Help me make my new variant! (please!)

[backwardsEric]

Reading out the element from the resist looks correct. You didn't pass the result of grenade_brand() as the element for the effect (I assume you would want it to replace ELEM_FIRE). If you want distinguish the weak and strong brands, you'd want to get the multiplier as well.

As for the targeting, the "other" parameter doesn't affect that for EF_STRIKE. Someone else will have to chime in how to best set the target for this case.

[Julian]

The "->" is if you have a pointer to the struct (so if grid was a struct loc *), if it's just the struct you need a ".". So grid.y and grid.x should work.

As a side note, one usually shouldn’t pass structs directly, as it makes the compiler copy it onto the stack. Pass by reference with a const declaration instead. (Not that it’s a big deal for a grid, which is tiny.)

[Nick]

As a side note, one usually shouldn’t pass structs directly, as it makes the compiler copy it onto the stack. Pass by reference with a const declaration instead. (Not that it’s a big deal for a grid, which is tiny.)

Yeah, in most of these case the struct loc has replaced two int arguments, so it's pretty much neutral.

[Grenoble]

Still up?

So, I'm looking into making a new variant since I just came back to Angband, and I always think the most fun thing to do with a game is tweak it, tinker with it, tamper with it, customize it, alter it, twist it, slime it, and otherwise modify it. But I'm going to need some help because I am much more of a hack than an actual coder/programmer, so this thread is where I'll ask questions.

Still messing around with this? I just went down this rabbit hole with the ToME variant. I wanted to build it on Win 10. I could sort of read c++ when I started and now I know how to debug a linking problem with a library. It was an amazing journey and I hope you'll keep at it. Here are some things I'd wish I knew, etc:

• I'd really recommend starting with a version that uses cmake. The integration with vs 2019 exposes a lot of features it would have taken forever to find on my own. It was easier for me to "get" cmake and then go back and understand older makefiles.
  
• C++ encompasses C (I didn't/still don't really get this), so VS will see your project as C++. I forked someone's code and then created a new project from existing files.
  
• The compiler you'll end up using is determined by the "triplet" you're targeting and the platform you're building on. Triplet is a standard term used in cross compiling as a way to completely capture the target environment (cpu, os, compiler, runtime, etc) in a single convenient name. If you were building on windows for linux, for example, you might use gcc through mingw.
  
• The link above is from the home of a package manager that can handle common libraries and tools for windows. It turned into a good resource for me.
  
• Most of the documentation you'll run into is hot garbage. Find someone you can talk to when you are well and truly stuck.

[will_asher]

Still messing around with this? I just went down this rabbit hole with the ToME variant. I wanted to build it on Win 10. I could sort of read c++ when I started and now I know how to debug a linking problem with a library. It was an amazing journey and I hope you'll keep at it. Here are some things I'd wish I knew, etc:

Thanks for the tips. I am pretty close to releasing an alpha version for other people to play (and help me find & fix bugs).
I've been using Visual Studio 2019, and I don't touch the make files. I've never used cmake.

[Grenoble]

Oh nice! Subscribed to this thread, please post here when you release. Congrats!

Some of the best documentation I found on building older software came from forums like this. Anything you can post on your process would be interesting to me.