This assignment is only for those enrolled in COMP1110 or COMP6710. COMP1140 students should look here.
Honesty and integrity are of utmost importance. These goals are not at odds with being resourceful and working collaboratively. You should be resourceful, you should collaborate within your team, and you should discuss the assignment and other aspects of the course with others taking the class. However, you must never misrepresent the work of others as your own. If you have taken ideas from elsewhere or used code sourced from elsewhere, you must say so with utmost clarity. At each stage of the assignment you will be asked to submit a statement of originality, either as a group or as individuals. This statement is the place for you to declare which ideas or code contained in your submission were sourced from elsewhere.
Please read the ANU's official position on academic honesty. If you have any questions, please ask me.
Carefully review the statement of originality which you must complete. Edit that statement and update it as you complete each state of the assignment, ensuring that when you complete each stage, a truthful statement is committed and pushed to your repo.
In this assignment you will exercise a number of major themes of the course, including software design and implemention, using development tools such as Git and IntelliJ, using JavaFX to build a user interface. Above all, this assignment will emphasize group work.
The assignment is worth 25% of your total assessment, and it will be marked out of 25. So each mark in the assignment corresponds to a mark in your final assessment for the course. Note that for some stages of the assignment you will get a group mark, and for others you will be individually marked. The mark breakdown and the due dates are described on the deliverables page.
Your work will be marked via your tutor accessing git, so it is essential that you carefully follow instructions for setting up and maintaining your group repository. At each deadline you will be marked according to whatever is committed to your repository at the time of the deadline. You will be assessed on how effectively you use git as a development tool.
The assignment involves implementing in Java an board game called IQ-steps made by the games developer SmartGames.
The game is a puzzle; the objective is to place all eight colored playing pieces onto a board comprising 25 pegs which are arranged in a grid. The placement must ensure that all of the pieces fit together correctly.
A completed game:
The following sequence shows the progression of a solution to the game above.
The game is played on a board comprised of 50 locations arranged in a 5x10 grid. 25 of the locations have pegs which are the same height as a single layer of the pieces (each of which are two layers high, described below, and seen in the photo above). The locations are encoded with letters A-Y and a-y, according to the picture below and encoding scheme which is described below. When pieces are played, each ring in their lower layer must be on a peg and as a consequence, each ring on their upper layer will be at a location that is not a peg.
The game comprises 8 playing shapes, each of which is made of plastic and consists of five or six flat rings arranged in two layers (see the photo above). Each layer has an arrangement of two or three rings. The thickness of the rings is the same as the height of the board pegs, so once a piece is played, the upper layer of rings always sits neatly above the top of the pegs. The two layers of rings are fused together. The two layers are offset from each other by half a peg space (rings are never directly on top another). See the illustration of all pieces and their possible orientatons below. The center-most ring is defined to be the home of the piece (the placement of the piece is defined in terms of the placement of the center ring). Shapes may be flipped and rotated, so the home ring may be on the top or bottom layer at the time it is played. For orientations A-D, the home ring is on the bottom layer. For orientations E-H, the home ring is on the top layer (see the illustration of all shapes and their eight orientations, below).
The illustration immediately below shows the state of the board after
placing three of the pieces from the completed game above. For each
piece, the lower layer is shown as darker rings, and may be overlapped
by rings from the upper layer, including its own rings and rings from
other pieces. Notice that the pink piece (shape A, placement AHQ)
had to be placed after the green piece (shape B, placement BGS)
because the top right of the upper layer of piece A (pink) overlaps
the top of the bottom layer of piece B (green). Notice that
although the ordering of pieces A and B matters, the ordering of
the placement of pieces A (pink) and E (orange) does not matter
for this particular game, because those pieces have no
inter-dependencies in this particular arrangement of the pieces.
Notice that in this example, the first three pieces happen to have
been placed with their home ring on the top (light-colored) layer, so
their home is not located on a peg. Their homes are locations S,
Q, and B (see the picture above for the locations, and you'll note
that these locations are not pegs).
Each piece can be flipped and rotated at 90 degree increments,
allowing for 8 different orientations (four rotations and a flip
with four rotations). The following illustration shows all 64
possible combinations of the 8 pieces and 8 orientations. The first
four columns show four rotations. The piece is then flipped and
rotated four more times. So the fifth image in the top row (AE)
illustrates the flip of the left-most image (AA). Notice that for all
pieces in the rotations A to D, the central home ring is on the bottom layer (dark color), but when
the pieces are flipped (E to H), the central home ring is on the top
layer (light).
For a piece placement to be valid, the following must be true:
- All rings must be placed on valid board locations (none of the rings may be off the board).
- Each of the bottom rings must be placed onto vacant pegs (pegs that are not occupied by already played pieces).
- None of the bottom rings may be obstructed by the upper layer of
pieces already played. Notice that for each peg, it may be
obstructed by up to four upper-level locations. For example, a
piece being played onto peg
N(see the diagram above), cannot be played if there are pieces with rings at upper locationsD,O,X, orM. - Each of the upper rings must be placed onto vacant locations (locations that are not occupied by already played pieces).
Game states are encoded as strings. Your game will need to be able to initialize itself using these strings and some of your tasks relate directly to these strings.
A placement string consists of between one and eight (inclusive)
piece placements. The placement string may not include any piece
twice. A completed game consists of eight piece placements. For
example, the game described above is characterized (when complete) by
the string BGSAHQEFBGCgCDNHFlDAiFHn. Notice that this placement string is
carefully ordered, and constitutes a legal playing sequence. Games
may also be represented in arbitrary orders, in which case they are
not encoding legal playing sequences. One of your tasks will be to
take unordered game states and determine legal orderings, figuring out
the order in which pieces must be played in order for all placements
to be legal.
A piece placement string consists of three characters describing the location and orientation of one particular piece on the board:
- The first character identifies which of the eight shapes is being placed ('A' to 'H').
- The second character identifies which orientation the piece is in ('A' to 'E' for four rotations, and then 'F' to 'H' for four flipped rotations, see the illustration of all 64 piece orientations above).
- The third character identifies which location on the board the home of the piece is to be placed on ('A' to 'Y' represent the first 25 locations and 'a' to 'y' represent the next 25 locations), as depicted in the image above.
The image above shows the first and second characters for each of the pieces in each of their orientations (64 in total). For example, at top left, 'AA' desribes piece 'A' at orientation 'A'. Below it, 'BA' describes piece 'B' at orientation 'A'. At the bottom right 'HH' describes piece 'H' at orientation 'H'. And so on.
The progression of twelve images above shows the progression of the game BGSAHQEFBGCgCDNHFlDAiFHn,
starting with BGS, then showing BGSAHQ, etc.
First, as with any work you do, you must abide by the principles of honesty and integrity. I expect you to demonstrate honesty and integrity in everything you do.
In addition to those ground rules, you are to follow the rules one would normaly be subject to in a commercial setting. In particular, you may make use of the works of others under two fundamental conditions: a) your use of their work must be clearly acknowledged, and b) your use of their work must be legal (for example, consistent with any copyright and licensing that applies to the given material). Please understand that violation of these rules is a very serious offence. However, as long as you abide by these rules, you are explicitly invited to conduct research and make use of a variety of sources. You are also given an explicit means with which to declare your use of other sources (via originality statements you must complete). It is important to realize that you will be assessed on the basis of your original contributions to the project. While you won't be penalized for correctly attributed use of others' ideas, the work of others will not be considered as part of your contribution. Therefore, these rules allow you to copy another student's work entirely if: a) they gave you permission to do so, and b) you acknowledged that you had done so. Notice, however, that if you were to do this you would have no original contribution and so would recieve no marks for the assigment (but you would not have broken any rules either).
It is essential that you refer to the deliverables page to check that you understand each of the deadlines and what is required. Your assignment will be marked via git, so all submittable materials will need to be in git and in the correct locations, as prescribed by the deliverables page.
The mark breakdown is described on the deliverables page.
In the first part of the assignment you will:
- Implement parts of the text interface to the game (Tasks #2, and #3).
- Implement a simple viewer that allows you to visualise game states (Task #4).
The criteria for the completion of part one is as follows:
- Tasks #2 and #3
- Task #4 (in addition to all tasks required for Pass)
- Task #5 (in addition to all tasks required for Credit)
Create a fully working game, using JavaFX to implement a playable graphical version of the game in a 933x700 window.
Notice that aside from the window size, the details of exactly how the game looks etc, are intentionally left up to you. The diagrams above are for illustration purposes only, although you are welcome to use all of the resources provided in this repo, including the bitmap images for each of the eight shapes.
The only firm requirements are that:
- you use Java and JavaFX,
- the game respects the specification of the game given here,
- the game be easy to play,
- it runs in a 933x700 window, and
- that it is executable on a standard lab machine from a jar file called
game.jar,
Your game must successfully run from game.jar from within another user's (i.e.
your tutor's) account on a standard lab machine (in other words, your game must
not depend on features not self-contained within that jar file and the Java 8
runtime).
- Correctly implements all of the Part One criteria.
- Appropriate use of git (as demonstrated by the history of your repo).
- Completion of Task #6
- Executable on a standard lab computer from a runnable jar file, game.jar, which resides in the root level of your group repo.
- All of the Pass-level criteria, plus the following...
- Task #7
- All of the Credit-level criteria, plus the following...
- Tasks #8 and #9
- All of the Distinction-level criteria, plus the following...
- Tasks #10 and #11