Help the poor little children ;(

Ok, I am trying to write a program that will print out a simple wordsearch (you know, a grid of random letters with several themed words hidden in it). I'd really like it finished before Christmas, so does anyone have an algorithm for placing the letters on the grid? A 2-dimensional character array would be fine for the grid, I have the printing part done and dusted.

The list of words is already known to the program at runtime, the words will be no longer than 20 characters, and the grid will be about 25 grid squares in width and height.

I would like it to have words horizontally and vertically, diagonally would be brilliant, but not neccesary.

I'm not going to have much time to work on this myself which is why I'm asking here, normally I'd struggle through it myself :)

Its for a school by the way, which explains the title!

That would be a hard one on my opinion. Implementing a char array would be tough. Have you tried it yet?

A 2d char array is dead easy.

Dim Grid(1 to 20,1 to 20) As String * 1

Its just the algorithm to arrange the words on the puzzle that's giving me a bit of trouble.

Hi woss
I dont think that the code will be so simple for that espec for someone to throw together in a day or two :p but i found this for ya. I havent downloaded it so cant vouch for it. but give it a go. I just searched google for "wordsearch game code"
regards
Stuart

http://www.freevbcode.com/ShowCode.Asp?ID=1869

Cool, thanks for that, I'll have a look in a moment.

My current theory is to let the user pre-define the size of the grid and then use brute force to fit the words in

Starting at a random square, check each of the 8 normal directions (up, down, left, right, diagonal up-left etc...) to see if the word will fit without disrupting any other words, then move on to the next word and repeat.

The problem with that it that it may take a long time on a PalmOS device (which is the other platform I am porting to), but it would be OK for VB, because its much faster at that sort of thing.

I'll check out this code though. Thanks.

Quote:

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A 2d char array is dead easy.

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I know that. :p I ment arranging the words.

Yeah, suuuure you did ;) right.

Heh heh :)

I've got it sussed out now. Thanks for your replies.