Creating a data base on speech

Im making a RPG game at the moment... Do any of you have
any ideas how to code the following?

player speaks to character in game

player has no key so character says you have no key

player has key so character says well done for finding it

would this sort of thing work:

Code:

---

if ( key <= 0 )
{
gotoxy(12,32);char senta[]= "You need a key";
}

if ( key >= 1 )
{
gotoxy(12,32);char sentb[]= "You have the key";
}

else
{
cerr << "ERROR in code";
}

---

That is only one idea,,, am I on the right lines? Or is there a better
way to acheive the same result?

Code:

---

if ( key <= 0 ) {
 gotoxy(12,32);char senta[]= "You need a key";
} else {
 if ( key >= 1 )
  gotoxy(12,32);char sentb[]= "You have the key";
 } else
  cerr << "ERROR in code";

---

The code works, but you're doing alot you dont need to. Thats a shorter version. I dont see whyy this wouldent work. But i'm not farmiliar with cerr.

Just a side note, why are you going to a point then not doing anything with that point?

» Or is there a better way to acheive the same result?

It is better for games to rely on scripts, rooms, data files, and the like than to be all hardcoded in like you appear to be doing. That way, you can easily change several aspects of the game without having to enter the code.

Ok this is what you do. Make a bunch of classes like player class and ect. then when you need to know some thing about that player, since its a single player game i assume this will be all the time, you just have a handy pointer to the intance of that class and extract the data as needed. Then have a huge table of text outputs for npc's to say and just pull out the right ones for the right time.

Assuming you have a table that looks like
table: Speech
npc-id | require-id | response-ok | response-notok

Where npc-id, and require-id are foreign key links to the tables (respectively)
table: Npcs
npc-id | npc-name | npc-location | other-fields...

table: Items
item-id | item-name | other-fields...

Then you could use some simple SQL statements to pull up the text, and items that are required in your inventory and print the appropriate response.



Of course, i'm guessing this solution is entirely above your head and not at all helpful.


Shucks.

Don't hardcode NPC dialogues, BTW.

BTW, as far as as scripts, dialogues, etc goes, can you still include them as .cpp string vectors or whatever? Assuming you had a NPC_text.cpp and associated header, on compilation, unless you changed the engine, you wouldn't get much compile-time overhead. Granted, I prefer them being in texts because not having to boot up dev-CPP to edit content is fun, but I'm just saying.

(Also, getlining from ifstreams is probably far easier, anyway. Just concept, I guess).