The Problem

This assignment asks you to implement the game of Nibbles. Nibbles is a snake. It moves around a field, looking for food. Unfortunately, it's not a very clever snake. It will try to eat anything it can reach. When it eats food, it grows. When it eats the electric fence around its field, it dies. When it gets all twisted up, it can even try to eat itself, which also causes it to die. The player of the game will control the movement of the snake. The objective, of course, it to eat as much food, and grow as much as possible, without dying.

As usual, start by dragging a copy of the starting folder from the server.

A working version of the program is provided below (if your browser supports Java 1.1). You can control the direction in which the snake moves by pressing the arrow keys. Important: You must click on the window displaying the snake before your program will respond to the arrow keys! The snake always moves in the direction indicated by the last arrow key pressed. Normally, the last cell of the snake's tail disappears as its head moves into a new square. If you can get the snake to eat the food (the red square), then you will notice how the snake grows. Its head moves in the usual way for a few steps but no squares are removed from the tail, thus simulating the growth of the tail. Note that the snake can go straight or it can turn, but it cannot reverse its direction with a single click of an arrow key.

Design

The Nibbles program consists of 5 classes:

• Snake - an ActiveObject extension that animates the snake as it slithers around the screen,

• NibbleField - a class used to represent the 2D grid that the snake lives within,

• Nibbles - the window controller that initializes the display and handles the user input,

• Position - a simple class that is used to represent positions within the NibbleField, and

• Direction - a class whose values are used to represent the four directions in which the snake can move: UP, DOWN, LEFT and RIGHT.

Initially, we will give you working code for all but the Snake class. We will ask you to implement the snake using our implementations of the other four classes. Then, we will ask you to switch to a version of the NibbleField class that is not complete and add the missing pieces needed to make it work with the other code.

The Nibbles Class

The Nibbles class begins by creating the field and the snake. It then receives the clicks of the arrow buttons and tells the snake to change direction accordingly.

The Position Class

The field on which the snake moves is divided up into a grid like a checkerboard. While the boundaries between the cells of this grid are not visible on the screen as the game is played, the cells determine where it is possible to put the food and the pieces of the snake's body. The picture below shows how the image of the snake and the food shown above might look if the grid in which the game is played was visible.

Each cell in this array can be precisely identified by two numbers indicating the row and column in which the cell is located. For example, in the picture the food is located in row 2 and column 6, and the head of the snake is found at row 3 and column 7. We can write these positions as (2,6) and (3,7). The Position class is used to combine such a pair of grid coordinates into a single object much as an object of the Location class encapsulates the x and y coordinates of a point on the canvas as a single object. Unlike canvas coordinates, the row and column numbers identifying a cell in our Nibbles grid must be integers. Also, the convention is to write the number that describes the vertical position of a cell before the number that describes its horizontal position. This is the opposite of the convention used with canvas coordinates.

The Position constructor takes a row and a column as parameters:

public Position (int row, int col)

In addition to this constructor, the Position class provides the following methods:

public int getRow();
public int getCol();
public boolean equals( Position otherPos);
public Position translate( Direction dir);

The individual row and column values can be extracted from a Position using the getRow and getCol accessor methods. The boolean equals method checks if two Positions are equivalent. The translate method is explained shortly in the discussion of the Direction class.

The Direction Class

The class Direction is used to encode the direction in which the snake is currently moving. There are four possibilities: Direction.UP, Direction.DOWN, Direction.LEFT and Direction.RIGHT.

Internally, the representation of a Direction is similar to that used for Locations. A Direction is just a pair of values indicating how far the snake's head should move in the horizontal and vertical directions. Each of these two values can be either 0, 1 or -1.

The most important method used with Direction values is actually associated with the Position class rather than with the Direction class.

    public Position translate(Direction curDirection);

Given a Position named curPos and a Direction named curDir, an invocation of the form:

    curPos.translate( curDir )

will return a new position obtained by moving one step from curPos in the direction described by curDir.

In addition, the Direction class provides several methods that can be used to manipulate Direction values themselves:

   public int getXchange();
   public int getYchange();
   public boolean isOpposite( Direction newDir );

The getXchange and getYchange methods return the amount of horizontal or vertical motion (either 0, 1 or -1) associated with a Direction value. The isOpposite method returns true if the Direction passed as a parameter is the opposite of the direction on which the method is invoked.

The NibbleField Class

The NibbleField represents the actual contents of the game grid. Most of the necessary information is encoded using a two-dimensional array containing one entry for every cell in the grid. The entries of the array hold FilledRects. If an entry in the array is null, it means there is nothing in the corresponding cell. If it is not null, it refers to the FilledRect drawn on the screen to represent the food or the part of the snake that occupies the corresponding cell in the game grid.

The only parameter expected by the constructor for a NibbleField is the canvas.

public NibbleField( DrawingCanvas canvas);

The constructor uses the getWidth and getHeight methods of the canvas to decide how big the game grid should be. It also places a piece of food at a random location within the field.

The Snake will interact with the NibbleField using several methods:

public void addItem (Position pos);
public void removeItem (Position pos);
public boolean outOfBounds (Position pos);
public boolean containsSnake(Position pos);
public boolean containsFood(Position pos);
public void consumeFood();
public Position getCenter();

The snake can ask the NibbleField to place a piece of its body (probably its head) in a given cell by invoking the addItem method. It can also remove a part of its body (usually its tail) from the screen by invoking removeItem.

Before moving, the snake can use the outOfBounds method to ask the field if a particular position is out of bounds. The snake can determine whether a given position in the field contains food or some part of the snake's body using the containsFood and containsSnake methods.

When the snake gets lucky enough to eat the food, it can tell the field to remove the food and place a new piece of food somewhere else on the field by invoking the consumeFood method. This method should be called before moving part of the snake into the cell that had contained the food.

Finally, rather than starting its life in some random position, the snake likes to start in the center of the grid. To do this it has to ask the field where the center is using getCenter.

The Snake Class

The most interesting class is the Snake. The Snake is an active object. It continuously moves the snake around the field checking at each step whether the snake has found food and should grow or has made an illegal move (out of bounds or into its own body) and should die.

If the user types an arrow key, the Nibbles controller gets the input and calls the setDirection method of the snake

public void setDirection (Direction newDirection);

to inform the snake that the direction in which it moves should be changed. The snake should ignore the controller if the new direction is the opposite of the snake's current direction.

The snake moves and tries to eat inside its run method. Between each move, it pauses for a while so that it slithers at a realistic speed. The snake normally moves by stretching its head forward one cell and then removing the last piece of its body from the screen.

We urge you to implement this motion using two separate methods: one to stretch the snake by adding a cell next to its current head and the other to shrink the snake by removing its tail. This will make it easy to make the snake grow after it finds some food. After the snake finds food, you can make it grow by letting it take several steps in which it stretches but does not invoke your "shrink" method. Similarly, when the snake should die you should make it gradually disappear from the screen by repeatedly invoking your "shrink" method without calling "stretch".

To implement "stretch" and "shrink", you will keep track of the Positions of the parts of the snake's body in an array. In addition, you will need an int instance variable to keep track of the snake's current length. Since the snake's length changes as the game is played, you will have to create an array large enough to hold as large a snake as you can imagine any player will ever manage to produce. Make sure to check that the snake never becomes larger than the array.

Each element of the array in the Snake class identifies the Position of one portion of the snake's body. For example, consider the snake shown in the pictures of the game field shown above and repeated below:

Since this snake occupies 10 cells of the field, 10 elements in a Position array would be used to describe it. The picture below suggests what the array would look like. As a shorthand in this figure, we have written pairs like (3,7) and (5,10) to represent Position values, but you should realize that you can't actually do this in your code. Instead of (3,7) you would have to say new Position(3,7).

The cell at one end of the snake is in row 3, column 7 and this Position is stored in the 0th element of the array. The piece next to this piece is at row 3, column 8 and its Position is shown in the 1st element of the array. The positions of the remaining pieces of the snake's body are placed in the remaining cells of the array in consecutive order.

You can't tell from either the picture of the game grid or the Position array which end of the snake is the head and which end is the tail. This is because the pieces of the snake can be stored in the array in either order as long as you remember which order you decided to use while writing the code for your Snake class.

If you decide to put the head in the 0th element of the array and the tail in the last used element of the array, then the code you write to "stretch" the snake will have to include a loop to move all the elements in the array over by one position to make room for the new head. On the other hand, you can shrink the snake very easily by just removing the last element in the array.

If you decide to put the tail in the 0th element and the head in the last element, then the code to stretch the snake will be simple, but the code to shrink the snake will require moving all the elements of the array down one slot to fill in the vacancy left when the old tail is removed. Either way, make sure that you check to make sure that the array is not full before adding a new piece to the snake's body. If it is full, you can either simply continue the game but not let the snake grow any more or stop the game declaring that the player has won.

Be sure to examine the cell where the snake is moving before you move. Once it has moved it will be impossible to determine whether it contained the snake or food.

As we have suggested above, your snake should grow by being allowed to make several moves in which the snake stretches but does not shrink. Similarly, when the snake dies you should make it wither away rather than simply stopping the program. You can do this by writing a separate, simple loop that repeatedly shrinks the snake and pauses.

Think about the design of the run method carefully in your design. A well thought-out loop can make the program relatively simple, while if you just throw it together you will get a very badly designed mish-mash of confusing code.

Your Job

This lab has two parts. For the first part, we will provide all the classes for you except the Snake class. Your job for Part I is to write a complete version of the Snake class. To work on part I, you should start Eclipse and import the program in NibblesStarterI. This folder does not include the NibblesField class so several errors will be indicated in Eclipse. You can make these go away by adding NibbleField.jar to your project.

Click on the project folder or any of the .java files. From the Project menu select "properties". When the window pops up, click on the Libraries tab. The OBJECTDRAW library should be visible in the text area showing. If NibbleField.jar is also visible, please select it and click on the Remove button as it likely has the wrong path to the file. Click on the "Add External Jars" button on the right and select "NibbleField.jar" from the window that pops up. Click "OK" and most of the error messages (aside from a few warnings) will disappear. You are now ready to complete the Snake class.

The snake constructor is passed the NibblesField that it wanders through as its only parameter. The constructor should create and initialize the array to hold the location of its body. It should use the field's getCenter method to decide where to place the snake initially. The snake should begin moving UP from this position. During the first few steps it takes, the snake should be allowed to grow to its initial length (3). You are responsible for defining a run method, a stretch method, a shrink method, as well as any additional methods you need to make the snake behave as described. You should not need to modify any other classes.

Once you have a working Snake class, you should import the project in NibblesStarter2. This has all the same .java files as Part I except that it now also contains an incomplete version of the NibblesField class. Before proceeding, copy the contents of your old Snake.java file in NibblesStarter1 into the corresponding file of NibblesStarter2.

Your task for Part II is to complete the NibblesField class by filling in the bodies of four of its methods: removeContents, showContents, isOccupied, and outOfBounds. Eclipse may show a warning about using the static method dumpStack. You may ignore this as we use it in a non-standard way to give you a warning if you try to add something to a filled position of the field or remove something from an empty position.

We will again require you to bring a proposed design for this problem to lab with you. If you would like feedback earlier, we encourage you to discuss your design with either instructor any time before the lab. Your design need only describe the work you will complete for Part I. You should, however, carefully read the code in our incomplete NibbleField class before coming to lab. Our incomplete NibbleField class is available from the link here: NibbleField.java

For this lab, you are allowed to work with a group on the design prior to lab. You can discuss the problem in your group and sketch out some ideas, but you should not write code together.

As usual, we would like your design to include:

• headers for the methods you will define during the lab. The header should describe the purpose of the method, the parameters it takes, the meaning of its return value if it has one, and a brief English description of what the method will do.

• descriptions of how the run, stretch and shrink methods will operate. Be sure to describe the looping and if statements you will use to structure your code as well as how you will manipulate your array in these methods.

• declarations for constants, instance variables, and parameters

If you do not do a good design, you are likely to make very little progress on this program during the lab. Be prepared so that you can take advantage of the lab period.

Implementation

Here are some hints on how to approach the problem of implementing the snake.

Start by constructing a snake that is only 1 cell long. Write a loop in the run method that will make this snake move in a straight line by calling grow and shrink. As the snake tries to move out of the bounds of the game, have the snake detect the boundary and die. The snake should die by falling out of the main loop of the run method.

Once that is working, use the values passed in the setDirection method in response to arrow clicks to cause the snake to change direction. At this point, your program should work correctly until the snake runs into the food (at which point it will encounter an error in our NibbleField class).

Now, get the snake to eat the food. Change the loop that moves the snake so that after the snake eats the food, the snake will take several steps in which it stretches but skips the call to shrink. You will need a counter to keep track of how many steps the snake has taken since it ate to do this.

Now that your snake can grow to be longer than one cell, it has to worry about running into itself. Add code to make the snake die if it runs into itself. Add a short loop after the main loop that slowly removes all the pieces of the snake from the screen when it dies.

Once your Snake class is complete, move on to Part II as described above.

Submitting Your Work

When your work is complete you should deposit in the appropriate dropoff folder a copy of the entire Lab10-Nibbles folder. Before you do this, make sure the folder name includes the phrase "Lab 10" and your name. Also make sure to double check your work for correctness, organization and style. This assignment is due two days after your lab at 11 PM as usual.

Computer Science 051
Department of Computer Science
Pomona College