Facing problems with making an airliner 'Top Trumps' app

MIT App Inventor Help
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1

Hey everyone!

I'm making an app which works like a 'Top Trumps' card game, for airliners. However, I'm facing problem after problem which I'm not able to find the solution for. Note: This app requires 2 devices to work, as it is a multiplayer game.

Would it be possible for someone to please help me out by fixing these bugs and making it work like a proper 'Top Trumps' game? I'm attaching a Drive folder with the images and .aia file for reference.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1yS90X8qWwgIgWJr-6dYoPXR_f356hk9M?usp=sharing

Please let me know if you need anything else.

2

A link to the rules of the game?

3

Here is a link that I found.

Only difference is that I've made the app only for 2 players, and when it's a tie, both the cards go to the 'bottom of the pile'.

Thank you for asking!

4

It would help if you were to show the Firebase DB tree structure, from the Firebase console.

Meanwhile, I'll start with a reading of Screen1:

Screen1
Screen11224×2088 263 KB

The setting of the global players list is deadly:

blocks
blocks1424×722 92.9 KB

It leaves the global list as a blank text instead of an empty list if blank text comes back from Firebase. That poisons subsequent list actions against that variable. Also, the global list does not contain the player's name. (I don't know if that is intentional or not. If it's intentional, the variable should be named OtherPlayers.)

...more to come ...

5

From your .docx, to keep this all together in the thread:

Players chance: “This player” or “Other player”

When a button is clicked, the following is sent to the Firebase:

Tag: Gameplay

Value: List of

  1. “Aircraft: [Aircraft name]”
  2. “Max speed: value”

Order of buttons:

  1. Max speed
  2. Length
  3. Thrust
  4. Max seats
  5. TO weight
  6. Range

Switching to Game screen – start value = List, index 1 = player name, index 2 = other player name, index 3 = starting player name

6

I skipped past how you pass data from Screen1 to game_screen, to see why I did not see a table of card deck values in your Media folder.

I found bad news, indicating that you have not used dictionaries or tables for the card deck:
Unfortunately, Discourse can't load the cleaned up blocks image for that screen, so I will show the mistakes snip by snip:

You have dozens of these:
image

You pay for that mistake in the Play procedure:
(again, too large for Discourse, with all its repeated code, so here's another snip)

image
image401×547 66.7 KB

I had to zoom out just to show the first two plane cards.

You need to learn tables and parametrized procedures to reduce your block count by 95%, or you might not pass a build.

Also, rubber stamping your code magnifies the cleanup if you made a mistake.

7

This makes sense. However, I'm not very familiar with using Dictionaries and the other things, so I may not be able to work it out well... What is my best way forward?

8

I'm still trying to get a grasp on your list knowledge and the data structures needed for this game.

Are multiple cards of the same type and value allowed in the deck?
That affects how to represent the deck internally.

BTW, this is a recipe for a coma at run time:

Repeated_plane
Repeated_plane926×270 36.1 KB

Were you looking to shuffle a deck?

9

Not really shuffling, just to ensure that the players don't have repeated cards. No cards can be repeated

Also, I had replaced this block with another procedure, but forgot to remove it. Fortunately, this procedure is not used anywhere.

10

To avoid retyping all that card data, you need some lookup functions:

cardData:

  • input: text cardName ('Airbus_A340_600',...)
  • output: that global variable holding that plane's data, in you case a list

attributeValue:

  • inputs:
    • text cardName ('Airbus_A340_600',...)
    • text attributeName ('Max speed',...)
  • output : lookup value of that attribute for that card
    (This procedure knows how to lookup attributes by position in your cards)

displayComponent:

  • input: text attributeName ('Max speed',...)
  • output component: label component that displays that attribute (Max_speed,...)

Picture:

  • input: text cardName ('Airbus_A340_600',...)
  • output: picture file name for that card

This is a step towards generalizing the code, to allow plugging in new decks without extensive rework.

I have not penetrated your game play yet.

11

I've not really understood how I'm supposed to code this using blocks... Is this using dictionaries?

12

Please read chapter 21 of
http://www.appinventor.org/book2

to learn how to use parametrized procedures.

13

Still working on the game play.

From your link:

Wait for the player left of the dealer to choose a card and read 1 of the stats. Invite the first player to read over their card and choose a “stat,” or card description, with a high numerical value.

So the player that starts off a round is not forced to use the top card of his stack, and is allowed to look through his stack to see which card he can play?

14

I find code like this impossible to work with.

image
image845×443 37.6 KB

If you had encoded your deck in a Google Sheet, one row per plane, with headings over each attribute, you could have downloaded it as a CSV table into your app's Media folder, and read that table at run time.

All the lookups you do by hand could have collapsed like a telescope.

15

When it comes time for the app to compare attributes across cards, how is it supposed to compare values with '*' or ',' in them?

Those symbols break math operations.

image

16

The concept of table lookup is fundamental.

Used properly, they can remove a lot of burdensome detail from your code.

The AI2 list blocks have a simpler Lookup In Pairs block.

17

Here's a tip on building up compound Firebase tags:

If you put a '/' between the parts of your Firebase tag, it makes it easier to see the tag/value structure in the Firebase console. The '/' imposes a tree structure on the data, so you can adjust your bucket to zoom in on one branch and its sub-branches. That becomes useful if you want to run more than one game at a time. It also allows grabbing an entire branch and its sub-branches as a dictionary.