Question

I have been programming for about 3 years now and feel confident in my skills. But recently I began working alongside embedded systems and working on other peoples code and have begun to question how good my code is.

I see all these complex answers on SO and think I would have done that with a vector and if statements and wonder if I am any more than a beginner as I was self taught and don’t really know my level.

So I was wondering if more experienced programmers could show me ho to do things better.

This is code I wrote to for an rpg game to pick a target to attack. using it as an example could you show me better/more advanced/professional ways of doing it.

int FindTarget(Player &player);
{
    int aimPoint[5] = 0;

    for(int i  = 0; i <= 5; i++)
    {
        if(player.team[i].exist == true)
        {
            // set random starting point between 1 - 3 
            aimPoint[i] = random /3;

            // add a point if you hve an elemental advantage minus if not
            if(player.team[i].type == weak)
            {
                aimPoint += 1;
            }
            else if(player.team[i].type == strong)
            {
                aimPoint -= 1;
            }

                //add for front row minus for back
            if(i == 1 || i== 3)
            {
                aimPoint += 1;
            }
            else
            {
                aimPoint -= 1;
            }
        }
    }

    return 0;
}

EDIT: If you don’t have the time or effort to show me examples I would appreciate a good book that a beginner/intermediate could understand.

Answer 1

ahem since nobody mentioned it, let me point this one out:

int FindTarget(Player &player);
{
   int aimPoint[5] = 0;

   ...
   return 0
}

to roughly

void FindTarget(const Player &player)
{
    std::vector<int> aimPoint(5, 0);
    ...
}

Also, since there is no knowing what the code should do (and how ‘aimPoint’ is related to teams; guessing doesn’t help because none of it is used, aimPoint is discarded?), I don’t have anything else than fixing the obvious breakage that was above

—- Edit from a comment

The handling of random seems misguided. Someone suggested that you might have meant random %3 + 1;

I noted that too but decided there is nothing to base the assumption on. Perhaps random is already an int in the range [3, 12).

Also, random % 3 won’t yield a uniform distribution, so you’d need to do something else

For many applications, rand() will perform admirably when used correctly, but with the current sad state of affairs, rand() is very rarely used correctly.

The problem is that of distribution