Coding Friends

The adventure game is textural based, but the main part of the assignment is pull data from files to build up the adventure environment so that nothing as such is hard coded apart from the main options like QUIT, HELP etc.

You have different parts of the adventure game to build up, reading in of the rooms that the user will move around, the adventure objects to pick up file to read in (and place within the rooms in the adventure game) and you are also able to pick up the items as well. To start with I am going to do the reading in of the files (if present)

Here is part of the room file, it starts with the room ID number, then the small name followed by the description (finishing with “—–“) and, last but not least, is the movement options and the room ID to move to, e.g WEST 2 means if you go WEST you will end up in room ID 2


1
Outside building
You are standing at the end of a road before a small brick
building. A small stream flows out of the building and
down a gully to the south. A road runs up a small hill
to the west.
-----
WEST 2
UP 2


here is how I am reading in the main room file, the readPassEmpty is another function that will read passed any empty lines and return the first non empty string from within the file, the readInLine will read just one line at a time (with all error checking). the returnRoom is what I am going to return back to the main adventure class that will add the rooms read into a ArrayList.

String st = readPassedEmpty(rd);
if (st== null) return null;
returnRoom.roomNumber = Integer.parseInt(st);
returnRoom.roomName = readInLine(rd);
String readIn;
while(true) {
	readIn = readInLine(rd);
	if (readIn.indexOf("-----")>=0) break;
	returnRoom.roomDescription.add(readIn);
}
while (true)
{
	readIn = readInLine(rd);
	if (readIn == null) break;
	if (readIn.equals("")) break;
	returnRoom.roomMotionTable.add(getMotionTable(readIn));
}

To break the movement roomID (/options) part of the file into parts, I used the split function within the String class, you pass in a regular expression, in this case [ ]+ which means any space [ ] and + means 1 or more times e.g. if there is one space between movement or 5 then it will classes as the same thing, and if there is any options attached to the roomID e.g. you needs to have KEYS

String[] split = st.split("[ ]+");
dir = split[0];
int indexOf =split[1].indexOf("/");

reading in the adventure room objects and also the synonyms is very similar in that I either break the synonym into a regular expression searching for the “=” and thus linking the left value to the right value within a ArrayList of synonyms. The adventure objects, I just read in there values and add the objects to the required room, for example the file looks like

KEYS
a set of keys
3

where the KEYS is the object, “a set of keys” is the long description, and 3 is the roomID to place the items into.

Movement around the adventure

To move around the adventure game, the user types in the direction (or there is some hidden options) and then the adventure game will move to that required place and the way that I thought about this was to get all of the movement options within that room, see if the player has requested any of these movement options and move that player to the next room, but if there is a option/requirement (e.g. KEYS) to access that room then see if the player has them within his user objects. Else if there is no movement that the user requested just output a error and return -1 (which means no update).

private int movePlayer(String player, int roomID)
{
	AdvMotionTableEntry[] moves = advRooms.get(roomID-1).getMotionTable();
	for (int i = 0; i < moves.length; i++)
	{
		if (moves[i].getDirection().equals(player))
		{
			String keyName =moves[i].getKeyName();
			if (keyName != null)
			{
				int objectPlace = getObjectIndexUsers(keyName);
				if (objectPlace >=0)
					return moves[i].getDestinationRoom();
			} else
				return moves[i].getDestinationRoom();
		}
	}
	println("There is no way to move in that direction.");
	return -1;
}

the getObjectIndexUsers is just a function that will scan though the users objects and search for the key, if one found return that key index, else return -1 as below.

private int getObjectIndexUsers(String keyName)
{
	for (int i =0; i < userObjects.size(); i++)
	{
		if (userObjects.get(i).getName().equals(keyName))
			return i;
	}
	return -1;
}

if you download the zip file you will notice that the most of game loop is within the mainGame function, what happens in there is to

• whilst not finished
• display the room – short or long description – if required
• set the room to be classed as visited (for the short/long description to be displayed)
• check for the room is FORCED – and thus to not request the users input and move
• If not FORCED request the users input for the movement
• With the users request, process the request to either TAKE/DROP MOVE QUIT etc options
• If none of the standard requested, see if it was a movement request e.g. WEST/NORTH/DOWN etc.
• Then if the roomID = 0, the game is finished, either win/lose
• repeat

The rest of the code is very similar in nature to the above code, looping through arrays and checking for conditions, it was a interesting game assignment I thought, I am going to do the CS106B next, which is a course that you write code in C++ (but only on a MAC/Windows PC). Shall do some posts of there assignments.

I used ArrayList to store the rooms etc into, because they allow for good access to the data in. I have included the full source code of the assignment and also the assignment PDF file within the ZIP file attached.