Programming Project 2:
Virtual Pet Enhancements


You may work individually or in groups of 2 people to finish this project. Your programming project should be your group's effort and not the effort of other persons. If you have questions or need assistance with your program, the instructor and the TAs are very willing to help and are available during their office hours and through the Collaboration Center.

Check out the page on programming tips to help you. Also, look at the Labs 2 &3 grading criteria and the PP 2 grading criteria to see the breakdown of the points given for this project.

When you complete your project, create a link to it from your course web page, and copy it to the web server. Make sure that the project works correctly after you have published it.

Recommendation: Upload your modified page at the end of each step or clean breaking point, as a backup.

Remove Temporary "Force State" Buttons


Polish Existing Work

Good programs include good indentation, good variable names, and comments that help the author (or someone else) understand who developed the program and what is going on. (See the grading criteria to see how comments and program style are evaluated.)


Virtual Pet Simulation Enhancements

  1. Add another button in an appropriate place on the form to allow the owner to pause and resume the virtual pet. The text on the button should initially say "Pause". When clicked, it should call a function that toggles back and forth between paused and unpaused (or active). (You could call it togglePause(), for example.)
  2. Once the virtual pet simulation is functioning properly, hide the state and counter text fields by changing their visibility style attribute to "false". (You can do this in a <style> section in the <head> or in a style="..." attribute in the field tags.) Invisible fields still take up space on the page, so you may want to move these fields to make it less obvious that they are there when invisible.

    Add a button so that the user can choose to make those two fields visible. If you want, you can make this button toggle back and forth between showing and hiding the state and counter, similar to the Pause button.

  3. Add graphics, labels, and/or text to the page to improve the user interface. Add text to describe what to do and align the page and buttons in an easy-to-read format. Document where your images came from in a comment at the bottom of your page or in your comments.

Finishing Up: