Also in this checkin (committed by mistake - I meant to do it
separately), a behind-the-scenes change to Slant to colour the two
non-touching classes of diagonals in different colours. Both colours
are set to black by default, but configuration by way of
SLANT_COLOUR_* can distinguish them if you want.
[originally from svn r6164]
nikoli.co.jp (which has quite a few puzzles that they don't seem to
have bothered to translate into English).
Minor structural change: the disjoint set forest code used in the
Net solver has come in handy again, so I've moved it out into its
own module dsf.c.
[originally from svn r6155]
positions immediately when you make an error, the game now reveals
as little information as is necessary to prove you wrong (including
none - if an existing laser path you know about is inconsistent with
your guesses, the game will just point it out and tell you nothing
new!) and you can try again. Errors are counted in much the same way
as deaths in Mines.
[originally from svn r6152]
which is unable to guarantee that every grid it generates can be
solved. So I'm eliminating that exception: this checkin contains a
more sophisticated grid generator which does guarantee solubility.
It's a bit slow (most noticeably on the 15x10c3 preset), and the
quality of the generated grids is slightly weird (a tendency toward
small regions rather than large sweeping areas of contiguous
colour); however, I'm willing to see the latter as a feature for
now, since making the game more challenging while simultaneously
guaranteeing it to be possible sounds like an all-round win to me.
From now on I'm raising my standards for contributions to this
collection. I made this fix to Same Game because I heard a user
_automatically assume_ that any puzzle in my collection would not be
so uncouth as to generate an impossible grid; as of this checkin
that's actually true, and I intend to maintain that standard of
quality henceforth.
(Guaranteeing a _unique_ solution is more of an optional extra,
since there are many games for which it isn't a meaningful concept
or isn't particularly desirable. Which is not to say that _some_
games wouldn't be of unacceptably low quality if they failed to
guarantee uniqueness; it depends on the game.)
[originally from svn r6124]
generation) from a simple but rather fun Flash game I saw this
morning.
Small infrastructure change for this puzzle: while most game
backends find the midend's assumption that Solve moves are never
animated to be a convenience absolving them of having to handle the
special case themselves, this one actually needs Solve to be
animated. Rather than break that convenience for the other puzzles,
I've introduced a flag bit (which I've shoved in mouse_priorities
for the moment, shamefully without changing its name).
[originally from svn r6097]
- reinstate the initialisation of ds->w and ds->h in guess.c, which
I'd accidentally removed during game_size() refactoring
- reorganise Net's interpret_move() so that my uncommitted patch
for drag-based UI (which he uses on the Palm port) will apply
more easily
- the interpret_move() changes make it easy to have a single move
type which rotates a tile by 180 degrees, so this is now provided
via the `F' key (but there's no spare button available to provide
it via the mouse).
[originally from svn r6070]
(solving it only requires matrix inversion over GF(2), whereas
several of the other puzzles in this collection are NP-complete in
principle), but it's a fun enough thing to play with and is
non-trivial to do in your head - especially on the hardest preset.
[originally from svn r5967]
Rather than revealing the entire mine layout when you die, we now
only reveal the one mine that killed you. You can then Undo and
continue playing, without having spoiled the rest of the grid for
yourself. The number of times you've died is counted in the status
line (and is not reduced by Undo :-).
Amusingly, I think this in itself is quite a good way of dealing
with ambiguous sections in a Minesweeper grid: they no longer
_completely_ spoil your enjoyment of the game, because you can still
play the remainder of the grid even if you haven't got a completely
clean sweep. Just my luck that I should invent the idea when I've
already arranged for ambiguous sections to be absent :-)
[originally from svn r5886]
(Adding modifier+cursors handling has had minor knock-on effects on the other
puzzles, so that they can continue to ignore modifiers.)
(An unfortunate side effect of this is some artifacts in exterior barrier
drawing; notably, a disconnected corner can now appear at the corner of the
grid under some circumstances. I haven't found a satisfactory way round
this yet.)
[originally from svn r5844]
number. Many thanks to Chris Thomas, for helping with the detailed
UI design by means of testing an endless series of prototypes.
[originally from svn r5842]
- fix documentation of Net's unique solution option (should have
tested before last checkin)
- make unique solutions optional in Rectangles too (same reasons)
- tidy up various issues in parameter encoding in both games.
[originally from svn r5818]
enabled by default), since ambiguous sections in grids can present
additional interesting challenges. I think uniqueness is a better
default, though.
[originally from svn r5816]
puzzles. I generate the grid of rectangles as normal, but before I
place the numbers I run it through a non-deterministic solver
algorithm which tries to do as much as it can with as little
information about where the numbers are going to be. The solver
itself narrows down the number placement when it runs out of steam,
but does so as little as possible. Once it reaches a state where it
has ensured solubility, and then the generation algorithm chooses
random number placement from whatever's left.
Occasionally it paints itself into a corner and can't ensure a
unique solution no matter what happens; in that situation we just
have to give up, generate a fresh grid, and try again.
[originally from svn r5809]
rather than literal grid descriptions, which has always faintly
annoyed me because it makes it impossible to type in a grid from
another source. However, Gareth pointed out that short random-seed
game descriptions are useful, because you can read one out to
someone else without having to master the technology of cross-
machine cut and paste, or you can have two people enter the same
random seed simultaneously in order to race against each other to
complete the same puzzle. So both types of game ID seem to have
their uses.
Therefore, here's a reorganisation of the whole game ID concept.
There are now two types of game ID: one has a parameter string then
a hash then a piece of arbitrary random seed text, and the other has
a parameter string then a colon then a literal game description. For
most games, the latter is identical to the game IDs that were
previously valid; for Net and Netslide, old game IDs must be
translated into new ones by turning the colon into a hash, and
there's a new descriptive game ID format.
Random seed IDs are not guaranteed to be portable between software
versions (this is a major reason why I added version reporting
yesterday). Descriptive game IDs have a longer lifespan.
As an added bonus, I've removed the sections of documentation
dealing with game parameter encodings not shown in the game ID
(Rectangles expansion factor, Solo symmetry and difficulty settings
etc), because _all_ parameters must be specified in a random seed ID
and therefore users can easily find out the appropriate parameter
string for any settings they have configured.
[originally from svn r5788]
additional configuration parameter, which is the number of shuffle
moves. By default the grid will be fully shuffled so that you need a
general solution algorithm to untangle it, but if you prefer you can
request a grid which has had (say) precisely four moves made on it,
and then attempt to exactly reverse those four moves.
Currently this feature is only available from the Custom box, and
not in any presets.
[originally from svn r5769]
the missing fifth difficulty level to Solo: `Unreasonable', in which
even set-based reasoning is insufficient and there's no alternative
but to guess a number and backtrack if it didn't work. (Solutions
are still guaranteed unique, however.) In fact it now seems to take
less time to generate a puzzle of this grade than `Advanced'!
[originally from svn r5756]
various things:
- if you haven't fully understood what a game is about, it gives
you an immediate example of a puzzle plus its solution so you can
understand it
- in some games it's useful to compare your solution with the real
one and see where you made a mistake
- in the rearrangement games (Fifteen, Sixteen, Twiddle) it's handy
to be able to get your hands on a pristine grid quickly so you
can practise or experiment with manoeuvres on it
- it provides a good way of debugging the games if you think you've
encountered an unsolvable grid!
[originally from svn r5731]
