Programming project ideas

Seeing as I've got a bit of spare time coming up, I'd really like to get stuck into a new program. Trouble is, I really can't think of anything. I'll be writing it in C++, I'm looking for a FAIRLY complex program, although probably nothing involving 3D/Games. Complex maths/physics isn't really a problem. I wonder if anyone has any suggestions...? Cheers.

a program that can multiply and devide numbers to the n'th digit percision....

it involves making custom data types.... a lot harder than you think. you have to overcome the limitations of storing numbers as floats or doubles, as they are only accurate out to like 16 places or so if i remember correctly :)

 

also, check out project euler.

Haha, I've actually thought of doing that before. I'm guessing this is how Pi is worked out to so many digits. A good idea though, I will give it some thought.

I will throw around some ideas with Wendell and LittleViking... let's find a problem that needs to be solved... something that will attract intelligent people... and something cool. We should do something that a few of us could help with.

A good screencasting program? :D

mother of god... I hate them all...

That's a good idea. I'm often thinking of projects, but they often don't do much after they've been made. We need something with a practial use.

That is why i asked! ;)

I forgot to mention. It would be nifty if it was open source or at least used open source codecs. Exporting recordings into ogg would be quite nifty. 

To do that you've have to get your hands on video compression algorithms. I'm not sure how you would go about that. There doesn't seem to be much on the internet about video, not even much about open source codecs like Xvid and stuff.

if you are wanting to do a large project with c++.... im happy to donate a bit of my time.

So, i have read.. It was just an idea... But i havent seen much as how to get into all of that with video compression and everything... I know camstudio is open source but it is terrible. So they could figure it out at least kind of.

Well, I'm not a brilliant programmer, infact I've got more interest in the maths part. I haven't really written any massive programs before either, but I'm sure if I put the effort in I could.

Out of interest, what kind of stuff have you made, ztrain?

if you want some headers i have written, i give them out to people....

i have a nice one that allows you to write characters to the console window with X,Y coorinates, and whatever color you want....

write("hello world!",3,5,blue,darkblue);

would write hello world, 3 characters over to the rihgt and 5 characters down, with blue font on a dark blue background... its very helpful, especialy if you are making a text gui or something.

 

also have networking headers, an irc header, and a header that has some nice #defines in it for min, max, random, abs, and explode.

Some of that stuff would be above my level. Ask me to interact with other software/hardware/a network and I'm fairly stumped. Those game engines you wrote, were they using libraries like openGL or something? Last thing I wrote was a Sudoku solver and a Sudoku creator, it used some fairly robust algorithms, it was not entirely brute-force either. I also made a user input/macro recorder thingie, records mouse/keyboard input so that it can be played back at a later time. Made several simple 2D games, among loads of other various random crap.

That header does sound interesting, there isn't much inbuilt customization for console windows. Would you mind sharing that? I would be grateful.

cgh_network_raw.h - http://pastebin.com/kwhjpJj2

cgh_network_irc.h - http://pastebin.com/1qy4jgqP

cgh_io.h - http://pastebin.com/vY6cGTvc

cgh_tools.h - http://pastebin.com/WxmMYm2z

 

also, the games were written using SDL. the engines for both were written from the ground up by me and one other student. SDL just gives you functions to write images to the window, poll keyboard and mouse events, and so on.

wait the collatz conjecture that is in boinc, YOU MADE THAT?!?

 

tons of small probrams, 2 games, some math stuff, and various things to solve some problems... ill name the notable ones.

 

games:

2d versus arcade shooter... it was more like a group of us programmed the engine, then each of us programmed a ship that had an attack and 2 special moves, then fought them... we made the engine so that the ship did not have access to anything other than its self and the ability to shoot bullets. i made the bullets search the map for my ship, then circle arround the ship using a parametric equasion... making a force field of death.... i won, alot.

i also made a 2d isometric real time stratagy game, fog of war, units made sound and had levels of alertness, loyalty, blah blah blah.... spent a month trying to get unit avoidence to work, but based on how i did pathfinding, i would have to reqwite a lot of it so i just said fuck it and stopped working on it.... probubly my biggest project, currently stands at about 5500 lines of code.... using SDL for graphics, wrote the engine from scratch.

 

problem solving:

at school, we save all our work to an ftp.... a student manualy created all the accounts in the beginning of the year, but the computers hdd died after the 1st nine weeks... we back up all the work, but not the ftp accounts, so i made a program that takes a text file of names and student numbers "bob joe:12345" then it makes the accound "joe, bob" with the password "12345". writes all the xml and stuff.... only thing i used that i did not write, was the MD5 hash... which i found on google (filezilla hashes the pass with md5 and saves it in the xml, so i needed to do the same)

 

math stuff:

i solved a few problems on project euler with my programming class back when i was in the class...

i needed to add and subtract very large numbers for one of thoes projects, so i made a class that could handel numbers as large as the ammount of ram you had.... i dont want to say how i did it incase you want to try it yourself... hint hint, look up a full adder circut diagram :)

also made a program that calculates the collatz conjecture, you type in a start number, and it follows the conjecture til the number is equal to one... diferent verbosity modes, basicaly you could choose to output or not output runtime, ammount of steps, and the steps its self.

 

 

also made a few random things, had a bot on the RTW irc a while ago, which i programmed in c++.... if someone said !summon or something like that the bot would send my phone a text mesage saying someone was in the irc.... lol.

no, mine just ran on the local computer, it was not distributed.....

i believe they are trying to find a patern, or a start number that never reaches 1.... not sure.

^Thanks for that. I've started on the "large integer addition/subtraction" program. It's coming on quite nicely so far.