The CSS "px" unit isn't always a device pixel. On devices with
high-DPI displays, there can often be multiple device pixels to a CSS
px, while in particularly low-resolution displays (like feature
phones), the user might zoom out to get several CSS px to a device
pixel. And even on desktop browsers, text zooming controls can change
the ratio.
To make Puzzles' rendering look good on an arbitrary device pixel
ratio, we really want the pixels of the canvas to be device pixels,
not CSS px, so that the canvas doesn't have to be scaled by the
browser for display. To correct this, we now control the CSS size of
the puzzle canvas, via its containing <div>, to be the canvas size
divided by the device pixel ratio.
There is a significant gap, which is that this doesn't yet track
changes to the device pixel ratio. This is slightly complicated, so
I'll put it off to the next commit.
Some elements (generally those created by JavaScript) had their style
parameters set directly by JavaScript. Putting styles in CSS generally
makes them easier to understand (and fiddle with), so I've done that.
The only styles left in JavaScript are those that are calculated by
JavaScript (like the status-bar size) and the random-seed permalink
visibility because I wasn't quite sure how to handle it.
In their normal state, most of the top-level menu items are a verb and
an object, like "Undo move". This is admirably clear, but on a small
screen the menu can take a lot of space. In each case the verb alone
is sufficient to know what the button does, so use a media query to
suppress the noun is the viewport is very narrow. "Very narrow" here
is roughly where the menus would overflow onto four lines in my
browser.
In the old design, when they wrapped onto multiple lines, various bad
things happened. The lines overlapped one another, the lines got
broken within buttons but not between buttons, and if they had got
broken between buttons the left button on each line would have lacked
a left border.
I've made two major changes to fix this. First, I've switched from
flow layout to flex layout. This has much better default behaviour,
breaking lines in the right places, not overlapping lines, and even
arranging line-wrapping within a button when the viewport gets really
narrow.
Second, I've given each button a border on all four sides and then
used negative margins to overlap them. This required changing the
borders from transparent black to opaque grey to make them display
correctly when overlapping.
The result is not quite identical to the old version on a wide
viewport, but I think it's as close as I can get while keeping the new
CSS pleasant.
Ideally, the separator would vanish when it was adjacent to a line
break, but I've not worked out how to do that yet.
This is similar in concept to Minesweeper, in that each clue tells you
the number of things (in this case, just 'black squares') in the
surrounding 3x3 grid section.
But unlike Minesweeper, there's no separation between squares that can
contain clues, and squares that can contain the things you're looking
for - a clue square may or may not itself be coloured black, and if
so, its clue counts itself.
So there's also no hidden information: the clues can all be shown up
front, and the difficulty arises from the game generator choosing
which squares to provide clues for at all.
Contributed by a new author, Didi Kohen. Currently only has one
difficulty level, but harder ones would be possible to add later.
Using a stunt webserver which artificially introduces a 3s delay just
before the last line of the HTML output, I have reproduced a
uwer-reported loading/startup race bug:
Previously the wasm loading was started by the <script> element,
synchronously. If the wasm loading is fast, and finishes before the
HTML loading, the onRuntimeInitialized event may occur before
initPuzzles. But initPuzzles sets up the event handler.
Fix this bug, and introduce a new comment containing an argument for
the correctness of the new approach.
Signed-off-by: Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk>
Now I've had a chance to collect some more data from browser users,
it's got a list of browsers in which we've definitely seen the WASM
puzzle working (so that if _your_ instance of one of those browsers
fails, you should check it for problems at your end, like
configuration details or overzealous web filtering software), and some
thoughts about what to report.
The result is a lot longer than the previous error message, so I've
put the bulk of it in a <details>. That way it won't look so silly
when it initially flashes up while things are loading.
The old one was totally out of date (it mentioned typed arrays and a
specific set of browser versions against which the previous Emscripten
build had been tested).
Also, a couple of users in the last day or two have reported
mysterious failures of the WASM puzzles, which I haven't been able to
reproduce in the same version of the same browser. So something odd is
going on, and this seems like a good place to put suggestions about
what diagnostic information to send.
A user mailed me today having found it less than clear from the docs
that Galaxies will only accept a solution if the set of filled-in grid
edges consists of _exactly_ the ones that separate two distinct
regions, rather than consisting of _at least_ those and perhaps others
which neither break rotational symmetry or disconnect any region.
This should make it less annoying for me to do local testing of the JS
output of a build, before I push a change. There's a new
build.out/jstest directory containing .html files suitable for loading
in a local browser, which refer to the JS files via an appropriate
relative path to the existing build.out/js directory.
Commit ef39e6e17 made a goof in which the 'New game' button had no
border on the left and an accidental extra one on the right, which I'm
really not sure how I failed to spot when I tested it yesterday.
The only user to send me a comment today on the new layout said that
that menu item in particular is annoying to have hidden behind more
clicks, so by a vote of one to nothing, it's back out in the open.
This is done by showing a dialog containing an <input type="file">
through which the user can 'upload' a save file - though, of course,
the 'upload' doesn't go to any HTTP server, but only into the mind of
the Javascript running in the same browser.
It would be even nicer to support drag-and-drop as an alternative UI
for getting the save file into the browser, but that isn't critical to
getting the first version of this feature out of the door.
This is done by getting midend_serialise to produce the complete
saved-game file as an in-memory string buffer, and then encoding that
into a data: URI which we provide to the user as a hyperlink in a
dialog box. The hyperlink has the 'download' attribute, which means
clicking on it should automatically offer to save the file, and also
lets me specify a not-too-silly default file name.
I'm about to introduce a few more options, and the button bar is
already a bit wide, so I think I should shrink it horizontally before
putting more stuff on it. So I've organised the options into something
more like the Game and Type submenus that the desktop versions use.
However, I haven't gone quite all the way, on the basis that the web
versions will be at least slightly playable on devices without much
keyboard, which makes it worth keeping the in-play actions (Undo,
Redo, and to a lesser extent Restart and Solve) accessible as
top-level buttons in a single click each.
As part of this change, I've also separated the menu bar into a
drop-down menus section and a top-level buttons section with a gap
between them, and put a signalling "..." on the end of the titles in
the former section.
This change also removes the class="left" on the game-type menu and
its submenus, which were previously there to deal with that menu being
all the way over on the far right of the menu bar. But the CSS for
those classes is still there in jspage.pl, and should still work if I
need it again in future.
The previous control buttons and dropdowns based on form elements were
always a bit ugly: partly in a purely visual sense, and partly because
of the nasty bodge I had to do with splitting the usual 'Custom' game
type menu item into two (to get round the fact that if an element of a
<select> is already selected, browsers won't send an event when it's
re-selected). Also, I'm about to want to introduce hierarchical
submenus in the Type menu, and <select> doesn't support that at all.
So here's a replacement system which does everything by CSS
properties, including the popping-up of menus when the mouse moves
over their parent menu item. (Thanks to the Internet in general for
showing me how that trick is done.)
Based on a web game I saw a few years ago, and dashed off this weekend
after I thought of a way to write a good (though not quite optimal)
heuristic solver, here's a random little thing not quite in the same
line as the most usual kind of Puzzles fare: instead of making you
scratch your head to find any move to make at all, it's easy to find
solutions in principle, and the challenge comes from having to do so
within a move limit.
Rather than design an ersatz 'window frame' surrounding the puzzle
canvas, I've simply overlaid the resize handle on the corner of the
puzzle itself (canvas or status bar, depending on whether the latter
exists), trusting that all games in my collection provide a reasonable
border within their drawing area. (OS X already does this with its
resize handle, so it's not as if there's no precedent.)
Unlike the desktop versions, I control the resize behaviour completely
in this environment, so I can constrain the canvas to only ever be
sensible sizes with no dead space round the edges (and, in particular,
preserve the aspect ratio).
Right-clicking the resize handle will restore the puzzle's default
tile size. I had intended to implement a maximise-to-browser-window
button too, but was annoyingly foiled by scrollbars - if you maximise
to the current window width, and as a result the text below the puzzle
scrolls off the bottom, then a vertical scrollbar appears and eats
into the width you just maximised to. Gah.
[originally from svn r9822]
inside the top-level display:none puzzle container as a side effect of
r9809.
Also, while I'm at it, reword the apology to mention typed arrays as
the most likely cause of failure (AFAIK that's the most modern feature
required by the JS front end), and fix indecision between singular and
plural ('this puzzle' doesn't work, perhaps a feature 'they depend on'
is missing).
[originally from svn r9818]
[r9809 == 5dc559c8be1b8f6ed15f560433f25c952c874f93]
added a trivial doctype (IE complained without it), but that caused a
gap to appear between the puzzle and the status bar, so I tinkered a
bit more and ended up removing the <table> completely (no great loss)
as well as adding display:block to the canvas and explicitly setting
the width of not only the status bar div but also its parent div.
Meanwhile, I'm putting the "px" on the end of a lot of properties I
set from JS, because IE complains about that too if I don't.
[originally from svn r9809]
puzzle startup. The puzzle web pages now enclose the whole puzzle
(buttons, canvas, permalinks) in a div set to display:none, and
instead display an apologetic message saying 'sorry, it didn't work';
then, if we get through the whole init function without crashing, we
show the puzzle and hide the apology.
[originally from svn r9802]
applets, here's an alternative webification in Javascript, using
Emscripten in asm.js mode (so that as browsers incorporate asm.js
optimisation, the game generation should run really fast).
[originally from svn r9781]
web pages for the Java applets. Previously, those have all been
maintained by hand in my website's svn area, which is a bit silly. Now
we have a file per puzzle in the 'html' subdirectory which contains
the puzzle's name, one or two attributes, and the instructions snippet
to go below the puzzle applet; and then there's a Perl script that
builds all the real web pages out of that by adding in the parts
common across all files: the header, footer, and middle fragment with
the <applet> tag and resizing bits and pieces.
One piece _not_ checked in here is the footer text specific to my
hosting at chiark, which I think does still belong in the www area. So
Buildscr doesn't actually build the web pages; it just delivers the
bits and pieces by which my nightly snapshot script will be able to
run the program that _does_ build them, passing that footer as an
extra argument.
[originally from svn r9780]
