Project Advanced Programming 2023-2024

Name: Patryk Pilichowski

Student number: s0220383

Links

• Design Choices Overview

Build & Installation

You can build the project out-of-source, install, and run it (make sure you're in the root directory first):

mkdir build -p
cd build && cmake .. && make && make install
cd .. && ./build/installed/bin/PacMan

The project has to be executed from root as well for the relative paths to work.

Features

• Menu
  • Title text
  • Play button
  • Quit button
  • Top 5 highscores
• Level
  • Ghosts and PacMan movement
  • Extra feature: Entities that try to go out of bounds will end up in the opposite end of the map
  • Player movement control with arrows and WASD keys
  • Collisions with walls
  • Intersections
    • Invisible entities that help dynamic entities like pacman and ghosts 'snap' in the intersection coordinate such that they can fit through walls perfectly
  • Coin and fruit collecting
    • Preserved when PacMan loses a life
    • Respawn when PacMan collects everything
  • GhostAI
    • The ghosts begin with stasis mode where they wait
    • After a time they transition to chase mode where they choose directions based on the algorithm described in the assignment
    • Ghosts transition to a temporary fear mode when PacMan collects a fruit, their choice of direction differs distance-wise as described in the assignment
    • Ghosts choose a direction every time they encounter a wall or an intersection during chase and fear mode
  • Score
    • Score decreases over time.
    • The faster PacMan collected something consecutively, the greater the score
    • Entities have different score worth: Coins < fruits < ghosts
    • Score is preserved as long as PacMan's lives are not depleted
    • Score is saved to src/config/highScore.json if it's in the top 5
  • Player begins with 3 lives
    • Loses a single life when a ghost that is not in fear mode collides with PacMan
    • Game over state when all 3 lives have been used
  • Difficulty increases by a factor every time player goes to the next level
    • Ghosts become faster, fear mode duration is shorter
  • Player can safely pause and resume the game anytime
  • Extra feature: Multiple customizable levels playable throughout the game
    • Can be customized in /levels/
      • 'g' represents spawn for ghosts
      • '#' represents a wall
      • 'p' represents spawn for PacMan
      • '.' represents a coin
      • 'f' represents a fruit
      • ' ' represents empty space
    • Can be extended to procedural generation of the level text files
• Sprites
  • All entities (except intersections) have sprites
  • Dynamic entities like pacman and ghost have looping animations
    • Their sprite also changes if they change direction
• Extra feature: Audio
  • Different sound types play in parallel
    • When PacMan spawns
    • Eating a coin
    • Eating a fruit
    • Eating a ghost

Known Issues

• OpenAL errors relating to SFML audio occur rarily.
  • This issue seems machine dependent.
  • It does not affect gameplay itself. However, it does make the time loading a level longer.
• Memory leaks seem to occur related to the graphics driver and the SFML library.
  • This issue seems machine dependent.
  • There are no known memory leaks related to the actual source code of the game.
  • The memory leaks may or may not be false positives.
• Collisions stop working properly if the game is ran at a very low framerate
  • This is because delta time is much larger and therefore the position in the next update step of a dynamic entity may go over a wall and collision may not be detected.
  • This seems to be a well-known problem in game development. However because the project is more focused on the design patterns used the current collision detection system will remain unchanged.
• PacMan and the ghosts sometimes look 'laggy' for a moment when they make a turn
  • This is because when a dynamic entity wants to make a turn at an intersection they have to 'snap' on the intersection perfectly so they can fit inbetween two walls
  • This will currently remain unchanged for the same reason as described above.

Generating API Documentation

API documentation can be read in the source code itself but it can also be generated using doxygen like this:

cd docs && doxygen docs.cfg

Again, ensure you're in the root directory first to run the command above.
You can then view the locally created site by running this in /docs/html/:

browsername index.html

Where browsername is the installed browser of your choice, i.e google-chrome, firefox, etc...

Design Choices Overview

The design choices that are:

• Different from what was described in the assignment
• New
• Important to note nonetheless
• Extra features

are overviewed here.