This repository contains the code for the project of the Distributed and Mobile Programming paradigms course. The goal of this project is to create a distributed scrabble game on android in ambienttalk.
The purpose of this project is to create a digital decentralized distributed version of a word game similar to Scrabble. This game works as follows: a number of players work collaboratively to create words out of virtually lettered tiles. Players are organized in teams and each player has a rack of letters. The goal of the game is to consume all the letters of the team by forming words. In other words, the team that first consumes all its letters wins.
When two players of the same team are in communication range, they can see each others letters. A player can then request particular letters of another team member to form a word. Once a player forms a word, half of the letters forming the word get consumed for his/her team. The player gets the opportunity to throw the other half of the letters to nearby opposite team members. Those thrown letters get also consumed for the team when the opposite team members acknowledge the letter(s) reception. If a player does not form a word for a while, a new letter gets added to his/her rack.
When a player starts the weScrabble application, he/she chooses a team. The application automatically generates a rack of (random) letters for that player. When two or more players of the same team are in range, they can start forming words. Once a game has started other peers can join the game, incrementing the number of letters that the team has to consume to win.
The weScrabble game is a multi-player mobile application. Each participant of the game has a (mobile) device running the application. There are some requirements w.r.t. the distributed design of the game.
Peer-to-peer design. The game should be designed in a peer-to-peer fashion. You can assume that there is a WiFi network available where players meet and play together (e.g. a cafeteria area). However, you cannot assume a centralized server in your design to coordinate the game, e.g to discover new players or to keep track of the game state (e.g. the consumed letters of each team).
Fault-tolerant design. You must assume that every computational unit in the network can fail at any point in time. In particular:
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Players may enter and leave the network at any point in time. However, you may assume that player disconnections are temporal. If a player disconnects, other players may have outdated game information, for example, about the state of his/her rack of letters. The game information should get properly updated once players come online again.
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Player disconnections should not hamper the game progress. For example, if a player disconnects, the other team members can continue forming words.
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Message sends to remote peers can fail. Note that failures may be unreliably detected using timeout as a heuristic.
Words are validated by means of a dictionary. You may use the provided dictionary.at module.
You may assume that there is only one game being played at a time.
Extra requirements (not obligatory):
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Validate the words by achieving consensus amongst nearby players. For example, the player needing to validate a word may start a poll with all nearby players.
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Explore team constraints to make the game more fair, challenging, competitive, etc.. For example, the application could adapt time period rates for the appearance of letters so that small teams get less letters, or the time to form words so that bigger teams get less time.
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Weaken the game assumptions. For example, adapt the application to take into account permanent disconnections of players.
Being creative and adding additional requirements of your own or any of the extra requirements to the project is appreciated.