The project has been developed for the Software Engineering final examination project at Politecnico of Milan; all rights to the Masters of Renaissance game are owned by Cranio Games, which provided the graphical resources used for educational purposes only.
Here a table to summarise the work done:
| Feature | Feature type | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Complete rules | basic | ✔️ |
| Socket | basic | ✔️ |
| CLI | basic | ✔️ |
| GUI | basic | ✔️ |
| multiple games | advanced | ✔️ |
| resilience to client disconnections | advanced | ✔️ |
It was decided to implement all the rules of the game: it is possible to play both multiplayer and singleplayer mode. Game can be played with both GUI and CLI.
For this project two advanced features were implemented: resilience to disconnections and multiple games.
Multiple games can run simultaneously. When the server starts, it waits for a player to create a waiting room: when a player connects to the server, if there are no waiting rooms available, it will ask him how many players should play the game and then it will create a new waiting room. In order to avoid players waiting for the creation of a waiting room, if there are no waiting rooms available, the server will always ask for the mode to the new connected player, so theoretically there could be more than one waiting room: in that case new players will join the oldest waiting room created.
If a player crashes or quits, he can rejoin the game using the same nickname used during the last game: while he is offline, his opponents can keep on playing. If a player crashes during his own turn the server will auto complete his turn. As multiple games are implemented, there can not be more than one player with the same nickname at the same time, even though they may play different games. Resilience works only after the game creation: if a player crashes while he is in the waiting room, the room will free a space for a new player, so if the same player tries to reconnect with the same nickname used before, he will not be necessary able to rejoin the same waiting room. If all the players that were playing the same game crash or quit, the game will pause, but will not end, so it will restart when at least one player rejoins the game.
For the implementation of this game, Java 15 was used: it is not guaranteed that it will work with lower versions.
Server and GUI client can run on all operative systems, whereas CLI run correctly on Linux or MacOS. For Windows users WSL is suggested in order to be able to play with CLI.
There are two different jars, one for the Client and one for the Server.
To build them, use the classic package Maven command, both jars will be generated in the target folder.
To start the server, open the terminal and change your working directory to the one in which Server.jar is saved, then write the following command:
java -jar Server.jar IP PORT
where 'IP' is the IP of the machine used to run the server whereas 'PORT' is the port used for the connections' acceptance.
To start the client, open the terminal and change your working directory to the one in which Client.jar is saved, then write the following command:
java -jar Client.jar IP PORT MODE
where 'IP' is the IP of the server to connect to, 'PORT' is the port used for the connections' acceptance, whereas 'MODE' can be gui if you want to play with a graphical user
interface, otherwise cli, if you want to go on using the command line.