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 header file defines structures and prototypes functions used in the program. You should implement your functions incrementally: start with location functions, then ship functions, then fleet (array of ships) functions. Use the following file to test your implementation. Presently, the file has location functions commented in while ship and fleet functions commented out. Once you implemented and tested your location functions, comment in ship and then fleet functions and test those. Note that successful compilation of this file does not guarantee correct implementation of the functions. It is just a test.

The header 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 should 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. You are advised to define (implement) the functions incrementally in the order prototyped in the header file. As you complete a function, invoke it in main() to make sure it works correctly.

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 check() The pseudocode for deploy()is as follows:

      declare a variable that stores the number of the deployed ships, initially zero
      this variable is to be used as an index in the array of ships
      loop until all ships are deployed
           invoke pick() to get a new random location in the ocean
           invoke check() to verify whether this location is occupied
           if this location is available then
                 deploy the next ship at this location by storing the coordinates
                 of this location in the ship's location, change the status of
                 the ship to "not sunk"
                 increment the number of the deployed ships
      

  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.

  Hint 2: The logic of initialize(), check() and deploy() is very similar to the logic of lottery number selection functions in one of the previous labs.

• 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). If the user selects this option then the locations of the ship (and their status: sunk or not) is printed after every shot

  The printout is done using the following 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 pseudocode of the game algorithm (to be implemented in main() or a dedicated function) is as follows.

      while at least one ship is operational
          invoke fire() to get the location of the next shot from the user
          invoke check() to see if this location is occupied by a ship
          if location is occupied then
              invoke sink() to sink the ship 
              report a hit
          else
              report a miss