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rather than literal grid descriptions, which has always faintly annoyed me because it makes it impossible to type in a grid from another source. However, Gareth pointed out that short random-seed game descriptions are useful, because you can read one out to someone else without having to master the technology of cross- machine cut and paste, or you can have two people enter the same random seed simultaneously in order to race against each other to complete the same puzzle. So both types of game ID seem to have their uses. Therefore, here's a reorganisation of the whole game ID concept. There are now two types of game ID: one has a parameter string then a hash then a piece of arbitrary random seed text, and the other has a parameter string then a colon then a literal game description. For most games, the latter is identical to the game IDs that were previously valid; for Net and Netslide, old game IDs must be translated into new ones by turning the colon into a hash, and there's a new descriptive game ID format. Random seed IDs are not guaranteed to be portable between software versions (this is a major reason why I added version reporting yesterday). Descriptive game IDs have a longer lifespan. As an added bonus, I've removed the sections of documentation dealing with game parameter encodings not shown in the game ID (Rectangles expansion factor, Solo symmetry and difficulty settings etc), because _all_ parameters must be specified in a random seed ID and therefore users can easily find out the appropriate parameter string for any settings they have configured. [originally from svn r5788]
This is the README accompanying the source code to Simon Tatham's puzzle collection. The collection's web site is at <http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/puzzles/>. You should find several Makefiles in the source code: - `Makefile' should work under GNU make on Linux, provided you have GTK installed to compile and link against. It builds GTK binaries of the puzzle games. - `Makefile.vc' should work under MS Visual C++ on Windows. - `Makefile.cyg' should work under Cygwin / MinGW. With appropriate tweaks and setting of TOOLPATH, it should work for both compiling on Windows and cross-compiling on Unix. - `Makefile.osx' should work under Mac OS X, provided the Xcode tools are installed. It builds a single monolithic OS X application capable of running any of the puzzles, or even more than one of them at a time. Many of these Makefiles build a program called `nullgame' in addition to the actual game binaries. This program doesn't do anything; it's just a template for people to start from when adding a new game to the collection, and it's compiled every time to ensure that it _does_ compile and link successfully (because otherwise it wouldn't be much use as a template). Once it's built, you can run it if you really want to (but it's very boring), and then you should ignore it. DO NOT EDIT THE MAKEFILES DIRECTLY, if you plan to send any changes back to the maintainer. The makefiles are generated automatically by the Perl script `mkfiles.pl' from the file `Recipe'. If you need to change the makefiles as part of a patch, you should change Recipe and/or mkfiles.pl. The manual is provided in Windows Help format for the Windows build; in text format for anyone who needs it; and in HTML for the Mac OS X application and for the web site. It is generated from a Halibut source file (puzzles.but), which is the preferred form for modification. To generate the manual in other formats, rebuild it, or learn about Halibut, visit the Halibut website at <http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/halibut/>.