Scalable grid with input for 'Tic Tac Toe' - In C++
For one of my assignments for my programming module, I have been given the task of creating a 'Tic Tac Toe' game in C++ with many additional improvements and features added to the base to show my range of skills and my creativity. For this program, I have created a function that will display a grid of any size, where the row length is always equal to the column length, and can take in input that will also adapt to the size of the grid.
Displaying A Grid Filled With Values
This is a screenshot of the 'DisplayGrid' function. It is responsible for displaying a grid that is been filled in with what the players have inputted previously and will let the players decide their next move. Each line has been commented to explain what they do and what the next lines will be doing. In a quick summary, the function starts off by initialising a variable called 'currentColour', which will store the colour of the current player's symbol to apply to the cell. It then loops through the rows and columns of the grid using the 'gridSize' variable, allowing this function to work with any grid size. Before each column is looped through in a row, the first value of that row will be added to a 'rowString'. The 'rowString' variable stores that entire row, being added to at the end of each loop of the columns and then outputted to the console before starting on a new row. A check is done to see which player the current cell is assigned to, assigning the player's colour to the 'currentColour' variable from earlier. It then adds to the 'rowString' the symbol that is being held in the current cell and concatenating 'currentColour' to it and a reset colour so that the rest of the console stays the default white colour. Empty space is added based on the 'cellWidth' variable, which is determined during the setting up function at the start of this program by getting the length of characters in the total number of grid cells. It repeats this same logic with each column, ignoring the first column since we already used some logic for it, but at the end of each iteration a 'separatorString' gets a string added to it, which essentially increases the length of the row separator so that it scales with the number of columns present and keeps the grid looking nice and clean. A separator character is also added after each cell to keep them clean and organised as well. Then after a row has finished being looped through, it outputs this the to console and starts again on a new row until the last. After these process have been complete, the output should look something like this:
This is obviously a small 3x3 grid, the default for a game of Tic Tac Toe, but with my scalable solution I can apply this to a 4x4 grid, 5x5 grid, or even a 10x10 grid:
Of course, this sounds very silly since you would not actually be able to win with a 10x10 grid versus anyone, but it was more of a test to see if I could find a solution to this silly idea. In the final product of my program I might add some special rules for bigger grid sizes, maybe just having the player find a way to get a 3 line match to make it fair and could be similar to a game of 'Connect 4'. This would definitely scale up the difficulty because there would a lot more ways to get a line match and much hard to block a match if played badly.
As I am writing this, I have also realised that there are some ways that I could improve the efficiency of this function. One improvement would be to when the first value of each row is added to the string and the separator string is initialised. I do not need this as I could just have an if statement in the column loop to check if the current column is the first column, where it can stop adding a separator before the cell as it will not need it. This is also applied to the input function that will be explained later in this post, and will be shown the updated version in this post to demonstrate how it is more efficient. This could definitely get some more optimisations if I prioritised it more over the actual development of it's features, but the program has not been completed and I will definitely spot some more later down the line.
User Input To Fill In Cells Of A Grid
Getting user input is very straight forward from here. All that needs to be done is create a grid that shows what value to input to fill in a certain cell on the grid. Then check for input from the user and validate it to make sure that it is a valid within the grid range and that it isn't a cell that has already been filled in.
