the main loop in a game depends on
1) Character's Life
2) Player wants to "SAVE" a character and Quit.

I understand this.

But how do you start implementing an inventory system, combat system, random object placement and monster A.I. ?

My graphics are going to be old school ASCII characters- just like Dungeon Hack/Rouge.

I am going to hook "keypress's" to certain actions that a character can do. Wield weapon, Pick up all, put on rings, search room, examine sword, open potion, drink potion, unlock door, detect trap, etc...

but how do i implement this in programming terms ?

Whats the main loop going to look like after this ?

Just fustrated with all this coding stuff. Would like to worry more about creating items and adding interactions with the items to character OR character to environment interaction OR just basically creating the dungeon and neat magic items. But i also want to "control" how these items interact with everything else.

Guess I just need a nudge in the right direction.

troy:)

Well, I don't have a "simple" demo of how to set it up, but look at Snowball, My Two Bits, or Wing Blaster for some ideas.

I use a frame limiter/throttler to ensure that the timing is consistent across all platforms. I update as long as there's frames being missed and render when the engine's caught up.

Untested general code loop:

int i;

while(!game_done)

{

	// Draw while we're caught up.

	Render();

	// [Drawing stuff here]

	ShowPage();

	

	FrameThrottle();

	// For every frame we miss, update.

	// Gap is the distance in time between the

	// current frame and last one.

	for(i = 0; i < frame_throttler.gap; i++)

	{

		UpdateControls();

		// [Update stuff here]

	}

}

To check if buttons/keys are pressed, it's pretty easy, and it's fairly well documented and discussed. Attaching the scancodes to your own 'custom' buttons is simple enough, but I don't quite think it'll let you use defines in defines, so the next best thing.

int PLAYER_KEY_GET = SCAN_G;

int PLAYER_KEY_LOOK = SCAN_L;

int PLAYER_KEY_TALK = SCAN_T;

int PLAYER_KEY_DROP = SCAN_D;

int PLAYER_KEY_SLEEP = SCAN_S;

int PLAYER_KEY_EQUIP = SCAN_E;

int PLAYER_KEY_USE = SCAN_U;

int PLAYER_KEY_ATTACK = SCAN_A;

int PLAYER_KEY_PARRY = SCAN_P;

int PLAYER_KEY_SNEAK = SCAN_S;

Then use key[SCANCODE] to check if it's pressed.

Oh, and a lot of resources on the Internet for random map generation and item placement are documented in C code. Most of these solutions work okay with a bit of prodding. Random maps are probably more annoying than actually populating your dungeon. Someone else would probably be better able to explain a good dungeon generation algorithm.

Also, main game loops are usually very general - not getting into the player's health and that kind of thing. You basically should start with an Update and a Render call or something like that. Within your game update you'll break it down into several Update modes, one of which being your game which in itself will have many update functions for all your systems.