a non-recursive level above Easy, which therefore moves the
recursive Hard mode further up still. Play-testing suggests that in
fact Tricky is often _harder_ than the old Hard mode, since the
latter had limited depth of recursion and would therefore spot
complex deductions only if it happened to start a recursion on the
right square; Tricky may be limited in the sophistication of its
complex deductions, but it never misses one, so its puzzles tend to
be hard all over.
Also in this checkin, a new source file `nullfe.c', containing all
the annoying stub functions required to make command-line solvers
link successfully. James wrote this for (the new) lightupsolver, and
I've used it to simplify the other stand-alone solvers.
[originally from svn r6254]
it had a command-line solver. In order to do this, I've had to
expose the internal region numbering because the solver has to have
some way to state which region it means; and in any case it's also
useful to have human-visible region numbering so that two people can
discuss a puzzle they're solving together. So pressing L during play
now toggles the display of region numbers; and `mapsolver' uses
those same numbers when showing its working and its solutions.
[originally from svn r6244]
level: positional set elimination (which is so obvious I really
should have thought of it myself, though it's tricky to spot) and
forcing chains (which are a type of one-level proof by
contradiction, findable through a simple breadth-first search
without requiring recursion, but so ludicrously powerful that they
are able to solve _two thirds_ of grids that the pre-Extreme Solo
generated and rated as Unreasonable).
Of course this makes Unreasonable mode harder still...
[originally from svn r6239]
- the exclamation mark was a bit dot-heavy
- allowing the indicator to be placed at a grid point as well as
half way between two grid points allows some much more natural
positioning.
[originally from svn r6234]
outline polygon with a clipping rectangle active. I don't know or
care whether this is GTK or my X server or what, but I'm working
around it by drawing the lines myself, which seems to sort it out.
[originally from svn r6227]
independently discovered an advanced reasoning technique in Map, and
then it occurred to me that since Solo can also be considered as a
graph-colouring game the same technique ought to be applicable. And
it is; so here's a new difficulty level, `Extreme', which sits just
above Advanced. Grids graded `Extreme' by new-Solo will of course
fall into old-Solo's `Unreasonable' category (since they're not
soluble using the old set of non-recursive methods). A brief and
unscientific experiment suggests that about one in six Unreasonable
grids generated by old-Solo are classified Extreme by the new
solver; so the remaining Unreasonable mode (now containing a subset
of the grids it used to) hasn't actually become much harder.
[originally from svn r6209]
place in r6190. I'm quite pleased that I didn't have to modify the
printing infrastructure _at all_ to make this work; the only source
change required outside windows.c was the addition of a trivial
utility function midend_get_params(), and that was for the benefit
of bulk puzzle generation rather than anything to do with actual
printing.
As far as I can tell, all printable puzzles now print almost
indistinguishably from the way they print under Unix. If you look
closely the font is slightly different, and the Windows standard
hatching doesn't seem to be quite as nice as the kind I did by hand
in ps.c (and, particularly annoyingly, hatched areas don't show up
at all for me when I print to a file and use gv, though they come
out fine on the printer itself); but it's all there, and it all
works.
[originally from svn r6193]
[r6190 == af59dcf6858264103bbc621761feee3aed5aaf2a]
as seen by the back ends from the one implemented by the front end,
and shoved a piece of middleware (drawing.c) in between to permit
interchange of multiple kinds of the latter. I've also added a
number of functions to the drawing API to permit printing as well as
on-screen drawing, and retired print.py in favour of integrated
printing done by means of that API.
The immediate visible change is that print.py is dead, and each
puzzle now does its own printing: where you would previously have
typed `print.py solo 2x3', you now type `solo --print 2x3' and it
should work in much the same way.
Advantages of the new mechanism available right now:
- Map is now printable, because the new print function can make use
of the output from the existing game ID decoder rather than me
having to replicate all those fiddly algorithms in Python.
- the new print functions can cope with non-initial game states,
which means each puzzle supporting --print also supports
--with-solutions.
- there's also a --scale option permitting users to adjust the size
of the printed puzzles.
Advantages which will be available at some point:
- the new API should permit me to implement native printing
mechanisms on Windows and OS X.
[originally from svn r6190]
(This puzzle is theoretically printable, but I haven't added it in
print.py since there's rather a lot of painful processing required
to get from the game ID to the puzzle's visual appearance. It
probably won't become printable unless I get round to implementing a
more integrated printing architecture.)
[originally from svn r6186]
to have some means of automatically spotting this sort of problem on
a desktop platform, but I can't immediately think of one; building a
trick compiler which thinks `int' is 16 bits would be the obvious
option, but it would immediately break the ABIs to all the system
functions.
[originally from svn r6184]
slash in this square is red, so it does indeed imply that some of
the edge markings are also red; but it doesn't mean _all_ the edge
markings must be red. So instead of assuming ERRSLASH implies all
edge error markers, we set the correct set of edge error markers at
the same time as setting ERRSLASH, at which point we know which kind
of slash it is so we know which ones to set.
[originally from svn r6175]
in red if it's impossible to fulfill them (either through too many
neighbours connecting to them, or too many not connecting to them),
and edges are highlighted in red if they form part of a loop.
In order to do this I've had to revamp the redraw function
considerably. Each square is now drawn including its top and left
grid edges, but _not_ its bottom or right ones - which means that I
need to draw an extra strip of empty squares outside the actual grid
in order to draw the few pixels which appear on the grid bottom and
right borders and also to red-highlight border clues.
[originally from svn r6174]
to reverse the effect of the mouse buttons. Gareth has been
complaining about this for days: apparently he finds precisely the
opposite control system intuitive to me.
This is a horrendous hack, and pushes me one step closer to losing
my temper and designing a proper preferences architecture.
[originally from svn r6168]
