Lab 3: A non-trivial (non-OOP) java program

Summary: For this lab you will write a simple game. It is a turn-based game in which players move a "light-cycle" with commands f - for forward, l - for left turn, and r - for right turn. As the light-cycles move, they leave a trail behind them, and a light-cycle dies when it crosses its own or its opponent's trail. What makes the game interesting, is that each player gets more moves at each turn. (Multiple moves in the sample game must be space separated.) You can play the game by giving the following command at the command-line:

~/wcbrown/bin/tryLab3

Note: Please resize your terminal window to have at least 42 lines.

The Board

The board is a grid of 40x40 cells. You'll want to represent this as a 2D array of ints or chars or something. You define such a beast in Java like this

  int[][] board = new int[40][40];

or this

  char[][] board = new char[40][40];

Of course, you still need to initialize the entries in the 2D array! How you use this array to represent the board state is, of course, up to you!

The players

Player 1's light-cylce starts at row 20, column 0. Player 2's light-cylce starts at row 20, column 39. A player's light-cycle has, at any given point in time, a location and a direction, and the moves (f,l,r) are always with respect to that current direction. Dr. Crabbe suggests you make a separate class for a "player", that stores the location and direction.

Winning/Losing

A player loses if he moves to a square occupied by the other player, or a square that's part of either his or the other player's trails, or if he moves off of the board.

Misc. Hints

Since multiple moves are required to be space-separated, you can read in the next character in the move sequence with

	  in.next().charAt(0);

Hopefully you see why this works! Also, so you don't get caught up with this, Dr. Crabbe reads in the y/n character after asking whether you're ready to move, but goes on and asks for the move no matter what you say! You can do the same.