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.
This set of rules should cover make and ninja on Linux, and all of
nmake, ninja and vcxproj on Windows, so that if someone follows the
README build instructions (by doing 'cmake .' in-tree), it should
generate no debris that .gitignore can't filter out.
This completely removes the old system of mkfiles.pl + Recipe + .R
files that I used to manage the various per-platform makefiles and
other build scripts in this code base. In its place is a
CMakeLists.txt setup, which is still able to compile for Linux,
Windows, MacOS, NestedVM and Emscripten.
The main reason for doing this is because mkfiles.pl was a horrible
pile of unmaintainable cruft. It was hard to keep up to date (e.g.
didn't reliably support the latest Visual Studio project files); it
was so specific to me that nobody else could maintain it (or was even
interested in trying, and who can blame them?), and it wasn't even
easy to _use_ if you weren't me. And it didn't even produce very good
makefiles.
In fact I've been wanting to hurl mkfiles.pl in the bin for years, but
was blocked by CMake not quite being able to support my clang-cl based
system for cross-compiling for Windows on Linux. But CMake 3.20 was
released this month and fixes the last bug in that area (it had to do
with preprocessing of .rc files), so now I'm unblocked!
CMake is not perfect, but it's better at mkfiles.pl's job than
mkfiles.pl was, and it has the great advantage that lots of other
people already know about it.
Other advantages of the CMake system:
- Easier to build with. At least for the big three platforms, it's
possible to write down a list of build commands that's actually the
same everywhere ("cmake ." followed by "cmake --build ."). There's
endless scope for making your end-user cmake commands more fancy
than that, for various advantages, but very few people _have_ to.
- Less effort required to add a new puzzle. You just add a puzzle()
statement to the top-level CMakeLists.txt, instead of needing to
remember eight separate fiddly things to put in the .R file. (Look
at the reduction in CHECKLST.txt!)
- The 'unfinished' subdirectory is now _built_ unconditionally, even
if the things in it don't go into the 'make install' target. So
they won't bit-rot in future.
- Unix build: unified the old icons makefile with the main build, so
that each puzzle builds without an icon, runs to build its icon,
then relinks with it.
- Windows build: far easier to switch back and forth between debug
and release than with the old makefiles.
- MacOS build: CMake has its own .dmg generator, which is surely
better thought out than my ten-line bodge.
- net reduction in the number of lines of code in the code base. In
fact, that's still true _even_ if you don't count the deletion of
mkfiles.pl itself - that script didn't even have the virtue of
allowing everything else to be done exceptionally concisely.
Having one of these makes it much easier to debug what's going on when
the solver can't solve something. Also, now the solver can grade the
difficulty of a puzzle, it's useful to expose that feature in a
command-line tool.
One of these days I should sit down and work out exactly when a run of
autoconf generates an autom4te.cache directory, and why it can
suddenly turn up unexpectedly one day after years of never needing to
put it in .gitignore!
I've made the existing optional solver diagnostics appear as the
verbose output of the solver program. They're not particularly legible
at the moment, but they're better than nothing.
OS X is beginning to show a warning when a 32-bit application is
opened, so it's high time that this gets enabled. Fix a clang warning
exposed by this build.
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.
