C++ Othello

Read this document to understand the project layout.

Author: Kaahan Motwani - kaahanm2@illinois.edu

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Table of Contents

• Getting Started
  • Downloading Cinder
  • Setting up the SQLite Database
  • Adding the SQLite and sql_modern_cpp dependencies
• How to Play the Game

Getting Started

Downloading Cinder and Setting Up Othello

1. Download Cinder (v0.9.2) for your platform. Extract the downloaded item into a folder. We’ll call this folder ~/Cinder throughout the instructions.

2. If you do not have the CLion IDE, download it. CLion comes with CMake and since this is a CMake Project, you will need CMake to run the project.

3. Open the ~/Cinder folder into the CLion IDE (and click the green build button. This will build libcinder. You only need to do this once per machine. This build might take a while.

4. Create a directory, say my-projects in ~/Cinder. Clone the C++ Othello project into this folder.

5. Open the snake project in CLion, set the target to cinder-snake and click the run button.

MacOS users: It’s possible that you may come across:

Error running 'cinder-final-project': Cannot run program … cinder-final-project.app/Contents/Resources"): error=13, Permission denied

In this case, try doing: Edit configurations -> Executable -> Select Other -> Find my-projects/final-project/cmake-build-debug/Debug/cinder-final-project/Contents/MacOS/cinder-final-project And click run once again.

Setting up the SQLite Database

1. In CLion, navigate to View > Tool Windows > Database.
2. Next, in the Database window, select the Database properties button, which is between the Refresh and the Stop button.
3. There are two possibilities now: i. If properties for snake.db are automatically selected, you can proceed to Step 4. ii. If there are no database properties selected, navigate to Add > SQLite.
4. Next, there should be a highlighted link to download the necessary drivers for SQLite. Click this link.
5. For the file of the datasource, select final-project-kaahanmotwani/assets/snake.db.
6. Press Test Connection to verify that the driver is set up correctly. Click the OK button in the
7. Now, you should run the cinder-snake target and play the game to test out your database.
8. After the cinder-snake application has run, go back to the Database tab, click the Refresh button. You should now be able to see the schema of the database under snake.db > schemas > main > scoreboard. Also, you’ll be able to manually execute queries by clicking the Jump to Console button at the top.

Adding the SQLite and sqlite_modern_cpp dependencies

In final-project-kaahanmotwani/CMakeLists.txt:

FetchContent_Declare(
        sqlite3
        GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/alex85k/sqlite3-cmake.git
        GIT_TAG v3.24.0
)

This will download a Git repository into your build folder. The first argument is the name that you want to refer to the entity as.

Then add the following to final-project-kaahanmotwani/CMakeLists.txt:

FetchContent_Declare(
        sqlite-modern-cpp
        GIT_REPOSITORY https://github.com/SqliteModernCpp/sqlite_modern_cpp.git
        GIT_TAG a0f96c10f04d96ccea1b8a49d5998c96e7887bf4
)

This will add the dependency for sqlite_modern_cpp.

We are using the SqliteModernCpp library to make SQLite queries from C++. Take a look at the examples here: https://github.com/SqliteModernCpp/sqlite_modern_cpp/tree/dev.

Then, you'll do something like this for both sqlite3 and sqlite_modern_cpp, still in final-project-kaahanmotwani/CMakeLists.txt:

FetchContent_GetProperties(sqlite3)
if (NOT sqlite3_POPULATED)
    FetchContent_Populate(sqlite3)
    add_subdirectory(${sqlite3_SOURCE_DIR} ${sqlite3_BINARY_DIR})
    target_include_directories(sqlite3 INTERFACE ${sqlite3_SOURCE_DIR}/src)
endif ()

FetchContent_GetProperties(sqlite-modern-cpp)
if (NOT sqlite-modern-cpp_POPULATED)
    FetchContent_Populate(sqlite-modern-cpp)
    add_library(sqlite-modern-cpp INTERFACE)
    target_include_directories(sqlite-modern-cpp INTERFACE ${sqlite-modern-cpp_SOURCE_DIR}/hdr)
endif ()

Notice that sqlite3 and sqlite_modern_cpp are CMake projects, so you can add it as a subdirectory of your project. This piece of code adds sqlite3 and sqlite_modern_cpp as a subdirectory of your project, which will expose any targets that sqlite and sqlite_modern_cpp defines.

NOTE: It is important that your variable names are all lowercase for FetchContent. The FetchContent_Populate() method will convert into lowercase, so just make all of the names lowercase. See more here: https://cmake.org/pipermail/cmake/2018-March/067185.html.

How to Play the Game

For the full rules of Othello (also commonly known as Reversi), click here.

Quick Summary of the Rules:

- There are two players, one will be black and the other will be white
- The goal of the game is to try to have the most pieces at the end
- Players will alternate turns, unless a player has no valid moves 
(in this case, the other player will go again)
- A valid move is defined as a move that flips pieces of the other color
- Pieces can only be flipped if there is a piece of your color on the 
opposite side, leaving pieces of the opposite color in the middle

Features of my game

• You can only click on valid moves. Valid moves are indicated by circles that are not filled in.
• When you hover over a valid move, you can see what the board would look like if you played that move.
• The scores and whose turn it is will be kept track of in the panel to the right side
• Once the game has finished, the result of the game will be populated into a sqlite database (scoreboard.db), with the winner, loser, and the winner's score
• When the game has ended, a restart button will appear, allowing you to play again without restarting the Cinder application
• There are sounds that will be played throughout the game! Have fun!