Having some issues with making pacman?

Question

Edit: Totally forgot to mention I'm coding in Java

I'm having a real hard time making some kind of detection system or some way to make my pacman sprite/character move smoothly through my board in the game. I did not make the board it's a image.

I had tried colour detection first which worked the best yet was not smooth at all and pretty choppy.

I then tried to manual input coordinates of location not allowed to be entered. This also did not work out so well.

I'm currently trying now to have the program use colour detection and check a separate unseen board to see if I'm still on the path. This has failed by far the most. It seems like it would be the smartest but the corners are just alful and hard to fix by adjusting the images.

I'm wondering what method you guys would suggest for such a task.

Answer 1

A typical approach to storing "old school" game boards is to use a char or int multidimensional array. Using Matt's excellent little graphic you can see there are 21 by 21 squares in the board:

int board[21][21] = {{1, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1}, 
                     {1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 0, 1},
                     {1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1, 0, 0, 0, 1, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1},
                     /* ... and so on, for all 21 lines .. */                      }};

It doesn't really matter which numbers you pick for walls and pathways. The "pathway" positions initially contain a code for "contains a dot". As paccy consumes the dots, store a new value into the board at the position to indicate that the dot has been consumed but it is still a pathway square. Matt recommended -1 for walls, 0 for no dot, and 1 for a dot -- that's a pretty plan, as it lets your "wall collision" routines simply look for

if (board[pac.x][pac.y] > 0) {
    /* still in bounds */
} else {
    /* collided against a wall */
}

The downside is the -1 is more awkward looking in your array initializer.

If this were done in C, it'd be easy enough to "improve" this using char board[21][21] instead of int board[21][21] and store the game board as a C string:

char board[21][21] = " XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX "
                     " X        X        X "
                     " X XX XXX X XXX XX X "
                     " X                 X "
                     " X XX X XXXXX X XX X "
                     " X    X   X   X    X "
                     " XXXX XXX X XXX XXXX "
                     "    X X       X X    "
                     "XXXXX X XXXXX X XXXXX"
                     "        X   X        "
                     "XXXXX X XXXXX X XXXXX"
                     "    X X       X X    "
                     " XXXX X XXXXX X XXXX "
                     " X        X        X "
                     " X XX XXX X XXX XX X "
                     " X  X           X  X "
                     " XX X X XXXXX X X XX "
                     " X    X   X   X    X "
                     " X XXXXXX X XXXXXX X "
                     " X                 X "
                     " XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX";

This is far easier to read in the source code, takes less memory, and your wall-collision routines can look like this:

if (board[pac.x][pac.y] == 'X') {
    /* collided with a wall */
} else {
    /* still in bounds */
}

(Though the trailing NUL that the compiler will insert at the end of the string means that lower-right-hand square can never be used for pathway or wall -- a little more effort can work around that, but it isn't as beautiful.)

I don't remember enough Java to make this work in Java -- but I'm sure you can figure out something if this looks compelling enough.