Drawing a game board in C

Question

Well, as the title says, I'm trying to draw a game board. Well the board itself I did and it looks something like his:

4 |
3 |
2 |
1 |
0 |
   - - - - -
   0 1 2 3 4

but that's not the problem. The thing I find hard is the I wanna draw icons of star shape (*) on the board, and the coordinates are giving in an array like this

posX {2,4,2,1}
posY {2,3,4,4}

so in this case I should draw * in the coordinates (2,2) , (4,3) , (2,4) , (1,4) and so on. Any ideas?

Answer 1

This illustrates what I meant in my comment, perhaps it helps. It prepares an array of strings representing the game board, before printing them.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

#define BOARDX  5
#define BOARDY  5
#define BOARDW  (BOARDX*2)              // length of text line

char board [BOARDY][BOARDW+1];          // allow for string terminator

void print_board(void)
{
    int y, x;
    for(y=BOARDY-1; y>=0; y--) {
        printf("%-2d|%s\n", y, board[y]);
    }

    printf("   ");
    for(x=0; x<BOARDX; x++)
        printf(" -");
    printf("\n");

    printf("   ");
    for(x=0; x<BOARDX; x++)
        printf("%2d", x);
    printf("\n");
}

void empty_board(void)
{
    int y, x;
    for(y=0; y<BOARDY; y++) {
        for(x=0; x<BOARDW; x++) {
            board[y][x] = ' ';
        }
        board[y][x] = '\0';
    }
}

void poke_board(int x, int y, char c)
{
    if (y >= 0 && y < BOARDY && x >= 0 && x < BOARDX)
       board[y][x*2+1] = c;               // correctly spaced
}

int main(void)
{
    int posX[]= {2,4,2,1};
    int posY[]= {2,3,4,4};
    int len = sizeof(posX) / sizeof(posX[0]);
    int n;
    empty_board();
    for(n=0; n<len; n++) {
        poke_board(posX[n], posY[n], '*');
    }
    print_board();
    return 0;
}

Program output:

4 |   * *
3 |         *
2 |     *
1 |
0 |
    - - - - -
    0 1 2 3 4