Evan Brierton - 19374423
The main program is structured around a loop that repeats as long as the game as not been won, this loop repeatedly performs 4 primary actions.
- Prints information about the players and the number of pieces they have reserved and captured.
- Prints the board in its updated state.
- Prompts the player for a given action, this action is then executed by the prompt function, and the
turncounter is incremented if the action has used up a player’s turn. - Checks if either player has lost and sets the
wonandloservariables accordingly.
The Player struct contains the following information about the player.
- Colour
- Name
- Pieces captured.
- Pieces in reserve.
The colour property is an enum value that is used to determine whether the player can perform certain actions throughout the game. The name property is input by the player, but this is concatenated with colour formatting strings using the getColourString function to print the player’s name in their colour.
The reserved and captured variables keep track of the number of the player’s own pieces and the number of their opponent’s pieces the player has popped off the bottom of stacks respectively.
The board is a 2-dimensional array of Square structs with each square containing a double linked list of Piece structs. I used a double linked list as it made popping pieces off the bottom of each stack both easier and more efficient as I was able to avoid traversing through the linked list entirely.
The presence of a tail in the linked list also made merging stacks easier, as rather than traversing through the linked list from the head to link it’s bottom element to the top of another list I could just point the next property of the tail to the head of the other stack.
Each square also contains a bool valid to determine whether a piece can be placed on it and a size_t height for more efficient access to the length of the linked list.
A number of methods acting upon Squares have also been implemented clear, setEmpty setInvalid, setPiece, pop, push and merge for initialisation, placing and moving of stacks.
There are several utility functions implemented including getColourString for pretty text formatting distanceFromEdge and distanceFromCorner used in generating the board layout. taxiCabDistance, validOrigin and validTarget used in determining whether a player can move a piece from and to given locations on the board. canMove, canPlace and checkWin for calculating the win condition, and cleanup for freeing memory at the end of program execution.
The folder structure implemented is very simple, the config files and two folders named src and includes are in the root, CMakeLists.txt uses add_subdirectory to add the src directory who’s own CMakeLists.txt adds the executable files and uses include_directories to link the .h files contained in the includes directory.