CMSC 131
Assignment:     Project #7
Due Date:     Monday 5/8, 11:00PM
Open/Closed policy:     CLOSED

Fish Club


Click here to view a video of the Fish Club application running.

 

The first rule of Fish Club is:  You do not talk about Fish Club.

 

The second rule of Fish Club is:  You DO NOT talk about Fish Club.  (After all, it's a closed project...)

 

Other rules:

 

Objective

To practice exception handling; practice using the ArrayList class; practice using for-each loops; practice using two-dimensional arrays.

 

Overview

Fish Club is a simulation of a very primitive "Ecosystem." 

If you watch Fish Club in "slow motion", you can see some interesting interactions and patterns occurring among the pond's inhabitants.  If you slide the speed slider all the way to the right (maximum speed) and watch patiently, you may observe some interesting long-term patterns in the populations and locations of the fish and plants.  The interactions can be very complex!  It's fun to try to formulate "theorems" for what sorts of situations will yield an "ecosystem" that can survive for a very long time.  Can you think of any scenarios where you can PROVE that the fish will never die?

You will be writing portions of the Model, Fish, and Plant classes. We have distributed skeleton versions of these classes to your CVS repositories -- look in the package called "fishPond".

Note that the main method which runs the project is in the Controller class.

 

Specifications

See the JavaDoc for a complete description of the project.   This information is also duplicated in the source code distribution that you have received.  A few items of great importance:

 

Style Hint

We have provided a  lot of built-in named constants.  For example, the two-dimensional array that keeps track of where all the rocks are uses the values "Model.ROCK" and "Model.WATER" to keep track of where there are rocks and where there is just water.  Even though you can easily see that these constants represent the values "true" and "false", it is a HUGE mistake to simply use "true" and "false" in your code when differentiating between rock and water.  That defeats the entire purpose of using symbolic constants:  the symbolic constants make the code more readable, and also facilitate possible changes to the project design at some later time.  You will lose style points if you don't use symbolic constants properly!

 

Requirements

Web Accessibility