek, 14 sierpnia 2015 15:25:37 UTC+2 użytkownik Kate Sendall napisał:

[Christopher Pisz]

SDL is off topic here.
Try the www.gamedev.net forums or https://forums.libsdl.org/

If you have a specific question about the C++ language, maybe we can help.

I'd start by breaking your requirements into smaller pieces.

Example: "allow the user to change its parameters"
How would you like to do that? Via a UI, via an XML file, via command
line arguments?

Break them all down and then tackle them one at a time.

--
I have chosen to troll filter/ignore all subthreads containing the
words: "Rick C. Hodgins", "Flibble", and "Islam"
So, I won't be able to see or respond to any such messages
---

[David Brown]

On 14/08/15 15:25, Kate Sendall wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> I failed a project for my on-line course about 2 months ago, and just
> received a letter with a new brief (simpler than the first, which was
> kind of the Board). It's still in my amateur opinion a pretty tricky
> brief. I only just started learning C++ and I still struggle with
> basic concepts of programming, unfortunately.
>
> Basically, I'm asking for your help - I DON'T WANT CODE FROM YOU. But
> I need some serious pointers (ha, pointers. Get it??). My tutors are
> on leave until the 16th, and my deadline is fast approaching. I need
> to get something DOWN that WORKS. Otherwise I will have to postpone
> my second year with them so that I can retake the programming class
> for a year... which might not be too bad, in all honesty. It would
> give me time to learn the language and get super good at it. But
> there's a price tag to postponing. :(
>

To be brutally honest, that sounds like a better idea - you are not
going to be able to learn C++, learn SDL, and get a working program
ready in such a short time.

I am sceptical about any course which teaches C++ as a first language
for programming - it's a powerful but complicated language. And I'd be
sceptical about setting students tasks such as writing turtle graphics
programs using SDL without much further instructions. But of course I
don't know anything more about the course than what you've written.

And please ignore Fir's comments. He is not a "professor" - as far as I
can tell, he is a perpetual student with severely limited social and
communication skills (he has not posted much in this group, but is
well-known in comp.lang.c).

Women /should/ be involved in programming - like almost every aspect of
life, the programming world would benefit from a greater breadth of
different people. Different genders, different ages, different
languages, different countries, different educational backgrounds.
Probably the two most important skills for being a successful programmer
are a solid grounding in mathematics and logical thinking, and good,
clear communication skills. You appear to have these in place. Now all
you need is to take the time required to learn programming properly,
instead of trying to rush something half-done in time for a deadline.

Best of luck!