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 allows the icons build to automatically disable itself if Perl
can't be found at all (and print a warning explaining that that's
why). It also means that if Perl exists on the system but is somewhere
other than /usr/bin (where our #! lines expect it), the icons build
can still run.
This reinstates the feature of the previous build system, that the C
icon files for the GTK puzzles were included in the source tarball, so
that users building from that instead of from the raw git repo would
not need to run the fiddly piece of build that regenerates them.
Running that fiddly piece of build is much easier in the CMake world
(because it's integrated with the main makefile), but it has a build
dependency on ImageMagick which is easily avoided.
The makefile will still build the icons if it _can_. But in the case
where it can't, it will use pre-built icon source files if they're
available, and only fall back to no-icon.c if it can't even do that.
(So a user checking out from git and building without ImageMagick
present will still be able to build _something_ playable.)
This way, ImageMagick is no longer a hard build dependency. For
developers or users, building puzzles without nice icons is preferable
to not building them at all.
(Also, thanks to Michael Quevillon for pointing out very promptly that
my use of 'REQUIRED' in the find_program command was implicitly
depending on a version of CMake in advance of my minimum_required
specification. This change fixes that too, in passing.)
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.
This is that annoying feature of up-to-date 'convert' in which
converting to or from a PNG file defaults to returning RGB values that
have been 'helpfully' gamma-corrected (or some such) from the exact
data stored in the source file to some nonsense you didn't want.
Usually the worst this causes is slightly washed-out looking graphics,
but in this case, since my entire aim was to squash the image into a
specific set of exact RGB values so as to turn it into a paletted
Windows icon file, it caused an actual build failure when the next
loop in icon.pl couldn't find the gamma-corrected values in its
expected palette map, and no wonder.
It actually went off this morning, after an upgrade of ImageMagick,
and I found that it contained both unprintable characters in the
colour description and the wrong variable in the coordinate display.
Its absence was breaking the icon build on Ubuntu 14.04, because you
ask convert to map an image into a specific 16-colour palette, and it
does so and _then_ nonconsensually maps those colours in turn through
a colourspace transformation you didn't ask for, causing icon.pl to
fail an assertion when it finds an RGB value not in the palette.
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.
'Haunted Mirror Maze', a game involving placing ghosts, zombies and
vampires in a grid so that the right numbers of them are visible along
sight-lines reflected through multiple mirrors.
[originally from svn r9652]
in the 'unfinished' directory for a while, and has now been finished
up thanks to James Harvey putting in some effort and galvanising me to
put in the rest. This is 'Pearl', an implementation of Nikoli's 'Masyu'.
The code in Loopy that generates a random loop along grid edges to use
as the puzzle solution has been abstracted out into loopgen.[ch] so
that Pearl can use it for its puzzle solutions too. I've also
introduced a new utility module called 'tdq' (for 'to-do queue').
[originally from svn r9379]
Hitori. One infrastructure change in the process: latin.c has
acquired a utility function to generate a latin rectangle rather
than a full square.
[originally from svn r8828]
is mostly done with ifdefs in windows.c; so mkfiles.pl generates a
new makefile (Makefile.wce) and Recipe enables it, but it's hardly
any different from Makefile.vc apart from a few definitions at the
top of the files.
Currently the PocketPC build is not enabled in the build script, but
with any luck I'll be able to do so reasonably soon.
[originally from svn r7337]
supports monochrome icons, can deal with any size of image you're
mad enough to put in there, and will construct icons with whatever
combination of sizes and resolutions you feel like specifying. This
has involved a change in the command-line syntax, hence the
adjustment to Makefile.
(I don't imagine that the changes described here will be critical to
Puzzles any time soon, but I might reuse this script elsewhere and
then I won't want it to have arbitrary limitations.)
[originally from svn r7031]
instead of having the puzzle binary export its window ID to a script
which then runs xwd, we can use the gdk-pixbuf library to have the
puzzle binary _itself_ read its own internal pixmap and save it
straight to a PNG. How handy. And faster, and less timing-sensitive.
[originally from svn r7022]
mkfiles.pl change (I don't seem to be planning ahead very well this
week), this time to provide a list of fallback options for an object
file. That way, I have a no-icon.c which quietly replaces
icons/foo-icon.c if the latter doesn't exist, and so again people
checking straight out from Subversion shouldn't have trouble.
[originally from svn r7021]
Windows puzzle binaries. This checkin involves several distinct
changes:
- mkfiles.pl now has an extra feature: if an object file is listed
in Recipe with a trailing question mark, it will be considered
optional, and silently dropped from the makefile if its primary
source file isn't present at the time mkfiles.pl runs. This means
people who check out the puzzles from Subversion and just run
mkfiles.pl shouldn't get build failures; they just won't get the
icons.
- all the .R files now use this feature to include an optional
Windows resource file.
- the .rc resource source files are built by icons/Makefile.
- windows.c finds the icon if present and uses it in place of the
standard Windows application icon.
[originally from svn r7020]
the main screenshots. (A few, like Map, were perfect already.)
In the process I've vertically reflected the puzzle shown in the
Pattern save file, to bring a more interesting piece of it into the
top left corner :-)
[originally from svn r7019]
screenshots into appropriate sizes and colour depths. This is all
done with a nasty Perl script, because ImageMagick does not output
correct .ICO format. Not sure why; it isn't _that_ hard.
I intend at some point to link the resulting icons into the actual
Windows puzzle binaries, but before then I have to make them
prettier: most of them would benefit from being derived from a
smaller crop of the puzzle screenshot instead of trying to fit the
whole thing in.
[originally from svn r7017]
the web, which I hope will also end up being extended to generate
both Windows and X icons for each individual puzzle. The mechanism
is: for each puzzle there's a save file in the `icons' subdirectory
showing a game state which I think is a decent illustration of the
puzzle, and then there's a nasty set of scripts which runs each
puzzle binary, loads that save file, grabs a screenshot using xwd,
and munges it into shape.
In order to support this I've added two new options (--redo and
--windowid) to all the GTK puzzles, which I don't expect ever to be
used outside the icons makefile. I've also added two more options
(--load and --id) which force a GTK puzzle to treat its command-line
option as a save file or as a game ID respectively (the previous
behaviour was always to guess, and sometimes it guessed wrong).
[originally from svn r7014]
