C - Creating animation in terminal - auto-updating 2D array - c

Question

I'm trying to make an animation which will make a basic circle from dots. I got stuck, because i do not know how to make an array to auto-update herself to make an animation. My program has an issue, because it shows only the last point on circle and other, previous points has vanished due to system("clear") command, but i do not know how to make it the proper way.
Thanks in advance!
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <math.h>
int main(void){
char tab[43][132];
int a, b, t;
double x_kropki, y_kropki;
for (t=0 ; t<360 ; t++) {
x_kropki=floor(10*cos((t*pi)/180))+60;
y_kropki=floor(10*sin((t*pi)/180))+20;
for (a=0 ; a<43 ; a++, printf("\n")) for (b=0 ; b<132 ; b++) {
if ((int)y_kropki==a && (int)x_kropki==b){
tab[a][b]='.';
printf("%c", tab[a][b]);
}else {
tab[a][b]=' ';
printf("%c", tab[a][b]);
}
}
system("clear");
}
return 0;
}

Answer 1

What is the animation supposed to look like? Do you want the circle to grow slowly? Then you need to add a delay (sleep or similar) or else it will finish the whole process too quickly for the screen to draw and for your eyes to notice.
Also you should not clear the progress after every new dot (of the 360 dots in total, it seems). To achieve that, you will need to change your approach a bit. Here's what the loop could look like:
Draw nothing
Draw dot 1
Clear
Draw dot 1 and 2
Clear
Draw dot 1 and 2 and 3
You see that after clearing, you need to repeat printing the progress so far. At loop iteration 180, you need to print the last 179 dots again plus the 180th. Wait a few milliseconds, then clear, then the same for 181.
How you do that? You repeat the for loop:
int dot, maxDots;
for (maxDots = 0; maxDots < 360; maxDots++) {
for (dot = 0; dot < maxDots; dot++) {
// your location calculations and printing for each dot
}
system("clear");
}
This should at least give you some kind of growing circle. But you will notice that the printing approach is hard to get right, because once a line has been finished, you cannot go back. If you start at the top and go your way around 180 degrees, down line by line, you will then need to go up line by line until you reach the top again. That won't work easily. Instead of printing directly, as #Weather Vane suggested, store the to-be-printed result of each animation stage in a buffer. That is an abstraction of on-screen coordinates. A very simple approach would be a two-dimensional array that you can manipulate freely, then print the whole array en bloc.