Assignment 4: Painting a Winner, Part 3: Changing the Game

Due dates:

• Implementation: Tuesday, Oct 15 Thu, Oct. 17 at 8:59pm

• Self-evaluation: Wednesday, Oct 16 Fri, Oct. 18 at 11:59pm

Starter files: code.zip

Note: Homeworks 5 through 8 will begin a new project, and you will be working with a partner for them. Start thinking about who you’d like to partner with. You will sign up with your partner on the handin server, and you will not be able to submit subsequent assignments until you are part of a team on the handin server. If you do not know (or remember) how to request teams, follow these instructions. Please request teams no later than the start of homework 5, which is Oct 20 — if you have not requested a teammate by then, we will randomly assign you one. You only need to request a partner for Assignment 5; we will copy the teams to the remaining assignments.

1 Purpose

The benefits of the model-view-controller architecture shine when we need to add new features, by isolating relevant parts of our design and changing them independently. In this assignment we will see those benefits pay off by supporting other forms of Solo Red. The goal of this assignment is to give you a chance to critically examine your earlier design choices, and either leverage or revise them to enable adding variations of this game with minimal change and duplication of code.

With one exception (main), all new classes and interfaces for this homework should be in the cs3500.solored.model.hw04 package. All classes written in previous assignments, even if improved upon, should remain in their respective packages.

There will be two submissions for this assignment:

• Your actual implementation and full test suite

• A self-evaluation, due one day plus one hour later than the actual implementation, where we will ask you to reflect on your implementation and testing choices.

The same late-day policy as on the previous homework applies: each of these submissions independently may use up to one late day, and you are still able to submit your self-evaluation on time even if you submit your implementation late.

You are expected to use your code from the previous assignment as the starting point for this assignment. However, please ensure all of your new code is in the cs3500.solored.model.hw04 package. Additionally, your code from the previous assignment should remain in the cs3500.solored.model.hw02, cs3500.solored.view.hw02 and cs3500.solored.controller packages.

2 How much of the controller and view do I need working now?

To pass the public tests specific to this assignment, you need a controller that can handle a single input: the quit command. So just the input "q". The view’s render method and toString method should also be fully working. That is the bare minimum you need to start this assignment.

You will also need a view that uses only the observations of RedGameModel to create the toString and render the game state to an Appendable.

Of course, for the hidden tests, you will need a fully working controller, view, and models.

3 A more advanced Solo Red game

Traditionally, the multi=player game Red7 has advanced rules that give more meaning to playing to a canvas or playing cards to a palette. You will implement a lighter variant of the advance rules with the following changes

• The player now draws a single card from the deck after they play to the palette. Naturally, if the deck is empty, no drawing occurs.

• The player can draw an additional card after playing to a palette if they play a card to the canvas and the number on the card played to the canvas is strictly greater than the number of cards in the now currently winning palette. If they fulfill this condition, they draw two cards from the deck instead of one after they play to the palette. After they draw, the number of cards they can draw resets to one.

Consider the state below with a non-empty deck and a max hand size of 5.

Canvas: R
> P1: B2 B7
P2: R1 B5
P3: O1 V7 R2
P4: O4 I1
Hand: B1 O7 O3 R3 R4

If they play B1 to the canvas, the game state changes to the following

Canvas: B
P1: B2 B7
P2: R1 B5
> P3: O1 V7 R2
P4: O4 I1
Hand: O7 O3 R3 R4

Since the number of the card played to the canvas is 1 and the winning palette has 3 cards, the player does not get to draw an additional card at the end of the turn. Therefore, the player will only be able to draw a single card after playing to palette. If they then play O7 to palette P2 and draw for their hand, we get the following state. Notice the hand gets one new card from drawing.

Canvas: B
P1: B2 B7
> P2: R1 B5 O7
P3: O1 V7 R2
P4: O4 I1
Hand: O3 R3 R4 I7

Suppose instead of playing B1 to the canvas, they played O7 to the canvas at the start. Then the game state becomes as follows.

Canvas: O
> P1: B2 B7
P2: R1 B5
P3: O1 V7 R2
P4: O4 I1
Hand: B1 O3 R3 R4

Since the 7 of O7 is greater than the number of cards in the winning palette P1, the player will get to draw an additional card at the end of their turn. Say they play B1 to P4, then the state becomes as follows.

Canvas: O
P1: B2 B7
P2: R1 B5
P3: O1 V7 R2
> P4: O4 I1 B1
Hand: O3 R3 R4 I7 R5

Again, noticed they drew two cards for their hand thanks to the canvas play!

Note that if they never changed the canvas and just played a card to a palette, then if the player is not losing, they only get to draw a single card.

Everything else about the game stays unchanged: the rules of the colors remain the same and drawing can only occur if the game has started and still going after playing to a palette.

4 Assignment Requirements and Design Constraints

You must complete these requirements while respecting the following constraints:

• You are not allowed to change the interface of the model (RedGameModel) at all from before.

• You are not allowed to change the controller interface (RedGameController) at all from before.

• As before, you are not allowed to add any additional public methods in your classes, with the exception of any expected constructors.

• You must create separate model implementations, without eliminating SoloRedGameModel from before. That is, models that represent all variations of the game must co-exist.

In this assignment it is important not only to have a correctly working model, but also a design that uses interfaces and classes appropriately. Make sure you minimize replication of code. You may refactor your earlier designs to do this. You may also have to change earlier implementations to remove bugs. This is OK, but must be properly documented and justified.

5 Hints

• You should always plan out things in detail before you code. But this assignment is designed to be significantly more difficult if you jump into the code prematurely and try to figure out things as you code!

• For each variant, go through each operation of the model interface, and think about how that operation works for this variant of the game. Planning out every operation before coding will save you a lot of time!

• Recall that your view needs to be able to work with any model implementation, without knowing which one!

• You may be tempted to discover all possible abstractions beforehand. Make sure you minimize code repetition, but not over-abstract so much that some methods lose meaning. Even private helper methods should have a specific purpose! While it is good to anticipate abstraction, there is nothing wrong with thinking about abstraction after implementing all the code. It’s the end result that counts!

6 Testing

When testing your new models, you may find that a lot of your old model tests should also pass under the new models. This means you will end up creating a lot of duplicate tests. Make sure to abstract your test code appropriately (Hint: Test classes are just Java classes. So how do we deduplicate code between classes?). Make a test file for each variant in the cs3500.solored package in your test folder and make sure to deduplicate code as necessary.

A really good test class for your new models will be reusing a bunch of the old model tests and then’ the only new code in your model test classes will be any factory methods you need to make and tests that only apply to that particular model

7 The RedGameCreator class

Design a class with the above name. The class should define a public enum GameType with two possible values: BASIC and ADVANCED. It should offer one static method createGame(GameType) that returns an instance of (an appropriate subclass of) RedGameModel, depending on the GameType given. ] (Note: What class/pattern am I asking you to design/follow?)

8 The main() method

Add the following class to your project. Notice what package the class is in!

package cs3500.solored;

public final class SoloRed {
  public static void main(String[] args) {
    // FILL IN HERE
  }
}

This main() method will be the entry point for your program. Your program needs to take inputs as command-line arguments (available in your program through the argument args above). Review the documentation for command-line arguments in a Java program.

• The first command-line argument must be a string, specifically one of basic, or advanced. This argument will decide which game variant (and hence which model) you should use.

• You may optionally pass one or two more arguments P and H, both of which should be parsed as integers, where P specifies the number of palettes, and H specifies the max hand size. If unspecified, you should use 4 palettes and a hand size of 7 as the defaults.

The following are some examples of valid command lines, and their meanings:

• basic produces a basic game of Solo Red with default number of palettes and max hand size

• basic 4 7 achieves the same thing, but explicitly sets the number of palettes and the max hand size.

• advanced 8 produces an Advanced Solo Red game with 8 palettes and the default max hand size.

• advanced 7 8 produces an Advanced Solo Red game with 7 palettes and a max hand size of 8.

All games created must start with all 35 possible cards and must be shuffled.

You may add additional methods to your RedGameCreator class, but you must maintain the methods specified above for my tests to compile against your code.

This command-line specification also does not allow for customizing the deck of cards to be dealt. It is an interesting challenge to think how you might design such configuration options.

This is not an exhaustive list; other command lines are possible.

When you specify command-line arguments, they are always treated as strings, even if they are not within quotes. However, quotes are necessary if you want to pass a string that contains spaces in it.

These arguments will appear in the String[] args parameter to your main method; you can use them however you need to, to configure your models. For this assignment, your main method should throw an IllegalArgumentException if the game type specified is not a valid game type. However, you do not need to explicitly handle invalid command lines (e.g. by producing an informative error message) for the number arguments. However, your code should not crash in that case (e.g. by specifying -1 as the number of rows, and causing an IndexOutOfBounds exception).

8.1 To actually run your program with command line arguments in IntelliJ IDEA:

• Go to Run > Edit configurations

  

• Click the + button in the upper left, and select Application from the dropdown that appears.

  

• Give the new configuration a name that you’ll remember (e.g. "Basic 7/3").

• In the Main class textbox, enter cs3500.solored.SoloRed – the fully-qualified name of the class with your main method.

• In the Program arguments textbox, enter the command line arguments you want to use for this configuration, e.g. basic 4 7

• Leave everything else at their defaults, and click Ok.

You can repeat this process as many times as you want, to make as many run configurations as you need. Then to choose among them, use the dropdown menu next to the run icon in the toolbar:

and press Run.

9 What to submit

• For your implementation: submit a properly-structured zip containing

  • All your code from before (with as few changes to the classes as possible, and any changes fully explained in comments)

  • Your implementation of Advanced Solo Red, and any support classes needed

  • Your SoloRed class with the main() method.

  • Tests for all models in one or more JUnit test classes. It is a good idea to include your earlier tests as well, for regression testing. I certainly will...

  • Your README file documenting your changes.

Your main class should be in the cs3500.solored package, as should your test class for the variant models, while all other new classes and interfaces for this homework should be in the cs3500.solored.model.hw04 package. All classes written in previous assignments, even if improved upon, should remain in their respective packages.

As with Assignment 3, please submit a zip containing only the src/ and test/ directories with no surrounding directories, so that the autograder recognizes your package structure. Please do not include your output/ or .idea/ directories — they’re not useful!

10 Grading standards

For this assignment, you will be graded on

• Whether you had to modify any previously written interfaces,

• whether your code implements the specifications (functional correctness),

• how well your code is structured to avoid duplication, improve readability, etc.

• the clarity of your code,

• the comprehensiveness of your test coverage, and

• how well you follow the style guide.

Please submit your homework to https://handins.ccs.neu.edu/ by the above deadline. Then be sure to complete your self evaluation by its deadline.