Question

YO. I’m a beginner in game development and I’m making a console tictactoe game, I’m trying to pass the board grid from the Board class for my game to main because I want to put the gameboard in it’s own class. I made a 2D array to hold the characters of the board but I’m having trouble returning it, the error is “cannot implicitly convert type ‘string[,]’ to ‘string’.

private int maxRow = 3;
private int maxColumn = 3;
private string[,] boardGrid = new string[3, 3]; //create the game board grid

//Initialise board method
public string InitBoard () //make an object of the board class, returns a 2d array because the board is essentially a grid
{
     //initialise board
     for (int row = 0; row < maxRow; row++)
     {
          for (int column = 0; column < maxColumn; column++)
          {
               boardGrid [row, column] = ".";
          }
     }
     return boardGrid; //<---[The problem happens here!]
}

This is the code for the main class.

public static void Main (string[] args)
{
    Board ticTacToeBoard = new Board ();
    ticTacToeBoard = ticTacToeBoard.InitBoard ();
    ticTacToeBoard.DisplayBoard (ticTacToeBoard);
}

I couldn’t find any other question on this but if there is one then feel free to point me to it. Cheers!

Answer 1

You have a few problems here:

• You shouldn’t generally need to call a separate method to initialize an object after construction. Put the initialization in the constructor
• You’re trying to return a string[,] from a method declared to return string. That’s not going to work
• You’re trying to assign a value of string to a variable of type Board. That’s not going to work
• You’re passing the state within an object back into a method called on the same object. That’s pointless.

Your main method should be as simple as:

Board ticTacToeBoard = new Board();
ticTacToeBoard.DisplayBoard();

Put all the initialization logic into your constructor, and make your DisplayBoard method use the variable within the object itself.

I’d also be tempted to make maxRow and maxColumn constants, or make them parameters in the constructor.