A user recently mentioned having found even 'Easy' to be harder than
they'd like. That difficulty level generates puzzles that can be
solved by filling in any square for which the other colour would
immediately generate a run of 3, and spotting rows that have the
correct total number of one colour and filling in all remaining
squares in the other colour.
Initially I thought there wasn't much I could do to make the solution
techniques easier than that. But after a bit of thought, I decided the
second criterion can be weakened a bit. The new 'Trivial' level
replaces it with a special case: when a row or column only has _one_
remaining unfilled square, the remaining square is filled in by
counting.
That version of the rule doesn't require the player to do any counting
in order to _spot_ possible applications of it: you can see at a
glance that a row or column has only one remaining grey square, even
if having seen it you then have to count to work out which colour to
fill it in. So it makes a gentler introduction to the game.
I don't know how I've never thought of this before! Pretty much every
game in this collection has to have a mechanism for noticing when
game_redraw is called for the first time on a new drawstate, and if
so, start by covering the whole window with a filled rectangle of the
background colour. This is a pain for implementers, and also awkward
because the drawstate often has to _work out_ its own pixel size (or
else remember it from when its size method was called).
The backends all do that so that the frontends don't have to guarantee
anything about the initial window contents. But that's a silly
tradeoff to begin with (there are way more backends than frontends, so
this _adds_ work rather than saving it), and also, in this code base
there's a standard way to handle things you don't want to have to do
in every backend _or_ every frontend: do them just once in the midend!
So now that rectangle-drawing operation happens in midend_redraw, and
I've been able to remove it from almost every puzzle. (A couple of
puzzles have other approaches: Slant didn't have a rectangle-draw
because it handles even the game borders using its per-tile redraw
function, and Untangle clears the whole window on every redraw
_anyway_ because it would just be too confusing not to.)
In some cases I've also been able to remove the 'started' flag from
the drawstate. But in many cases that has to stay because it also
triggers drawing of static display furniture other than the
background.
The Rockbox frontend allows games to be displayed in a "zoomed-in"
state targets with small displays. Currently we use a modal interface
-- a "viewing" mode in which the cursor keys are used to pan around
the rendered bitmap; and an "interaction" mode that actually sends
keys to the game.
This commit adds a midend_get_cursor_location() function to allow the
frontend to retrieve the backend's cursor location or other "region of
interest" -- such as the player location in Cube or Inertia.
With this information, the Rockbox frontend can now intelligently
follow the cursor around in the zoomed-in state, eliminating the need
for a modal interface.
I noticed this during the bool trawl: both of these games have an
array of flags indicating which grid squares are immutable starting
clues, and copy it in every call to dup_game, which is completely
unnecessary because it doesn't change during play. So now each one
lives in a reference-counted structure, as per my usual practice in
similar cases elsewhere.
This is the main bulk of this boolification work, but although it's
making the largest actual change, it should also be the least
disruptive to anyone interacting with this code base downstream of me,
because it doesn't modify any interface between modules: all the
inter-module APIs were updated one by one in the previous commits.
This just cleans up the code within each individual source file to use
bool in place of int where I think that makes things clearer.
This commit removes the old #defines of TRUE and FALSE from puzzles.h,
and does a mechanical search-and-replace throughout the code to
replace them with the C99 standard lowercase spellings.
encode_params, validate_params and new_desc now take a bool parameter;
fetch_preset, can_format_as_text_now and timing_state all return bool;
and the data fields is_timed, wants_statusbar and can_* are all bool.
All of those were previously typed as int, but semantically boolean.
This commit changes the API declarations in puzzles.h, updates all the
games to match (including the unfinisheds), and updates the developer
docs as well.
This function gives the front end a way to find out what keys the back
end requires; and as such it is mostly useful for ports without a
keyboard. It is based on changes originally found in Chris Boyle's
Android port, though some modifications were needed to make it more
flexible.
This allows me to use different types for the mutable, dynamically
allocated string value in a C_STRING control and the fixed constant
list of option names in a C_CHOICES.
Now midend.c directly tests the returned pointer for equality to this
value, instead of checking whether it's the empty string.
A minor effect of this is that games may now return a dynamically
allocated empty string from interpret_move() and treat it as just
another legal move description. But I don't expect anyone to be
perverse enough to actually do that! The main purpose is that it
avoids returning a string literal from a function whose return type is
a pointer to _non-const_ char, i.e. we are now one step closer to
being able to make this code base clean under -Wwrite-strings.
To do this, I've completely replaced the API between mid-end and front
end, so any downstream front end maintainers will have to do some
rewriting of their own (sorry). I've done the necessary work in all
five of the front ends I keep in-tree here - Windows, GTK, OS X,
Javascript/Emscripten, and Java/NestedVM - and I've done it in various
different styles (as each front end found most convenient), so that
should provide a variety of sample code to show downstreams how, if
they should need it.
I've left in the old puzzle back-end API function to return a flat
list of presets, so for the moment, all the puzzle backends are
unchanged apart from an extra null pointer appearing in their
top-level game structure. In a future commit I'll actually use the new
feature in a puzzle; perhaps in the further future it might make sense
to migrate all the puzzles to the new API and stop providing back ends
with two alternative ways of doing things, but this seemed like enough
upheaval for one day.
rows are permitted to have exactly the same pattern, and likewise
columns. (A row and a column can match, though.) This rule is
sometimes used, but not always; http://www.binarypuzzle.com/ in
particular has it (as a user just pointed out).
Since the filled-grid-generation stage of Unruly is implemented by
repeatedly choosing a square and then calling the solver to fill in
all its consequences, simply adding a solver mode conditional on this
flag is sufficient to do the whole of the interesting part of the job.
[originally from svn r9837]
puzzle backend function which ought to have it, and propagate those
consts through to per-puzzle subroutines as needed.
I've recently had to do that to a few specific parameters which were
being misused by particular puzzles (r9657, r9830), which suggests
that it's probably a good idea to do the whole lot pre-emptively
before the next such problem shows up.
[originally from svn r9832]
[r9657 == 3b250baa02a7332510685948bf17576c397b8ceb]
[r9830 == 0b93de904a98f119b1a95d3a53029f1ed4bfb9b3]
new_desc. Oddities in the 'make test' output brought to my attention
that a few puzzles have been modifying their input game_params for
various reasons; they shouldn't do that, because that's the
game_params held permanently by the midend and it will affect
subsequent game generations if they modify it. So now those arguments
are const, and all the games which previously modified their
game_params now take a copy and modify that instead.
[originally from svn r9830]
