Assignment 1 Information

Here are the tests that I used on your code.

Submission

To submit assignment 1, you will create a gzipped tar archive that contains all the source code for this project and upload this file to our web server.

To create the gzipped tar archive, do the following:

$ cd assign1
$ gmake clean
$ cd ..
$ tar cfz assign1.tgz assign1

The "gmake clean" command will delete your object files and executables. We don't want those --- we will compile your code ourselves. There is a 100K limit on the size of the archive file that you can upload. This should be plenty for just your source code and any examples that you created to test your program.

Remember that your code must compile and run on the CS Suns. In order to test this, you can do the following:

$ ls assign1.tgz
assign1.tgz
$ mkdir tmp
$ cd tmp
$ tar xfz ../assign1.tgz
$ cd assign1
$ gmake
$ ./assign1 Problem1.txt

After you have verified that your archive file will properly unpack and your code compiles and runs in the CS Sun environment, you can upload it to the web server.

The number of uploads is unlimited, but we will only look at the last submission.

Getting started

All the required software is already installed on the CS department Suns. If you want to work on your own computer, the software is freely available. (It will work under Linux, probably work under FreeBSD, and theoretically work under windows; I'm not sure about Mac OS.)

Getting the required libraries

CGAL Version 3.0
In addition to the CGAL files, you may also want to download the documentation in your favorite format.
After you install CGAL, it will tell you what your CGAL_MAKEFILE variable should be set to. You need to put this in your shell initialization file. On my Linux machine I use the bash shell, so in my .bashrc file, I put the line:
```
export CGAL_MAKEFILE=/usr/local/CGAL/CGAL-3.0/make/makefile_i686_Linux_2.4.22-10mdk_g++-3.3.1
```
DOLT Version 0.97
In order to use DOLT, you will need the Mesa library (which provides OpenGL graphics stuff) and GLUT (which provides an easier interface to OpenGL/Mesa that we've used in DOLT). I think these things are fairly standard nowdays. On my Mandrake 9.2 Linux system, I have the following packages installed:
```
libMesaGL1-5.0.1-5mdk
Mesa-5.0.1-5mdk
libMesaGLU1-devel-5.0.1-5mdk
libMesaglut3-5.0.1-5mdk
libMesaGLU1-5.0.1-5mdk
libMesaglut3-devel-5.0.1-5mdk
```
Installation instructions for DOLT are on the above page. That documentation is also included in the distribution. (The documentation is a little old, but is still pretty correct.)
If you want to install DOLT someplace other than /usr/local, you should either set the INSTALL_DIR environment variable, or edit the Makefile to set that variable.
FYI, I recently upgraded my IBM Thinkpad T22 to Mandrake Linux 9.2 which uses XFree86 Version 4.3. Evidently they broke something for the savage graphics chip driver in this distribution. I downloaded an independent driver (search Google for "thinkpad linux T22" for details). I also had to turn off hardware acceleration in order for this to work. BTW, I had no problems with my desktop PC which has an nVidia graphics card --- it just seems to be a problem with the savage S3.
filereader Version 1.1
This is a pretty simple library and should compile easily. Either set the INSTALL_DIR environment variable or edit the makefile. Or just copy the library and include files into the right place.

Getting and compiling the support code

Here is the support code:

In order to compile this software, you must have the following environment variables set. Here is what you should add to your .bashrc file if you are using the CS department Suns (and are using bash as your shell):

export CGAL_MAKEFILE=/projects/cgal/CGAL-3.0/make/makefile_sparc_SunOS-5.9_g++-3.3.0
export DOLT_MAKEFILE=/projects/arl/make/Makefile-dolt

You then need to either start a new shell or "source ~/.bashrc" to make sure those environment variables are defined.

You should then be able to do the following:

$ tar xfz assign1.tgz
$ cd assign1
$ gmake
$ ./assign1 Problem1.txt

Two important notes:

In the CS department, you must use a sun for this to work. You can ssh to remote.cs.rpi.edu and check with the command uname which should return SunOS. Or you can ssh to solaris.remote.cs.rpi.edu.
Make sure you set the environment variables. Test to make sure they are set with the command echo $CGAL_MAKEFILE, for example. You can also print out all your environment variables with printenv. Just because a variable is set, however, doesn't mean that it's exported. The simplest thing is to just put the right stuff in your .bashrc file and either source it or start a new shell.
You must use the gnu version of make. On the CS suns, this is called gmake. On (I assume) any Linux system, the make command will run gnu make. You can check with the command make --version.

Guide to the code

There are several files in the support code, most of which you won't have to edit:

Problem1.txt, Robot1.txt, World1.txt
These contain one sample problem. You should create some of your own for testing your code.
world.cpp, world.h
These files contain code for reading in the problem specification files and creating the workspace. They also contain the intersection code that you'll need for detemining whether a cell is empty, mixed, or full.
motplanner.cpp
This is the file where you'll do most of your work. Look for "YOUR CODE HERE" in the comments.
I would suggest writing your A* code in a separate file.
motplanner.h
This file contains the "external interface" to the motplanner.cpp file. This is simply the prototypes for the procedures that must be called from the keyboard handler in assign1.cpp
assign1.cpp
This contains the main program. You won't have to do much here except add some procedure calls to display the e-channel and m-channel. Everything else you should be able to leave as it is.