COMP1110 Assignment 2 Academic Honesty and Integrity
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.
Purpose
In this assignment you will work as a group to master a number of major themes of this course, including software design and implementation, group work, using development tools such as Git and IntelliJ, and using JavaFX to build a user interface. Above all, this assignment will emphasize group work; while you will receive an individual mark for your work based on your contributions to the assignment, you can only succeed if all members contribute to your group’s success.
Assignment Deliverables
The assignment is worth 30% of your total assessment, and it will be marked out of 30. 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.
Problem Description
The assignment involves implementing in Java, a board game called IQ-Fit made by the games developer SmartGames.
Objective
The game is a puzzle. The object of the game is to place ten plastic pieces on a board so that the pieces fill the board perfectly, with no overlaps and no gaps. The player starts by selecting a challenge which will have some number of pieces already placed. Their task is to place all remaining pieces. Broadly, the more pieces that are placed, the smaller the set of remaining options for the player, and therefore the easier it is to complete the puzzle. The challenge is made interesting by the complex three-dimensional shapes of the plastic pieces.
A completed game:
To help you visualize the game, we have provided a paper version, which you can cut out. Challenges
A game starts by choosing a challenge which specifies in what positions certain puzzle pieces must be placed. The puzzle pieces that are pre-placed by the challenge at the start of the game cannot be moved by the player until the game is ended.
Here is the starting challenge for the game above:
In the challenge above, the lime (L), sky blue (S), indigo (I), and green (G) pieces are placed as part of the challenge. They can’t be moved. You can see that much of the board is unfilled (grey holes). The player’s task is to place the remaining six pieces in such a way that all of the board is covered perfectly, which means no gaps and no overlaps.
Some challenges are much easier to solve than others. When you think about the game, you may wish to reflect on what makes some challenges so much easier than others. One of the assignment tasks is to create interesting challenges. Note that as a general rule for puzzles, the more constrained the player is, the fewer options they have, and consequently the solution to the challenge is simpler.
The game comes with five difficulty levels: starter, junior, expert, master, and wizard, and offers 24 challenges at each level, for a total of 120 prescribed challenges. These challenges are provided for you in the Solutions class, and the different difficulty levels are tested in the SolutionsTest test.
Solutions
Each challenge has just one solution.
The following sequence shows one possible progression of a solution to the game above (note that the order in which the pieces are played is not important; this is just one possible sequence of moves).
Board
The game is played on a board comprised of 50 locations arranged in a 10×5 grid.
In the real-world game, each location consists of a circular indent into which a piece may fit. We refer to the placement of pieces in terms of their upper left corner when a bounding box is placed around them. In our game, locations are encoded as two digits, the first one identifying the column from 0 to 9 , followed by another identifying the row from 0 to 4 .
In the example illustrated below we show how the location of pieces on the board is encoded. Notice that we identify each piece by the location of the upper-left corner of its bounding box (a rectangular box drawn around the piece).
For example, in the game above, the lime piece (lower-left, lime-green in color) is in position 02 (column 0 , row 2 ), the sky-blue piece (bottom center-left) is in position 23 (column 2 , row 3 ), the indigo piece (purple, bottom center-right) is in position 63 (column 6 , row 3 ), and the green piece (green, right) is in position 82 (column 8 , row 2 ). Notice how the bounding box is necessary to identify the location of the sky-blue piece since the piece itself does not cover location 23 , but that is the top left corner of its bounding box. Likewise for the green piece, which does not cover 82 , but that is the top left corner of its bounding box. For the lime-green and indigo pieces the top-left corner of the piece is the same as the top-left corner of its bounding box.
Pieces
The game comprises 10 playing shapes, each of a distinct color (blue, green, indigo, lime-green,
navy-blue, orange, pink, red, sky-blue, and yellow).
Each piece is 3-dimensional. Note that in your assignment, your game will be on a screen (just
like this description), so will only view each piece from a two-dimensional perspective.
You should study the picture below carefully. The lime-green, navy-blue, and red pieces have not been placed, revealing their three dimensional shape.
Each piece can be thought of in terms of a spine comprising either three (green, indigo, lime-green, navy) or four (blue, orange, pink, red, sky-blue, and yellow) spheres in a straight line.
Each piece has three additional spheres that protrude from the spine, two in one plane, and one in the other. Thus, when laid flat on a table and viewed from above, they will either have a single protrusion sticking out from the spine (blue and red in the photo), or a double protrusion (lime- green). You can see these clearly in the diagram below.
When a piece is placed on the board, it must be placed with either the single or double protrusion pointing downwards into the holes in the board. Thus in the photo above, each of the 7 pieces placed on the board has no protrusions pointing upwards. When a player places a piece, they can have either the double protrusion pointing down, into the board, or the single protrusion pointing down into the board. In the photo above, the pink, orange, and sky-blue pieces each have their single protrusion visible, which means they were all placed with the double protrusion pointing downwards, into the board. On the other hand, the blue, green, indigo and yellow pieces all have their double protrusion visible, which means they have been placed with their single protrusion pointing downwards into the board.
Since each piece may be placed in one of four 90-degree rotations (north, east, south, west), and in two flips (single protrusion visible or double protrusion visible), each piece has eight possible ways it can be placed on the board.
The diagram below illustrates all ten pieces and their eight possible orientations. The first four columns show each piece its single protrusion visible with four 90-degree rotations, while the last four columns show each piece with its double protrusion visible with four 90-degree rotations. When we encode pieces in this assignment, we use lower case letters (e.g. b ) to encode a piece in its single protrusion orientation (left half of the diagram), and we use upper case letters (e.g. B to encode a piece its double protrusion orientation (right half of the diagram).
In the game below, you can see that lime was placed in the L flip (double protrusion) and the W orientation (west), sky-blue was placed in the s flip (single protrusion) and S orientation (south), etc.
Legal Piece Placements
For a piece placement to be valid, the following must be true:
All of the visible spheres in the piece must be placed above board locations (no part of a piece may be off the board).
All of the visible spheres in the piece must be placed on vacant board locations (pieces may not overlap).
Encoding Game State and Challenges
Game states and challenges 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.
Challenge Strings
A challenge string consists of a placement string comprising one or more piece placements.
For the sample challenge below, the challenge string is “g82EI63SL02Ws23S” , which consists of piece placements for green ( g81E ), indigo ( I63S ), lime-green ( L02W ), and sky-blue ( s23S ). These encodings are explained further below.
Placement Strings
A placement string consists of between one to ten (inclusive) piece placements (pieces blue to yellow, listed in order). The placement string may not include any piece twice. A completed game must include ten piece placements. Pieces are always listed in order (by the first letter of the color name; the ordering of the rows in the figure above (blue … yellow)). Each piece placement is described using four characters. For example, the completed game below is encoded by the string “b52Ng82EI63SL02Wn12So40NP60Sr00Ns23SY11N” . Note that the placement string is ordered (the blue piece ( b or B ) first, and yellow piece ( y or Y ) last, following the ordering in the diagram above). Correct ordering is a requirement for valid placement strings. The encoding of the string is described further below.
Piece Placement Strings
A piece placement string consists of four characters describing the location and orientation of one particular piece on the board:
The first character identifies which of the ten shapes is being placed, and which flip (lower
case: single protrusion, upper case: double protrusion). The table above shows the letters used.
The second character identifies which column the left of the piece is in (columns are labelled 0 to 9 ).
The third character identifies which row the top of the piece is in (rows are labelled 0 to 4 ). The fourth character identifies which orientation the piece is in (north N , east E , south S , and west W ).
The image above shows the first and fourth characters for each of the pieces in each of their orientations (80 in total).
In the placement string above, r00N describes the placement of the red piece, which is placed with one protrusion (lower case r ) in orientation N at location ( 0 , 0 ) (the top left corner of the board). L02W describes the placement of the lime-green piece, which is placed with one protrusion (upper case L ) in orientation W at location ( 0 , 2 ). b52N describes the placement of the blue piece, which is placed with one protrusion (lower case b ) in orientation N at location ( 5 ,
2).
Legal and Ethical Issues
First, as with any work you do, you must abide by the principles of honesty and integrity. You are expected to demonstrate honesty and integrity in everything you do.
In addition to those ground rules, you are to follow the rules one would normally 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 receive no marks for the assignment (but you would not have broken any rules either).
Evaluation Criteria
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 tests run through git’s continuous integration (CI) framework, 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. Part One
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 visualize game states (Task #4).
The criteria for the completion of part one is as follows: Pass
Tasks #2 and #3
Credit
Task #4 (in addition to all tasks required for Pass) Distinction
Task #5 (in addition to all tasks required for Credit) Part Two
Create a fully working game, using JavaFX to implement a playable graphical version of the game in a 933×700 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 933×700 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 13 runtime).
Pass
Credit
All of the Pass-level criteria, plus the following…
Task #7
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.
Distinction
All of the Credit-level criteria, plus the following…
Tasks #8 and #9
High Distinction
All of the Distinction-level criteria, plus the following…
Tasks #10 and #11