@GESHY47 In these cases you need to consider the scope of your project and change your perspective of the problem. Oh boy, this is going to be a long write-up, sorry for that but I don’t know how else to explain it with less words.
(…) but what code do I also add to determine if it is open or closed. Like do I have to check if objects are connected (colliding) like the battery, wire and lightbulb and it is only a 5x5 grid so it doesn’t get too wild with the circuits.
If that’s what you want the simulator to do, then yes. When I say change how you view your problem, I literally mean that you need to stop thinking in terms of how the real world works and consider how you can make it seem to the end user that it works like in the real world.
While I understand that a simulator needs to be faithful to reality, no one will be asking how you programmed the electrical current behavior, for all we care electricity is something you can’t see unless it has an effect, so you don’t program the cause, you program the effect, the result.
but I don’t want to have to keep changing it, rather the simulator should understand by itself if the circuit I am creating is open or closed.
I already mentioned how in my previous comment. I understand it is not obvious if you’re new to programming, but it is literally that simple. You don’t need to make the simulator understand anything. You need to give it orders so it does tasks. One of those tasks is to be watchful of what changes the current flow state. This is why I mentioned which cases you were going to test, because you have to program every one of them.
It’s nearly impossible to just let the program “react” to a virtual world without programming behaviors and giving it stimuli to react to, you would probably need an AI and some machine learning algorithms for that. That’s why in my previous comment I was implying that you need to make use of your knowledge to reduce the amount of cases that you need to test.
Let me give you some concrete examples since you already mentioned some things. Let’s say you have a 5 x 5 grid like in your example, you have a battery, you have a wire and a lightbulb. Now let’s think, in a perfect world without restrictions what do you need to light the bulb? do we even need cables? do we need the battery? no, we just need the bulb. In programming you can make the light bulb turn on and off by itself without electricity, and you can record the state of the bulb in a variable.
Why am I saying this? because this means you can communicate between objects without needing physical connections. So if the example, regardless of the wire, if you want to light the bulb on it’s own you can. Let’s say you want the battery to light it on instead, what do you do?
You then make a variable for the battery object let’s call it voltage. This variable can be a boolean variable too. 1 for current, 0 for no current.
Then how can the light bulb react to the battery? Well you need a conditional statement (this is pseudo code) "if battery.Variable(voltage) = 1 then light_bulb.Variable(light) = 1
There we communicated the battery and the lightbulb, but what if the battery sends a 0 signal? Well the lightbulb will retain it’s previous state, so even if the battery doesn’t send more current, the lightbulb will still be lit. Why? because you need to program it what to do when it receives no current!
So you’d need a new set of events "if battery.Variable(voltage) = 0 then light_bulb.Variable(light) = 0. Seems pretty obvious, but unfortunately computers are in need of precise orders all the time to do anything.
Now, this could be the end of your simulation, but for the sake of argument let’s say you want to add the wires to affect the simulation. You have to think and ask yourself questions like:
- how will these wires affect the way the current flows through the circuit?
- how can the user add and remove these wires?
- will the wires inform the light bulb that there’s no current? or the battery? both? neither?
- etc
Let’s say you have a system where you can already add and remove wires during the game / app window, if you click a tile you can add a wire, if you right click you can remove it. Ina 5 x 5 grid, we have a wire that is 5 tiles long horizontally, and let’s say that each tile is a “part” of that wire. Then how does the flow become interrupted if you remove the a single tile?
- Will you check each each to see if there’s a connected path?
- Will you make that each tile that exists has a value? and if the sum of that value is less than the total distance there is no current?
- Will you try to create a wire tile behavior that reports if they are next to another wire and aligned properly to conduct the current flow?
Now, getting more specific than that is basically me doing the work, and I’m sorry to say this but I don’t really have time for that. I think however this should be enough to give you ample understanding about how to tackle the problem, but you also NEED to break down the problem itself (creting a circuit simulator) into quantifiable & manageable tasks that will move you towards the objective.
Try to ask yourself what you want to do concretely and how you want the app to work. It’s important not to be vague about it because you can “see it” and know how to use one in reality. Be thorough and write it down as concise and as simply as possible, as if you were explaining it to an alien with zero knowledge of earth and make it so each task is phrased like an action that has to be taken. “I need to program the light bulb states”, “I need to create the light bulb sprites” etc
Consider taking time to plan what do you want to do with the simulator to scope the project correctly, otherwise there will be simply no end to the amount of work you will have to do…