Question

I want to choose randomly from among 4 directions:

movePlayer(map, &positionPlayer, direction);

where direction is one of UP, DOWN, LEFT, and RIGHT.

I haven’t yet found out how to do this with the rand() function.

How can I do this? Do I need to assign a number to each direction and then choose a random number within those bounds?

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

The simplest way to do this is to simply do a modulos of the rand function to get a numbers between 0 and 3(inclusive).

int x = rand() % 4;

Then you can simply perform a switch statement to choose the direction

switch(x)
{
   case 0:
      movePlayer(map, &positionPlayer, UP);
      break;

   case 1:
      movePlayer(map, &positionPlayer, DOWN);
      break;

   case 2:
      movePlayer(map, &positionPlayer, LEFT);
      break;

   case 3:
      movePlayer(map, &positionPlayer, RIGHT);
      break;
}

Of course, this will not be exactly random with a perfect distrubition( the modulus is somewhat of a hack).

If you want real randomness with actual distributions then you might want to look into Boost.Random.