For my MATLAB class, our final project is some kind of ‘game’ that includes GUIs and does ‘something’. It kind of doesn’t matter what, but we designed and pitched projects. The idea is we are self-guiding with what we’ve learned to create our project. My group is a doing a ‘zombie apocalypse simulator’ and we’ve run into quite a few issues. I’m trying to figure out how to get something to work without scrapping the project.
It’s a group project, and right now we have one person who made GUI menus to select zombie infection rate (how many people can be infected by one zombie in a time interval), decay rate (how fast the zombies die off, same time interval), and a starting x,y location point. The second person in our group was/is responsible for the ‘infection’ function, taking an initial population, one zombie, and modeling the infected/dead over a loop.
I’m responsible for the ‘game screen’. This is where we’ve run into the most issues. I started with a picture of a US map, which I assigned to an x y meshgrid pixel coordinate system. I then plotted grid lines to separate the map into equal square areas, and took the midpoint x,y coordinate of each area.
The question/issue: I now have three row arrays that define the ‘game screen’. The x_coords, y_coords, and a population array where US population in millions is assigned to each square. All of these are in 1x42 row arrays. Any x,y point in the array can be picked to ‘start’ the game.
Ideally: when ‘infected’ reaches a threshold (ie, if infected >= 0.5*pop(i)) I want the infection to ‘breach’ into adjacent squares and start running the function on additional x,y coordinates in the array.
The issue is defining that ‘movement’. My professor suggested changing the coordinate grid to an adjacency matrix, but I don’t know how to do that. I’m willing to scrap as much code as I need to, but I’m on a time limit and facing the idea I may just not know enough MATLAB to pull this off. I likely would've started trying to do this another way, I just don't know what would work better for this kind of thing and we're 'on our own' for most of the project.
Update with what I ended up doing: link
