GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 602655
Add ability to play/load/save/share existing games
Last modified: 2018-05-22 12:23:06 UTC
The current version of gnome-sudoku does not have the ability to play a game that is entered by the user, e.g., a game out of the newspaper or a book-collection of puzzles. Ideally, there would be two ways of entering an existing game: 1. A menu entry for "Enter Game", that would bring up an empty grid and allow users to add, remove, or change numbers, with a "Finish" or "Submit" button that would add the entered game to a new "Entered Games" section (along with the "New Game" and "Saved Games" sections). 2. A menu entry for "Load Game from File" that would bring up a file dialog to allow users to select a file, which would contain one or more Sudoku games in some plain-text format, say 9 lines of 9 characters each ('1' .. '9', plus '.' for an empty square), with blank lines between games. All games loaded from the file would be added to the "Entered Games" section. The file format mentioned in 2 would also allow games to be shared among Sudoku uses, stored in annotated repositories (e.g., "Todd's Top Ten"), etc. To facilitate this, a way to export specific puzzles or generated puzzles to a file would also be useful. As an example of the successful use of such file formats, the developers might want to look at the KSokoban game: http://hem.passagen.se/awl/ksokoban/ Thanks!
Point 1 overlaps with Bug #559298
This seems like a major regression to me. It might be worth going back and forking the old python codebase as an independent project again to get back entering games, resuming games, etc.
Well, Parin implemented support for entering games manually already. I will release a new development version (3.17.2) with that feature tonight. We also already have the ability to save a game to a file and load it, which we use to implement autosave. We just don't have any menu item for this. I couldn't think of any use-case for wanting to save and load games, since I personally only play one game at a time myself and then never look at it again, and nobody else complained in several years, but maybe I'm just not a sufficiently-serious Sudoku player. I'm not opposed to adding Save and Open, and it *should* be quick and easy to do (without forking :) since the functionality is already present.
How about this -- I'm in the middle of a game and then (for whatever reason) I need to restart my computer? Or, alternatively, I'm playing a really hard game, and my kids come downstairs and see and want to play, and I want to save my game and open an easy game for them to work on? Speaking of this, btw, I don't know if the new sudoku-generating library is better at making hard sudoku, but one of the features I'd always meant to implement (once my kids grow up and I have time?) was better generation of really hard puzzles, because it's something serious sudoku players like. That + nuanced difficulty rating + hints to help + saving games all make it fun to play really wicked hard sudoku puzzles. Finally, I'll say that I was convinced by the designers who got me to remove save/load in order to just show a start-up screen with new games + any in-progress games. It gives you save/load without adding anything unnecessary to the UI, and it makes for kind of a more fun opening screen anyway. Also, it was fun making the little mini-sudoku icons which became a super-quick way to recognize a game you'd been in the middle of.
(In reply to Thomas M. Hinkle from comment #4) > How about this -- I'm in the middle of a game and then (for whatever reason) > I need to restart my computer? Well that's the autosave we already have: it should open up right where you left off (provided you made at least one move, and haven't finished the board). > Or, alternatively, I'm playing a really hard > game, and my kids come downstairs and see and want to play, and I want to > save my game and open an easy game for them to work on? OK, I agree, it would be useful to have for that case. > Speaking of this, btw, I don't know if the new sudoku-generating library is > better at making hard sudoku, but one of the features I'd always meant to > implement (once my kids grow up and I have time?) was better generation of > really hard puzzles, because it's something serious sudoku players like. > That + nuanced difficulty rating + hints to help + saving games all make it > fun to play really wicked hard sudoku puzzles. A bit of a tangent, but I'm not sure either. I suspect it may not be as good as the original algorithm, since the new algorithm is quite simple: any puzzle that requires at least one guess to solve is automatically Very Hard. [1] FWIW, the reason we removed hints was not that we didn't like them, but that we noticed they didn't help when a puzzle really was difficult to solve, when they're needed the most. [1] https://github.com/stephenostermiller/qqwing/blob/master/src/cpp/qqwing.cpp#L208 > Finally, I'll say that I was convinced by the designers who got me to remove > save/load in order to just show a start-up screen with new games + any > in-progress games. It gives you save/load without adding anything > unnecessary to the UI, and it makes for kind of a more fun opening screen > anyway. Also, it was fun making the little mini-sudoku icons which became a > super-quick way to recognize a game you'd been in the middle of. Hm, we could do that... I was not really a fan of the original screen, since it was relatively complicated, but I'm not horribly opposed.
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