[Paepay]

I need help with programming in multiple tabs using Classes. We never learned this in class and I need to learn how to do this as soon as possible. Any help would be greatly appreciated

I use VB 2010.

[Paepay]

More background on this "project":

I started making a game around 2 months ago. Currently it has around 1400 lines of code on a single page. Adding new parts to this game is very tedious when I have to scroll through over a thousand lines of code. Last year in my CS1110 class we didn't learn anything about classes or I wouldn't be seeking help.

If anyone would like to view my game on Teamviewer or Screen share via Skype I'd be more than happy to show you.

[darek9576]

How the hell can you start making a game without knowing what a Class is? Its the most fundamental building block of OO languages. I would open any intro book to the language and read firs 5 chapters.

[Ryano121]

I agree with darek9576. With over 1400 lines of code in one file for a project of this type points out that you are not yet familiar with modularising your code.

You are taking this way too fast. You have been making a game without knowing the fundamental concepts behind object oriented design. This is of no use whatsoever.

Go back to the basics. Start from scratch. Before you dive in to making games and what not you should actually have some idea of what you are doing.

It may sound harsh but its for your own benefit. You are jumping into the deep end without knowing how to swim. Take a step back. Read up about classes and objects. Do some simple projects. Then when you have some more knowledge go back to these projects. Try even re - coding to current badly designed game into something more flexibility with the use of OOP and other design concepts.

Good luck.

[darek9576]

I have never programmed a game in my life, but if i was to do it, there would be 1 thing i would immediately do:


1) Create a Player class, Environment class, Board class. - these classes might not be needed depending on the game but it just shows you, a nice way to break your code into modules. If it was a team of you coding the game, how would you expect other memebers to contribute to the one stream of code you have at the moment. Not possible.

[Paepay]

I know how to make classes. I'm trying to program in different "tabs" though to make it much easier to program.

I know how to make and call to classes if they are on the same page.

Sorry for any misunderstanding.

I currently have 8 tabs in my program.

1 being the main class and the other ones are for other classes I need for the game.

I want to call to each one of these classes specifically when I need them.

To put it simply. When I'm playing the game and choose the "C" option I want the program to go to the tab of code that I have for that particular choice. If any of you can talk to me on MSN I'd greatly appreciate it.

With Teamviewer this wouldn't take more than 5 minutes.


<removed contact details>

This post has been edited by CodingSup3rnatur@l-360: 19 November 2011 - 02:50 PM
Reason for edit:: Please try to keep discussion in this thread :)

[Paepay]

I'm sorry if that is not in the rules, but I'd like for someone to use Teamviewer with me so they can see what I'm talking about

[tlhIn`toq]

I'm sorry to say this; and as others have said I'm sorry if this seems harsh but...

You really don't sound like you have a grasp on understanding the basics. You've run off an started cutting wood and hammered together planks to build a house - before ever sitting down and making a blueprint. You've got 1400 lines of ... what? If you had no idea where you were going what did you code?

Quote

I know how to make classes. I'm trying to program in different "tabs" though to make it much easier to program.

I know how to make and call to classes if they are on the same page.

Sorry for any misunderstanding.

I currently have 8 tabs in my program.

1 being the main class and the other ones are for other classes I need for the game.

I want to call to each one of these classes specifically when I need them.

You said you wanted to make tabs because it would be easier to code. You have 8 tabs already. So... did it make the coding any easier?

I'm not sure why you think that having tabs will make this project easier to write. Tabs are just GUI. They might make interface easier to use for the player. But they really don't change much from the point of view of the programmer. You still make objects, whether they are players, treasure, weapons... You track them... they interact with each other... they raise events and they react to events... None of which have anything to do with which tabpage data is displayed on. The score can be shown on tab1 or tab8 or the statusbar. Your code doesn't care and isn't affected by that.

You sound like you think it has to be 1 tab to 1 class. That's just not the case. Take for example a tab that is going to be your map of the game environment. It would show lots of information that comes from other objects/classes: Trees, rocks, other players and so on.

There is no direct or implied relationship between tabs and organized code. Just because you have 20 code files doesn't mean 20 tabs. And having 8 tabs doesn't magically break up your one code file into lots of desecrate bits of organized classes. You have to do that. You have to design and organize your code. You have to envision the game, the pieces (objects), the interactions and code it accordingly. You have do the engineering of your software: That's why the job title is "Software engineer".

Quote

When I'm playing the game and choose the "C" option I want the program to go to the tab of code that I have for that particular choice.

• On your form, set the KeyPreview to true.
  
• Create a handler for the .KeyDown event. In your event handler you check which key was down and set the TabControl's .SelectedTab to the one in question.

Please don't be offended but this is basic. If you don't know how to do this, then you aren't ready to try to archetect something as complex as a game. Your course didn't teach you a LOT of things. Honestly, most of us don't hold college programming courses in high regard. They suck. They are designed on purpose to teach slowly so they get 4 years of tuition from you. You can learn more in 60 days with a good self-teaching book than a year in a college course.

The stages of asking for homework help on a forum

Quote

I have a little C# experience but I need to write ...

You need to start there. I can't say "I have little experience in speaking Russian, but I have been assigned to write a mystery novel in Russian. Can you help me?"

We can help you by saying "First learn basic programming and the language of C#. Then take on assignments." Could someone here write this program for you? Sure. Could someone here map out all the processes you need to follow and do the Software Design part of this in the slim hope you could code it from there? Sure. But we don't volunteer to do the job that you're either getting paid for, or getting a grade for. You may want to read this.

For now, just work on the lessons. Do a self-teaching book from cover to cover. Then consider writing a program.

Don't try to create a useful working program to fit a need of yours (or a for-pay contract) as your introduction to coding project. When you are learning to code you don't know enough to code a program, let alone know how to engineer the architecture of a program. It would be like saying "I don't know how to read sheet music, or play an instrument. I think I'll write a 3 act opera as my first learning experience."

I don't say this to be mean. We've seen lots of new coders take this approach and we know it doesn't work. Trying to design your own programs before you understand the basics of the code language you've chosen just leads to problems, frustrations, and 'swiss-cheese' education (lots of holes).

---

Resources, references and suggestions for new programmers. - Updated Oct 2011

---

Spoiler

Finding answers to specific problems:
Sometimes just knowing where to look can make all the difference. Google is your friend.
Search with either "C#" or "MSDN" as the first word: "MSDN Picturebox", "C# Custom Events", "MSDN timer" etc.
How to do a good search that will get you targeted answers.

Once you have that MSDN page that describes the function, you may not be familiar with out to actually get useful information from that page. There is a LOT of data there. So what is the important parts? Read this guide to reading the MSDN.

Don't think you are the first person to ask a question. Try a search on this site to see if someone has already brought up this problem. Also, as soon as you post your question go to the bottom of the updated page: You will see where the system has already analyzed your question and tried to find similar threads for the same question, so check those links out.

But honestly, just typing away and seeing what pops up in Intellisense is going to make your self-education take 20 years. You can learn by trying to reverse engineer the language through banging on the keyboard experimentation - or you can learn by doing the tutorials and following a good "How to learn C#" book. There are so many great "How do I build my first application" tutorials on the web... There are dozens of "Learn C# in 21 days", "My first C# program" type books at your local book seller or even public library.

Beginner:
Build a Program Now! in Visual C# by Microsoft Press, ISBN 0-7356-2542-5 is a terrific book that has you build a Windows Forms application, a WPF app, a database application, your own web browser.

Visual Studio Keyboard Shortcuts

D.I.C. C# Resource page Start here
Intro to C# online tutorial then here...
C# control structures then here.
MSDN Beginner Developer video series
MSDN video on OOP principals, making classes, constructors, accessors and method overloading
MSDN Top guideline violations, know what to avoid before you do it.
Design patterns as diagrams

I hate sending people to another site when we have such good tutorials here, but this series shouldn't be overlooked.
Programming OOP in C# - Part 1
Programming OOP in C# - Part 2
Programming OOP in C# - Part 3
Programming OOP in C# - Part 4
Programming OOP in C# - Part 5

Writing a text file is always one of the first things people want to do, in order to store data like high-scores, preferences and so on.
Writing a text file tutorial.
Reading a text file tutorial.

Have you seen the 500+ MSDN Code Samples? They spent a lot of time creating samples and demos. It seems a shame to not use them.

Intermediate:
The tutorials below walk through making an application including inheritance, custom events and custom controls, object serialization and more.
Bulding an application - Part 1
Building an application - Part 2
Quick and easy custom events
Separating data from GUI - PLUS - serializing the data to XML
WPF version (WPF-MVVM data binding)
Passing values between forms/classes
Decouple your multi-threaded work from the GUI so forms don't hang

Working with environmental variables
'Why do we use delegates?' thread
And everyone always wants to connect to a database, right out of the gate so Database tutorials right here on DIC

C# Cookbooks
Are a great place to get good code, broken down by need, written by coding professionals. You can use the code as-is, but take the time to actually study it. These professionals write in a certain style for a reason developed by years of experience and heartache.

Everyone:
Debugging tutorial
Debugging tips
Debugging in detail
Great debugging tips
It still doesn't work, article

I urge you to work through the C# learning series here on DIC, and to work a self-teaching book from cover to cover before you even think about designing your own applications.
Microsoft Visual Studio Tips, 251 ways to improve your productivity, Microsoft press, ISBN 0-7356-2640-5 Has many, many great, real-world tips that I use all the time.

These are just good every-day references to put in your bookmarks.
MSDN C# Developers Center with tutorials
Welcome to Visual Studio
Free editions of Visual Studio 2010

Let me also throw in a couple tips:

• You have to program as if everything breaks, nothing works, the cyberworld is not perfect, the attached hardware is flakey, the network is slow and unreliable, the harddrive is about to fail, every method will return an error and every user will do their best to break your software. Confirm everything. Range check every value. Make no assumptions or presumptions.
  
  
• Take the extra 3 seconds to rename your controls each time you drag them onto a form. The default names of button1, button2... button54 aren't very helpful. If you rename them right away to something like btnOk, btnCancel, btnSend etc. it helps tremendously when you make the methods for them because they are named after the button by the designer.btnSend_Click(object sender, eventargs e) is a lot easier to maintain than button1_click(object sender, eventargs e)
  
  
• You aren't paying for variable names by the byte. So instead of variables names of a, b, c go ahead and use meaningful names like Index, TimeOut, Row, Column and so on. You should avoid 'T' for the timer. Amongst other things 'T' is commonly used throughout C# for Type and this will lead to problems. There are naming guidelines you should follow so your code confirms to industry standards. It makes life much easier on everyone around you, including those of us here to help. If you start using the standards from the beginning you don't have to retrain yourself later.
  
  
• Try to avoid having work actually take place in GUI control event handlers. It is usually better to have the GUI handler call other methods so those methods can be reused and make the code more readible.
  
  Spoiler

  
  

  btnSave(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveMenuItem(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  SaveContextMenu(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      SavePreferences();
  }
  
  FormMain_Closing(object sender, eventargs e)
  {
      if (IsDirty) SavePreferences();
  }
  

  
  
  
• I strongly suggest installing VMware or some other virtualization technology on your development PC so you can create a couple virtual computers for testing. This would allow you to debug and test inside: WinXP32, XP64, Vista, Win7x32, Win7x64... etc. without having to actually have 5 physical PC's. Visual Studio will let you send the debug directly into one of these virtual machines so you can watch it operate, check its variables, see the crashes and so on just as if it were debugging on your real machine.
  
  
• This can't be stressed enough in today's world of cell phone messaging:
  Don't use txt/sms/leet/T9 speak like: u no, u r, dnt, wut i m do-n, coz, al gud, b4, ny1, and so on like this guy:
  
  dis not b d'hood dawg... You are sitting at a real keyboard with a real monitor, not a cell phone. You are not here texting your high school posse to come to your kegger after their shift at Taco Bell. You are here asking for help from senior coding professionals who graciously donate their valuable time to helping the next generation of coders with their chosen craft. Please try to show them, yourself and the industry some respect by writing at least at an eighth grade level. (IE: English not ebonics or SMS, real words, punctuation and so on). If you can't take your own problem/question seriously enough to write like an adult, then why would you expect anyone else to take it seriously?

[Paepay]

I really do appreciate that response and did put somethings into perspective for me.

I have made the game into Classes on a single page and it is working just fine. I'm having a few simple errors here and there but I should be able to do it.

Just to throw it out there, my game is VERY simple. It's 2D with ASCII graphics and is purely something I'm doing for fun, nothing else. I have a lot of interest in Computer Science and this is something I do on my free time.

If you want to help me with a few things I'd greatly appreciate it. Message me on here since posting my MSN is against the rules

[Paepay]

I have since resolved this issue and my game is over 8000 lines now

[darek9576]

Number of lines has no indication about the program itself. I dont get the point.

[tlhIn`toq]

Paepay, on 26 November 2011 - 10:22 AM, said:

I have since resolved this issue and my game is over 8000 lines now

Are they still all in one file?

The goal generally is not to see how big you can grow the application, but how small. Its like golf; the person with the lowest score wins.

The fact that it has grown from 1400 to 8000 lines in a couple weeks makes me think there is a LOT of code redundancy/duplication. Its easy to grow the program by having a lot of duplicate code via copy/paste the same method(s) amongst several classes like: Player, ogre, goblin and so on.

[Paepay]

There are at least 15 different classes and some of the code is copy and pasted, but it has come a LONG way since learning more about classes.

If you are interested in the game I can upload a .exe to Mediafire or something.

tlhIn`toq, on 26 November 2011 - 10:01 AM, said:

Paepay, on 26 November 2011 - 10:22 AM, said:

I have since resolved this issue and my game is over 8000 lines now

Are they still all in one file?

The goal generally is not to see how big you can grow the application, but how small. Its like golf; the person with the lowest score wins.

The fact that it has grown from 1400 to 8000 lines in a couple weeks makes me think there is a LOT of code redundancy/duplication. Its easy to grow the program by having a lot of duplicate code via copy/paste the same method(s) amongst several classes like: Player, ogre, goblin and so on.

I add code to this game everyday when possible. I added a few skills and simple 2D animations. Working inventory and shops. A few NPCs for combat as well.