midend_status(), and given it three return codes for win, (permanent)
loss and game-still-in-play. Depending on what the front end wants to
use it for, it may find any or all of these three states worth
distinguishing from each other.
(I suppose a further enhancement might be to add _non_-permanent loss
as a fourth distinct status, to describe situations in which you can't
play further without pressing Undo but doing so is not completely
pointless. That might reasonably include dead-end situations in Same
Game and Pegs, and blown-self-up situations in Mines and Inertia.
However, I haven't done this at present.)
[originally from svn r9179]
state is in a solved position, and a midend function wrapping it.
(Or, at least, a situation in which further play is pointless. The
point is, given that game state, would it be a good idea for a front
end that does that sort of thing to proactively provide the option to
start a fresh game?)
[originally from svn r9140]
_conditionally_ able to format the current puzzle as text to be sent
to the clipboard. For instance, if a game were to support playing on
a square grid and on other kinds of grid such as hexagonal, then it
might reasonably feel that only the former could be sensibly
rendered in ASCII art; so it can now arrange for the "Copy" menu
item to be greyed out depending on the game_params.
To do this I've introduced a new backend function
(can_format_as_text_now()), and renamed the existing static backend
field "can_format_as_text" to "can_format_as_text_ever". The latter
will cause compile errors for anyone maintaining a third-party front
end; if any such person is reading this, I apologise to them for the
inconvenience, but I did do it deliberately so that they'd know to
update their front end.
As yet, no checked-in game actually uses this feature; all current
games can still either copy always or copy never.
[originally from svn r8161]
works, but it's slow, and the puzzles are currently at a relatively
low level of difficulty. Also this is a generator only: no UI yet
(because I'm waiting to see if I can make the generator practical
before bothering to write the rest).
[originally from svn r7700]