CSCI 1321 (Principles of Algorithm Design II), Spring 2010:
Homework 1

Credit

Design 40 points; code 20 points.

Overview

This assignment is less about you writing code and more about thinking about what you are going to do for the project and getting used to Java and the IDE. As with all of the assignments, there are two distinct due dates. On the first one you will turn in your design documents; on the second one you will submit the code itself. In this assignment, the code is very short and simple; you will likely write far more comments (describing your design) than code.

Before reading further, be sure you have read the Project Description giving the overall description of the project and general requirements.

Design

You will write your design in the form of comments for the class that will contain your main program; they will then appear in the HTML documentation generated by Eclipse (or with the javadoc command). This documentation will not necessarily set in stone every detail of the game you will write, but you should be as specific as you can. In particular, you should first give a general description of the game and roughly how the user will play it, and then explain how you will implement this using Dr. Lewis's framework (i.e., what kinds of Block, and GameEntity classes do you think you will need?) For example, in a very simple Pacman-style game you might need two kinds of blocks, one for walls (obstacles) and one for the rest of the playing field, and two kinds of game entities, one for enemies and one for things you pick up to score points.

Step-by-step instructions

• Create an Eclipse project for this assignment. You can add the JAR file at this point, but you don't need it for the design phase, since you're writing comments only.

• Within the project, create a package for your code. (You could skip this step, but it's good style.) A good package name is edu.trinity.cs.yourusername.yourgame, where yourgame is something descriptive of your game (e.g., pacmanclone).

• Create your main class, and add to it documentation comments describing your game. To make it easier for me to find everyone's main class later, please give it a name that includes the word Main -- e.g., PacManCloneMain, or just GameMain.

• Generate HTML documentation for your project as described in the Project Description and check that it is okay (i.e., the comments you wrote show up in the page for the class).

• Turn in your design by sending me mail telling me it's ready to be graded. Please use a subject line such as ``csci 1321 design 1''.

Code

For this assignment, all you have to write is a main method for the class you defined in the design phase. See the step-by-step instructions below for what should be in this method.

Step-by-step instructions

• Open the project you created in the design phase. At this point you need to be sure the JAR file for this assignment is in the build path, as described in the Project Description.

• Put a main method in the class you created for the design phase. Its return type and parameters should be the same as the examples we've done in class. Within this main method, do the following:
  • instantiate (create) a MainFrame object. MainFrame is a generic class, so doing this requires you to supply the names of classes implementing the Block and GameEntity interfaces. For now, use BasicBlock and BasicEntity; the type of the variable you need here is therefore MainFrame<BasicBlock,BasicEntity>.

    You will also need (to pass to the constructor for MainFrame) an instance of a class implementing GameSetup. For now, you can get one of these by using the (static) method instance of class BasicGameSetup.

    (See the ``Files and links'' section at the end of this document for a link to documentation about the game framework. It's also linked from the course ``Useful links'' page.)

  • call your MainFrame object's setVisible method, passing it a value of true. (You won't find a description of setVisible in the documentation for MainFrame; it's inherited from the Java library class JFrame.)

  When you compile this program and run it, it should bring up a window that lets you play Dr. Lewis's starter game.

• (Normally at this point I would say ``revise and debug until you're happy with how your code compiles and executes'', but for this assignment, that should be trivial.)

• Generate HTML documentation for your project as described in the Project Description. Notice that you want it to go into a Final directory rather than overwriting what you did in the design phase.

• Turn in your code by sending me mail with your source code (a single file for this assignment) as an attachment, as described in the Project Description. Please use a subject line such as ``csci 1321 code 1''.

Files and links

• The JAR file for this assignment, PAD2S10Assn1.jar.

• Project Description.

• Project API (Lewis game framework).