COMP 310	BallWar Demo:  Command-dispatching Ballworld with User Interaction

Note:  it is an Honor Code violation to attempt to decompile any supplied code

User Manual for the demo:

BallWar is an extension of the command-dispatching Ballworld and run similarly.   BallWar adds the ability to have "players" that can manually control the movement of certain balls.   The system also has a notion of "scoring" which is just the counting of collisions of a user-controlled ball.

BE SURE TO SELECT BOTH AN UPDATE AND A PAINT STRATEGY BEFORE ATTEMPTING TO MAKE A BALL!

Available Update Strategies:

• Breathing
• Color
• Curve
• Explode
• Heavy
• Kill
• LightUp
• Move
• Multi
• Rock
• Score
• Wander

Note: Unlike the other command-based Ballworld demos ( See links above and below), Straight strategy already has elastic collisions built-in. This is because the architecture that actually runs this demo pre-dates the architectures currently in use in the class, so the update strategies behave a bit differently overall. Please see the other command-based demos for behavior that is closer to that expected in the current class.

Notes on the available update strategies:

• Not all strategies initialize the radius, color, location or velocity of the ball. Using one of these strategies "plain" will result in a black ball with a radius of 1 pixel located at (0,0), which is effectively invisible and non-interacting.
• Strategies that inherit from ANoOpStrategy will tend to initialize only a few of the ball's parameters, if any. Examples are CurveStrategy, HeavyStrategy, KillStrategy, etc.
• Strategies that inherit from AUpdateStrategy will initialize all the ball's parameters to random values. Examples are StraightStrategy.
• The respective init, updateState, and updateCollision behaviors between any two strategies are not guaranteed to be commutative, therefore combining them may result in behavior that is dependent on the order in which they were combined. For instance a Heavy-Straight ball and a Straight-Heavy ball do not exhibit the same behavior. In fact, a Heavy-Straight ball behaves identically to a Straight ball because the Straight strategy's init overwrites the Heavy strategy's initialization of the mass of the ball.
• In general, base most of your combination strategies off of Straight strategy, i.e. Straight-XXX-YYY-etc. This will enable the subsequent strategies to overide the Straight strategy's plain behaviors.

Available Paint Strategies:

• Ball
• BirdSheepImage
• Ellipse
• Fish1
• Fish2
• NiceFish
• Rectangle
• Square
• SwimFish

 

Adding Players

1. Type a player's name into the right hand text field and click the Make Player button. This will instantiate a new player and add it to the drop list below.
2. A player is always associated with a set of movement keys. When a player is made, it is associated with the selected movement key set from the far right hand drop list. That choice, having been taken, disappears from the drop list.
3. There are two sets of movement key sets: Arrows+End (arrow keys & End=Stop) and WASDX ( W=Up, A=Left, S=Stop, D=Right & X=Down).
4. The MoveStrategy associates itself with the selected player when it initializes. Thus it can be controlled by the movement keys.
   1. A MoveStrategy is based on an ANoOpStrategy, so it must be combined with another strategy such as a StraightStrategy in order for the ball to be fully initialized.
   2. Click on the main ball panel area to give it focus so that the movement keys will work. The movement keys will not work if focus is on the control panel area of the frame.
5. A limitation of the current implementation is that the player can only control the last ball made with a MoveStrategy.
6. A player is also always has a score., which is displayed on the bottom status bar of the main window.
7. The ScoreStrategy associates itself with the selected player when it initializes. Whenever a ball with this strategy is involved in a collision, the score is incremented.
8. If the ball containing the ScoreStrategy is killed, the corresponding player's score is reset to zero.

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© 2017 by Stephen Wong