Adventures in the Imaginary Land of Gack

MCS-178: Introduction to Computer Science II
Max Hailperin, Fall 2001

Due: November 28th, at the beginning of class

Prelab

In this lab you will work on your own. You will be using object-oriented programming to extend an adventure game, the Land of Gack. This game is explained in section 14.5 of the text, so you should read that section before coming to lab.

In lab

Since this lab involves the object-oriented programming system, you will need to tell DrScheme to load in that system. To do this on any of the machines in the MCS department lab, you select "Add Teachpack..." from DrScheme's "Language" menu, and then in the dialog box that comes up, select oops.ss. If you are working on your own machine, you will need to first obtain a copy of oops.ss; see the web site of supporting materials for the book.

The code for the game has been divided into a collection of individual files, but for convenience there is a single ``master file'' called game.scm which loads all the others in. The first thing you should do is to copy the whole collection of files, so that you will be able to modify any of them as the need arises. If you add any additional files (for example, for newly added classes), you should extend your copy of game.scm to load in the new files as well.

To make a copy of all the files, the simplest approach would be to use the shell to copy the whole directory containing the files. If you are in a shell window, type:

         cp -r ~max/www-docs/concabs/code/gack .

(note that this command ends with a space and then a period), you will get a subdirectory called gack containing all the files. Ask for help with this if you need it.

You should open your own copy of game.scm in DrScheme. To play the game, press the Execute button in this window and then evaluate (play) in the associated interaction window.

If you want to edit one of the other files, open it up in its own window in DrScheme, make your changes, and save the file back out. But don't press the Execute button in that window. Instead, press the Execute button back in the window that holds game.scm

Following are links to the various files that comprise the program, together with short descriptions. These links should be useful when you are programming, since you will typically be working on one of the class files, but will need information about various other classes or utility procedures.

The file that loads all the other files, and should be reloaded each time you modify your program:
- game.scm
The various class files in the Land of Gack hierarchy::
- named-object.scm
- registry.scm
A utility file that contains some procedures used by various classes:
- utilities.scm
The gack file creates the specific people/places/things that constitute the Land of Gack:
- gack.scm
The interface file provides the play procedure which can be invoked as a normal user's interface to the game, so that you can say (go north) instead of (person/go player 'north):
- interface.scm

Once you have copies of the files made and loaded in, you are to do exercises 14.33, 14.34, and 14.35, on pages 568 through 570. In coming up with ideas for the open-ended exercise 14.35, you may also want to look at exercise 14.42 on pages 572 and 573.

Our implementation of the object-oriented programming system contains a useful procedure, not mentioned in the text, called oops-display. This is the procedure that the object/describe method uses for displaying each of the instance variables values in a summary form -- for example [an object of class witch] or [a 3421 element vector]. It is useful when debugging, when you don't know for sure in advance what type of value you are going to encounter (because the bug may be precisely that you have the wrong type, for example the person object rather than the symbolic name of the person).

Postlab

Write up a lab report that explains the final program to an audience generally knowledgeable about Scheme. One thing I'll be looking for is a clear description of your final class hierarchy early in the report. (A diagram helps!) As always, emphasize the final product rather than each incremental change you made.