Lab #4
Summary
Our goal this week is to get Exits working throughout our application,
and have our Command Interpreters functioning throughout the
application as discussed in class. The first step would be to modify our
XML file to include exits between rooms. As discussed in class, these
exits can either be relative or absolute paths to other rooms in the
environment. The parsing of this file will be done in a “two-pass”
manner. This does not necessarily mean that you will parse the XML
file twice, but rather that you need to temporarily do something with
the exits while you are parsing the XML file. Then once all the rooms
are built, you can go back through and add exits to them. A good
solution to this might be to change the constructor for Room to take a
list of exits in their relative or absolute path form. Then add a method
to Room called generateExits which actually creates the pointers to the
destination Rooms. Once you have finished building all the Rooms in
the Environment, go back and call generateExits for each Room. At
this point in time, all the possible destination Rooms should be created
and creating a pointer to them should be possible.
Once this is working, modify your command interpreter to accept exit
commands. Maybe north,south,east,west or something similar to this.
Once you can successfully exit a Room and arrive at a new Room, then
modify your command interpreter structure as we discussed in class.
Every Environment, Area, and Room can have a command interpreter
associated with it. When one issues a command, it should try to get
interpreted by the Room they are in first. If it can’t be interpreted
there, it should work its way up the hierarchy until it is either
interpreted or gets to the top and can then be deemed an invalid
command.
