Ch. 3 Acey-Deucy game contains error

tblank555 · February 25th, 2013, 07:26 PM

[edit: I'm an idiot. The shuffle function only shuffles cards 0-51 in the array. Ignore this whole post please!]

So I just finished coding the Acey-Deucy game at the end of Chapter 3. On my first test of the game, I ended up receiving the "sentinel" card as one of my first two cards. Looking back through my code, I realized that in my main do...while loop for the game, I accidentally had it checking the previous 3 cards for the sentinel card instead of the next 3.

Problem solved, right? WRONG.

This highlights a critical error in the way this game works: the sentinel card gets shuffled in with the rest. As I understood from the description, the game should continue until the entire deck is used up, but with the way the sentinel card currently gets shuffled in, the game just ends as soon as the sentinel is in the next 3 cards. I can see how this would be a hard error to catch without having made an error in your code like I did originally, but really guys?

Obviously this can be solved a couple of different ways, one of which would be to modify the initialization of the card deck and a bit of the main code so that the sentinel card gets added after the deck is shuffled.

tblank555 · February 25th, 2013, 07:38 PM

[edit: Again, sorry, I was completely wrong.]

I'm sure there's an easier way to add an element to an array, but this is the only way I could get to work. Also, I'm not sure you can just add an element to an array that's already been defined like this, but it seems to work. Any professional help here would be greatly appreciated.

SUGGESTED FIX:

1. Remove the

Code:

{"sentinel", "null", 0}

object from the end of your initialization of the deck array (in main())

2. after the

Code:

shuffle(deck);

command in your main function, insert the following code:

Code:

// add the sentinel card
deck[52].name = "sentinel";
deck[52].suit = "null";
deck[52].value = 0;