oh the fun of strings....

Okay, I am making a Real Time Strategy game engine.
It's going very well, and if you want to see a demo, I can send one to you...but anyways, thats not the point.

I was changing up some code in the engine to optimize it. I had hardcoded in some file loading processes to get it to work for a presentation, and now I am optimizing the file loading processes.

Basically, I have a set of "x" amount of bitmaps, targas, etc., each one acting as one frame in an animation.

the naming sequence is like this:

bob0001.bmp
bob0002.bmp
.....
bob10000.bmp
bob10001.bmp
.....

So, I decided to just use a couple simple for loops to manipulate the string easily so I would not have to type out every filename.

At first I included cstring.h, which shuld have the standard string class in it, but that did not work. Visual C++ got angry at me and did not let me include it. So I looked at the include files and saw one called cstring, but with no file extension, so I included that one. Visual C++ got angry at me again, saying that the data type "string" did not exist. So then I looked in the cstring file, and it was nothing like cstring.h I had found in every other compiler I had ever used. It didnt even contain the standard string class.

So then I tried using normal char* and string.h, but that proved to be a difficult task and the computer hated me.

So I checked the Visual C++ help files for some type of string class, and found just the thing I was looking for, the CString class in afx.h. So I included it, and I used it.
However, when I tried to compile, it told me that the CString class could only be used in MFC applications. My game engine isnt MFC and never will be MFC.

So what do you suggest I do?

isn't a string a standard C++ data type?

Not that I know of.

Whenever I declared a string (the type that is in cstring.h), and used the . notation to get to one of its member functions, VC++ would pop up the window of member variables and functions like it does for classes that it knows about, but then when I tried to compile it, it said it didnt know about that data type...

Did you use the infamous "Using namespace std;" line after your include ?

:p

yeah, i tried using it, and it didnt work. i also tried not using it, and it didnt work.

I have no based myself to using the utterly horrid apstring class. It's barbaric and menial ways should suffice for my purposes.

string isn't standard?

Heh, can you tell I do almost all C and practically 0 C++? :p

have you tried with the stl string type... you know...

#include <string>
using namespace std;
string s="This is a STL string";

blah blah