Question

I am writing a battleship program. Right now I am testing a couple lines of code to see if it will place the boat going in the up direction. How my program is set up is that if, for example, the user clicks on the aircraft carrier button to set his aircraft carrier, the program should also set the ai’s aircraft carrier. The boats are placed on a button array, called tlba. aifirstclicki is set by a random generator so that it will choose a random row. aifirstclickj chooses a random column, in conjunction the two pinpoint a spot on the button array (which is 10×10). I wrote the following code to try to make it so that if the program has an outofboundsexception error,or in other words if the program chooses a first spot that will eventually cause an outofbounds exception error because the for loop will keep adding spots until aiclickcount = 5, it should start over and pick a different spot until it finds a spot that will allow it to place all 5 spots. I keep getting stuck in an infinite loop though.

    int aiclickcount = 0;
    while (directiondecider == 0)
    {//up
        aifirstclicki = generator.nextInt(10);
        aifirstclickj = generator.nextInt(10);
        while (aifirstclicki != 3 &&
               aifirstclicki != 2 &&
               aifirstclicki != 1 &&
               aifirstclicki != 0)
        {
            for(int k=0; k<shiplength; k++)
            {
                tlba[aifirstclicki - k][aifirstclickj].setBackground(Color.RED);
                aistringarray[aifirstclicki - k][aifirstclickj] = "aircraftcarrier";
                aioccupied2d[aifirstclicki - k][aifirstclickj] = true;
                aiclickcount++;
            }

            if (aiclickcount == 5)
            {
                shipset = true;
                break;
            } 
        }
        System.out.println(shipset);
    }

Does anyone know what’s wrong or have a different solution to my problem?

Answer 1

You never have aiclickcount == 5 if your shiplength is not 5. Put if into your for loop. You don’t need the second while at all, you don’t break out of it as well. Just generate number greater than 3 by nextInt(6) + 4.