This assignment is only for those enrolled in COMP1110, COMP1510, 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-link made by the Dutch games developer SmartGames.
The game is a puzzle; the objective is to place all twelve colored playing pieces onto a board comprising 24 pegs which are arranged hexagonally. 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 comprises 12 playing pieces, each of which consists of three units. The center unit is defined to be the origin of the piece (the placement of the piece is defined in terms of the placement of the center unit). A unit may either be a ball, or a ring. Each ball has one or two connections extending from it. Each ring has zero, one, or two openings. A ball and a ring may be placed on the same peg so long as the ball's connection fits exactly in one of the ring's openings.
For example, the illustration below shows three of the pieces from the completed game above. The ball at the left end of the green piece has a connection to the right, and that connection fits exactly through the opening in the ring at the top of the blue piece. Likewise, the opening in the pink piece is in exactly the right place to accommodate the connection from the blue piece.
Each piece can be flipped and rotated at 60 degree increments, allowing for 12 different orientations (six rotations and a flip). The following illustration shows all 144 possible combinations of the 12 pieces and 12 orientations. Note that the first piece exhibits rotational symmetry, so 6 of its rotations are isomorphic (shown as faint), yielding a total of 138 distinct piece orientations (144 - 6 isomorphisms).
Notice that the center unit of piece A is an example a ring with two openings, and the center unit of piece I is an example of a ball with two connections. The center unit of piece B is an example of a ring with no openings.
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.
For example, the game described above is characterized (when complete) by the
string BAAHBATCJRDKWEBEFDNGLPHEDIFMJJQKIKLJ.
A placement string consists of between one and twelve (inclusive) piece placements. The placement string may not include any piece twice.
A piece placement string consists of three characters describing the location and orientation of a particular piece on the board:
- The first character identifies which peg the origin of the piece is to be placed on ('A' to 'X').
- The second character identifies which of the tweleve pieces is being placed ('A' to 'L').
- The third character identifies which orientation the piece is in ('A' to 'L', except for piece 'A', which has only 'A' to 'F').
The image above shows the second and third characters for each of the pieces in each of their orientations. 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 'LL' describes piece 'L' at orientation 'L'. And so on.
The progression of twelve images above shows the progression of the game BAAHBATCJRDKWEBEFDNGLPHEDIFMJJQKIKLJ,
starting with BAA, then showing BAAHBA, etc.
Pieces must be placed so that they are strictly non-overlapping. This means that a ball can only go in a ring if a) there is not already a ball there, and b) that there's an opening in the ring at exactly the right place. A ball cannot be placed on a ball, and a ring cannot be placed on a ring.
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:
- Create a UML model of your initial design for the final assignment (Task #1).
- Implement parts of the text interface to the game (Tasks #2, #3, and #5).
- 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. However, you are provided with images for each of the twelve pieces which you may use.
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 Tasks #6 and #7
- 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 #8
- All of the Credit-level criteria, plus the following...
- Tasks #9 and #10
- All of the Distinction-level criteria, plus the following...
- Tasks #11 and #12