Structures

Battleship. Create a project titled Lab8_Battleship. You are to program a simplified version of the Battleship guessing game. The field (ocean) is a square 5x5 grid. One of the coordinates of the grid is a number (from 1 to 5) and the other -- a letter (from 'a' to 'e'). Your program should randomly place a fleet of five ships in the ocean. Each ship takes up exactly one location in the ocean. Multiple ships cannot be placed in the same location. The ships, however, can be placed in adjacent locations. The user fires on the ships by specifying the coordinates of the shot. The program reports whether each shot was a hit or a miss. If the shot was a hit, the ship is sunk. The game continues until all ships are sunk. The program does not keep track of the locations of the previously fired shots.

You should use this header file. The file defines two structures:

• location that is used to store the number and letter coordinates of a ship or a shot;
• ship stores the coordinates of the ship in location substructure and a boolean variable signifying whether the ship was sunk. The fleet of the deployed ships is stored in the array where each element is a structure variable of ship. This array is first initialized and then used in the game.

The header file prototypes the functions to be used in the implementation. The functions are separated into three groups:

• Initialization functions that place the fleet of battleships in the ocean. The major function among the initialization functions is deploy() that accepts an array of ships by reference and initializes their locations. It uses the other two initialization functions: pick() and match() The implementation outline for deploy()is as follows:
  deploy() maintains an index of the ship array for the next ship to be deployed. deploy() loops until all ships are deployed, In the body of the loop
  1. deploy() calls pick(). This function returns a random location in the ocean.
     
  2. deploy() iterates over already deployed ships and calls match() on each to see if the new location is already occupied.
     
  3. If the location is occupied,
     deploy() proceeds to the next iteration
     
     otherwise (location is available)
     deploy() puts the location into the coordinates of the ship to be deployed and marks it as not sunk (deploys a new ship at this location). Then, it increments the index in the ship array for the next ship to be deployed.

  Hint: To randomly assign a character coordinate (from 'a' to 'e') for the location in pick(), randomly select a number from 1 to 5 and then use a switch to select the appropriate letter.

• Functions that display the location of the fleet.. After the fleet is deployed, the user is prompted if he would like to see the location of the ships (Hint: use this option for debugging). The printout is done using two functions:
  • printShip() prints the location and status of a single ship
  • printFleet() prints the location and the status (sunk or not) of the whole fleet of ships. This function uses printShip(). The output of this function might look like:
    b5 sunk, c3 up, a2 up, e1 sunk, e4 up

• Battle functions that control the game play. After the fleet of ships is deployed, and its location is printed if desired, the game starts The outline of the game algorithm (to be implemented in main() or a dedicated function) is as follows.

  The game continues while function operational() returns true. This function iterates over the array of the deployed battleships to check if there is at least one that is not sunk (member variable sunk is false). If there is an operational battleship, fire() is invoked that asks the user for number and letter of the location of the shot. After obtaining this location, iterate over the array of the battleships to check if one of them is deployed at the location of the shot by invoking match(). If yes, report a hit and sink the ship by invoking sink(). If no, report a miss.

You are free to modify the existing functions or introduce new ones. For example, you may elect to pass battleship array size as a parameter to functions as opposed to using a global constant. Make sure your programs adhere to proper programming style. Submit your projects to the subversion repository. Do not forget to verify your submission on the web.