CPPND: Capstone Snake Game

This is the Capstone project in the Udacity C++ Nanodegree Program. The code for this repo was inspired by this excellent StackOverflow post and set of responses.

In this project, I used what I learnt in the C++ Nanodegree to extend the Snake game.

New Features

• Obstacles:
  • Obstacles are now part of the game and are added to the board every time the snake eats food.
• Game modes: The game comes with 4 possible modee, which are selected in the console before the game initializes. The modes are:
  • 1: Classic Snake
  • 2: Snake With Static Obstacles
  • 3: Snake with randomly moving obstacles
  • 4: Snake with Obstacles that chase the head of the snake round the board.

Dependencies for Running Locally

• cmake >= 3.7
  • All OSes: click here for installation instructions
• make >= 4.1 (Linux, Mac), 3.81 (Windows)
  • Linux: make is installed by default on most Linux distros
  • Mac: install Xcode command line tools to get make
  • Windows: Click here for installation instructions
• SDL2 >= 2.0
  • All installation instructions can be found here

  Note that for Linux, an apt or apt-get installation is preferred to building from source.

• gcc/g++ >= 5.4
  • Linux: gcc / g++ is installed by default on most Linux distros
  • Mac: same deal as make - install Xcode command line tools
  • Windows: recommend using MinGW

Basic Build Instructions

1. Clone this repo.
2. Make a build directory in the top level directory: mkdir build && cd build
3. Compile: cmake .. && make
4. Run it: ./SnakeGame.

Rubric Points

Loops, Functions, I/O

• Project accepts user input to determine game mode
• Project is organised into functions.
• Project uses arrays, vectors and constant variables.

Object Oriented Programming

• All functions within classes have their purpose and function documented.
• Project is organized into classes, with
• Constructor and destructor of the game class have been expanded.

Memory Management

• Destructor of the game class is used to tidy up threads.
• References are called to manage implementation of obstacles vector and manage the threads.
• Snake is implemented as a unique pointer.

Concurrency

• Project splits the snake and the obstacle movement into two threads and runs them concurrently.
• Mutex and a lock is used for this, as is a conditional variable.