CSE 490RA Exercise 3

University of Washington Department of Computer Science & Engineering

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Elevator simulation

This assignment has two parts - the first is to write an elevator simulator, and the second is to do something cool with ink. So far, I have only implemented the first part.

Part 1

Write an elevator simulator that moves a car up and down in response to buttons. The main purpose of this exercise is to pick up some experience with basic window form graphics. Here is my effort. It is primitive - but the car does move up and down.

Hints

Here are the steps I went through. You will get the most out of this assignment if you only refer to these as necessary.

Create control panel and main panel with a splitter
Put an inkCollector in main panel and set references
Add buttons
Begin drawing the elevator - create a DrawElevator method which is called by the main panels OnPaint method. The graphics context is extracted from the eventargs in the OnPaint handler.
Note that the Pen constructor takes a float, so 10.0 had to be written 10.0f.
To clean the screen after resizing the form, add an OnResize method for the resize even - the method just needs to make an invalidate call.
Draw the car in a stationary position.
We will have fixed floor positions which evenly divide the panel. Set a minimum form size, so we don't need to shrink the car.
Add the buttons to send the car instantaneously to the pressed floor. You may need to put in invalidate calls to get a repaint when the button is pushed
Now animate the elevator moving. I did this with a loop with a call to Thread.Sleep(100) [using System.Threading]. Following the invalidate call by an update call forced the repaints to occur immediately.

Part 2

Now the part I haven't got to, is to do something cool with ink. What I am wanting to do is to have any ink drawn in the elevator car move up and down with the elevator. I haven't tried to do this yet - so I don't know how hard it will be.

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[comments to anderson]