Question

I’m a Rails/web developer with little experience with C++, so I’m not totally sure what direction to head in: I’m looking to build a simple simulator that I can use to test an algorithm I’m building that converts standard images to radial coordinates, and all I really need to be able to do is to plot points (which will represent LEDs) on a blank window and continuously refresh them (the LEDs blink). I don’t want to build a gui; command line is fine, as I’ll be the only person using the tool.

I’m not sure whether this is even possible or not… I did some Java programming years ago and I remember being able to pretty easily open a window and render images in it. Is there a C++ equivalent?

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

What you are describing is a perfect fit for a GUI application, rather than command line, as far as I understand.

But if you want something really simple, and not spend some time learning a GUI development framework (MFC, Qt, WxWidgets, etc), you should check the following resources:

• character based basic console graphics
• some more advanced console graphics with blinking, box drawing, etc.
• using full GDI graphics on console