Question

Basically I’ve got some structs of type Ship which are going to go on a board which can have a variable width and height. The information about the ships is read in from a file, and I just need to know the best way to make sure that none of the ships overlap.

Here is the structure of Ship:

int x // x position of first part of ship
int y // y position of first part of ship
char dir // direction of the ship, either 'N','S','E' or 'W'
int length // length of the ship

Also, what would be a good way to handle the directions. Something cleaner than using a switch statement and using a different condition for each direction.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Answer 1

You could keep a boolean array of the entire grid, initially initialized to “false.” For each ship, for each location the ship covers, check if the location is “false.” If it is,
set it to “true”. If not, then some other ship is on the location.

This algorithm is linear in the total area of all the ships, but also requires extra space
proportional to the number of locations on the board.