cs349 - Developing User Interfaces - Spring 2005

Assignment 1 - Game interfaces. 2D graphics - Draft.

To be handed in before: 23h59 June 3, 2005.

Overview

Assignment 1 asks you to develop a simple game based on an event loop written in C, with Xlib as the base window system. Emphasis in the assignment is

  1. an attractive functional game interface,
  2. a well-tuned implementation that is both challenging and playable, and
  3. effective use of the events and graphics provided by Xlib.

Resources

Course Account

In the course account, in the directory /u/cs349/assignments/a1, you will find three resources to help you with the assignment.

  1. A PDF description of the game, which might be called `Whack-a-jinnee'.
  2. Source code of a simple event loop program with a blocking event loop to help you see how XLib and C work together. It shows you:
  3. The binary, executable but not readable, for a prototype model solution, made by Erin Lester, which you can execute to answer questions about how the game is supposed to work.

Note that this prototype solution assumes that the player has enough imagination to see bottles and corks in simple geometric objects. In judging the success of your implementation we assume that players are typical graduate students, and most highly reward assignments that make neat looking solutions using the simplest of means. For example, don't use colour; you will lose marks for doing so.

The prototype solution is intentionally a mediocre and incomplete version of the game. Submitting an exact replica of it will not achieve a high mark on the assignment.

Web

In addition there are resources on the web that will help you with programming Xlib using C/C++. Here are a few, far from the only ones.

You are assumed to be capable of using documentation and examples to find out how to use a novel programming environment.

Hints

The final source is a set of `helpful hints'.

  1. You will need two OS services to make an accurately timed event loop: finding out the current time, and suspending execution for a specific length of time. When you start to poke around the man pages you find that there are lots of ways to do timing on Unix, most of them not that great: too complex, insufficient resolution, etc. Here are my thoughts.
  2. If you want to position text XStringWidth will tell you how long a string is in pixels.
  3. I use a rough, and easy to program, algorithm for determining if the mouse is clicked inside a bottle. Users don't notice its deficiencies.
  4. I only put corks and bottles into my display list explicitly, leaving the crate and other stuff in the `display list' that is implicit in the repaint function.

Hand In

  1. The source code for your game, which may be in one or more files, plus a Makefile that compiles it. We will compile your code using your makefile.
  2. A Readme file. The Readme file should contain the environment (machine and terminal in the undergraduate environment) on which you compiled and tuned you game, and pointers to TAs so that they don't miss something important. It should also contain answers to the following questions.
    1. What is the most significant improvement in the interface of your implementation? Why?
    2. What is the most significant improvement in the appearance of your implementation? Why?
    3. Did your hot keys adjust the values arithmetically (by adding and subtracting) or geometrically (by multiplying and dividing)? Why?

Marking

The marking procedure used by the TAs is the following.

  1. Execute your program using the following sequence of steps.
    1. cd to the directory in which your handed in files are located.
    2. Execute make as defined in the undergraduate environment.
      • rees% which make

        /usr/ccs/bin/make

    3. Run the resulting executable
      • rees% ./game
  2. Inspect the source code you created.
  3. Read the answers you submitted.

The assignment will be marked as follows.


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