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.
The check_valid() function was not verifying that each Killer cage
summed to the right thing! Thanks to Chris Goodyer for spotting it. I
wonder how nobody else has, in 8 years.
Keen, Towers and Unequal (and Group) already have this feature in
common: pressing m while no square is selected, causes a full set of
pencil marks to be filled in for every square without a real number/
letter/whatever in it. Solo and Undead share the basic UI principles
(left-click to select a square then type a thing to go in it, vs
right-click to select a square then type things to pencil-mark in it),
but did not have that same feature. Now they do.
spec_to_dsf() should not report invalid input by failing an assertion,
because one of the contexts it's called from is validate_desc(), in
which the whole point is to present a useful error message to the user
before getting to the point where an assertion might go off at all.
Game description 5j:c1_5o4_3c,c___aba___cca_a_a_aca now fails
validation cleanly, where previously it would trigger this bug.
Due to a copy-and-paste error, I was accidentally treating 'y' as the
special-case character which puts no 1 bit after the run of 0s, which
should have been 'z'. Game id 9jk#12345-5994 failed an assertion as a
result (because it generates a y which was accidentally treated as
special).
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]
basically just so that it can divide mouse coordinates by the tile
size, but is definitely not expected to _write_ to it, and it hadn't
previously occurred to me that anyone might try. Therefore,
interpret_move() now gets a pointer to a _const_ game_drawstate
instead of a writable one.
All existing puzzles cope fine with this API change (as long as the
new const qualifier is also added to a couple of subfunctions to which
interpret_move delegates work), except for the just-committed Undead,
which somehow had ds->ascii and ui->ascii the wrong way round but is
otherwise unproblematic.
[originally from svn r9657]
square. It isn't equipped for it, and will try to handle it with the
4-square case and get confused. This can come up if the
DIFF_KINTERSECT pass before that split a cage, and will cause the
solver to miss valid solutions; e.g. 3x3kadu#802065940985372 would
generate an ambiguous puzzle before this change.
[originally from svn r9402]
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]
solosolver verbose diagnostics in X mode. Also added gcc-specific
prototypes with __attribute__((format)) to ensure they all get checked
in future.
Spotted by Arun Giridhar; segfault without this fix is reproducible by
'solosolver -v 3x3x:7_9e4_1c7d3e3d1b2_4e2c6e5_6b1d8e5d9c8_2e9_5'.
[originally from svn r9151]
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]
Guess, because Guess expected ^H whereas GTK generated ^?. Other
puzzles that use Backspace do it by being prepared to see either,
which seems wasteful. Now the midend normalises both into ^H, so
front ends can generate whichever they like while puzzles can
safely just look for ^H.
[originally from svn r8786]
merge_some_cages() was written in the assumption that it would
always be able to do something, in that it returned void on success
and if it couldn't find anything to do it would just loop round
forever trying the same things over and over again.
Now it makes a methodical list of the pairs of cages which are merge
candidates, goes through them in a random order until it finds a
viable one, and returns a boolean indicating whether it succeeded or
ran out of candidates.
A test case which previously hung and now does not is "solo
--generate 1 7jxkdt#12345-10".
[originally from svn r8541]
of each digit, and - perhaps more importantly - the display code
wasn't highlighting violations of that rule as an error. Fix both.
[originally from svn r8540]
the 'Killer Sudoku' puzzle type. As a side effect I've had to
increase the default tile size of Solo, so that the extra numbers
drawn in the squares in Killer mode were still legible.
[originally from svn r8455]
_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]
suggested by IWJ last night: grid generation can immediately choose
an entire grid row randomly, since all that's doing is nailing down
the names of the numbers, and that gets the whole thing started more
efficiently. But the main difference is that now grid generation is
given only area^2 steps to come up with a filled grid, and then cut
off unceremoniously, causing grid generation to fail and be retried
from scratch. This seems to prevent hangups on jigsaw layouts that
admit few useful solutions, by changing layout constantly. 9j
puzzles now generate at a sensible rate, and as an added bonus so do
5x5 normal puzzles, which they never used to.
[originally from svn r7978]
failed to point out a declaration after a statement, and gcc's
linker was clever enough to optimise the call to divvy_rectangle()
out of solosolver so that I didn't have to include divvy.c in that.)
[originally from svn r7975]
(require both main diagonals to have one of every digit in addition
to all the usual constraints) and Jigsaw Sudoku (replace the array
of rectangular sub-blocks with the sub-blocks being random
polyominoes). To implement the latter, I've moved my `divvy.c'
library routine out of the `unfinished' subdirectory.
Jigsaw mode is currently an undocumented feature: you enable it by
setting the rows parameter to 1 (and the columns parameter to your
desired grid size, which unlike normal Sudoku can be anything you
like including a prime number). The reason it's undocumented is
because generation times are not yet reliably short: sometimes
generating a jigsaw-type puzzle can hang for hours and still get
nowhere. (The algorithm should terminate in principle, but not in
any time you're prepared to wait.) I _think_ I know how to solve
this, but have yet to try it. Until then, jigsaw mode will remain a
hidden feature.
Printing of X-type puzzles is also substandard at present, because
the current print-colour API replaces the desired light shading of
the X-cells with heavy diagonal hatching. I plan to adjust the API
imminently to address this.
[originally from svn r7974]
about eating the letter `d' (for `diagonal') when it appears in a
symmtery description: it should only be used after `m', because
mirror symmetry is the only type that can be diagonal. This was
causing parsing of the parameter description `3x3adu' to produce the
wrong answer: the d would be swallowed, then the u ignored for being
incomprehensible, and you'd get default Trivial difficulty.
[originally from svn r7386]
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]
zero as a valid puzzle symbol, it can support at most 35 symbols,
not 36. (This is largely academic since IME anything above about 25
is impractical to generate, but there we go.)
[originally from svn r7115]
function, since it took no parameters by which to vary its decision,
and in any case it's hard to imagine a game which only
_conditionally_ wants a status bar. Changed it into a boolean data
field in the backend structure.
[originally from svn r6417]
was actually using it, and also it wasn't being called again for
different game states or different game parameters, so it would have
been a mistake to depend on anything in that game state. Games are
now expected to commit in advance to a single fixed list of all the
colours they will ever need, which was the case in practice already
and simplifies any later port to a colour-poor platform. Also this
change has removed a lot of unnecessary faff from midend_colours().
[originally from svn r6416]
in the game description, the solver will fail to notice it and
overrun an array leading to assertion failure, silent wrong answers
or (in extreme cases) segfaults. Hence, validate_desc() now spots
them and kicks them out.
[originally from svn r6383]
game_print(), wherever feasible. This fixes a specific bug in Loopy
(James H's new field ds->linewidth wasn't being set up, leading to
corrupted print output), but I've made the change in all affected
files because it also seems like a generally good idea to encourage
it for future games, to prevent other problems of this type.
There is one slight snag, which is that Map _can't_ do this because
its game_set_size() also initialises a blitter. I could fix this by
abstracting the common parts of Map's game_set_size() out into a
subfunction called by game_set_size() and also called directly by
game_print(); alternatively, I could introduce a means of
determining whether a `drawing *' was for screen or printing use.
Not sure which yet.
[originally from svn r6340]
r6160, I completely failed to ensure that generated grids were _at
most_ the required difficulty. It appears to have been only random
chance that prevented a request for a Trivial puzzle from producing
Extreme. Here's a one-line fix.
[originally from svn r6298]
[r6160 == e55838bc9b0d173ca539d0cfe714495b5c12b9dd]
a non-recursive level above Easy, which therefore moves the
recursive Hard mode further up still. Play-testing suggests that in
fact Tricky is often _harder_ than the old Hard mode, since the
latter had limited depth of recursion and would therefore spot
complex deductions only if it happened to start a recursion on the
right square; Tricky may be limited in the sophistication of its
complex deductions, but it never misses one, so its puzzles tend to
be hard all over.
Also in this checkin, a new source file `nullfe.c', containing all
the annoying stub functions required to make command-line solvers
link successfully. James wrote this for (the new) lightupsolver, and
I've used it to simplify the other stand-alone solvers.
[originally from svn r6254]
level: positional set elimination (which is so obvious I really
should have thought of it myself, though it's tricky to spot) and
forcing chains (which are a type of one-level proof by
contradiction, findable through a simple breadth-first search
without requiring recursion, but so ludicrously powerful that they
are able to solve _two thirds_ of grids that the pre-Extreme Solo
generated and rated as Unreasonable).
Of course this makes Unreasonable mode harder still...
[originally from svn r6239]
independently discovered an advanced reasoning technique in Map, and
then it occurred to me that since Solo can also be considered as a
graph-colouring game the same technique ought to be applicable. And
it is; so here's a new difficulty level, `Extreme', which sits just
above Advanced. Grids graded `Extreme' by new-Solo will of course
fall into old-Solo's `Unreasonable' category (since they're not
soluble using the old set of non-recursive methods). A brief and
unscientific experiment suggests that about one in six Unreasonable
grids generated by old-Solo are classified Extreme by the new
solver; so the remaining Unreasonable mode (now containing a subset
of the grids it used to) hasn't actually become much harder.
[originally from svn r6209]
as seen by the back ends from the one implemented by the front end,
and shoved a piece of middleware (drawing.c) in between to permit
interchange of multiple kinds of the latter. I've also added a
number of functions to the drawing API to permit printing as well as
on-screen drawing, and retired print.py in favour of integrated
printing done by means of that API.
The immediate visible change is that print.py is dead, and each
puzzle now does its own printing: where you would previously have
typed `print.py solo 2x3', you now type `solo --print 2x3' and it
should work in much the same way.
Advantages of the new mechanism available right now:
- Map is now printable, because the new print function can make use
of the output from the existing game ID decoder rather than me
having to replicate all those fiddly algorithms in Python.
- the new print functions can cope with non-initial game states,
which means each puzzle supporting --print also supports
--with-solutions.
- there's also a --scale option permitting users to adjust the size
of the printed puzzles.
Advantages which will be available at some point:
- the new API should permit me to implement native printing
mechanisms on Windows and OS X.
[originally from svn r6190]
clues from a filled grid, was using the algorithm
- loop over the whole grid looking for a clue (or symmetry group of
clues) which can be safely removed
- remove it
- loop over the whole grid again, and so on.
This was due to my vague feeling that removing one clue might affect
whether another can be removed. Of course this can happen - two
clues can be alternative ways of deducing the same vital fact so
that removing one makes the other necessary - but what _can't_
happen is for removing one clue to make another _become_ removable,
since you can only do that by _adding_ information. In other words,
after testing a clue and determining that it can't be removed, you
never need to test it again. Thus, a much simpler algorithm is
- loop over the possible clues (or symmetry groups) _once_, in a
random order
- for each clue (group), if it is removable, remove it.
This still guarantees to leave the grid in a state where no further
clues can be removed, but it greatly cuts down puzzle generation
time and also simplifies the code. I am a fool for not having
spotted this in three and a half months!
[originally from svn r6160]
