Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

[ploum]

Quite a fan of "Galaxies" (I wish games were harder). Thanks for the work!

[GerReader]

New version 0.7.0 27.12.2020

I just released the next version 0.7.0, found again on the GitHub repo:

https://github.com/SteffenBauer/Pock...SGTPuzzles.app

I implemented an additional entry method proposed by the MobileRead member EastEriq.

Affected games are those that consist of a grid into which numbers / letters / symbols are entered. (ABCD, Group, Keen, Mathrax, Rome, Salad, Solo, Towers, Undead, Unequal).

Additionally to the classic entry method "click a grid cell to highlight it - then click a control button to enter a number", there is now an additional entry method that should make to faster and easier to enter the same number multiple times.

When no grid cell is currently highlighted or 'pencil-mark highlighted', one can now click a symbol control button to highlight it. The button stays highlighted until it is pressed again or another button is selected. As long as the button is highlighted, pressing a grid cell immediately enters that number; long-pressing enters / removes a pencil mark.

I hope that this enhancement is useful; in my tests it took me some minutes to get used to the new entry method, after that it indeed makes playing a puzzle more efficient and fun. Especially in combination with the 'swap short/long click' button one can now enter whole rows/columns of pencil marks very fast.

I'd be glad is this could be tested and given feedback, if this feature is useful and if it can be improved.

[tocy777]

It's not working on Touch Lux 5, after clicking on it, it throws me out to the main screen.

[GerReader]

Originally Posted by tocy777

It's not working on Touch Lux 5, after clicking on it, it throws me out to the main screen.

Oh, thats unfortunate

What exactly is happening? You click the app icon to launch the app, and it just returns to the main ereader screen?

This will unfortunately be very hard to debug now. As this is a one-man private project, I only have access to one device (Touch HD 3) and limited development information, so testing it on a different device is not possible for me.

As the Touch Lux 5 seems to be very new and recently released, I hope that PocketBook didn't change its API.

There are some things that could cause this crash. One is the lower screen resolution of the Lux 5; but there is a report here in this thread that the app works with a Lux 3 which has the same screen resolution, with some drawing issues, but working. I am currently working on adjusting the app that it can handle other screen resolutions, so the next release perhaps could work on a Lux 5.

Or perhaps PocketBook changed the system layout, and the app cannot find the location of the config file. Can you connect your device with USB cable, and check if the folder 'system/state' exists?

[GerReader]

V 0.7.2

https://github.com/SteffenBauer/Pock...master/release

Next version is ready. Changes:

• Added new puzzle Sticks.
• Extracted the Creek puzzle from Slant as separate puzzle, added cell dragging to it.
• Reworked UX handling in Tracks puzzle.
• Calculate chooser layout and fontsizes according to screen resolution; extend chooser to 3 screens as there are now 52 puzzles in the collection.
• Mention game contributors in the individual puzzles 'How to play' texts.

The UI of the Tracks puzzle was originally written for mouse controls, and using it on a touch screen was rather glitchy. I reworked the UX controls, and like to ask for feedback if the handling is now better and more intuitive.

I further received reports that the game chooser is having issues on devices with a different screen resolution. I changed how layout and fontsizes are calculated. I'd like to ask especially people here with a Touch Lux to test this next version, and post screenshots.

[GerReader]

Minor update:

* Fixed a bug in the Undead puzzle, where 'show solution' was occasionally showing a garbled solution.
* Reworked border sizes in several games, so that available screen space is better used. This change is especially important for the Mines and Map puzzles.

https://github.com/SteffenBauer/Pock...master/release

As I didn't receive replies to my last post, I again would like to ask people with a Touch Lux to test the new app, and reply here a short message if the game chooser is now showing all game icons and descriptions correctly. Perfect would be a screenshot.

[Kleki]

Originally Posted by GerReader

V 0.7.2

The UI of the Tracks puzzle was originally written for mouse controls, and using it on a touch screen was rather glitchy. I reworked the UX controls, and like to ask for feedback if the handling is now better and more intuitive.

Actually, I think the UI has only now become glitchy. Not sure how you intend the game to be controlled but this is what I did so far:

• highlight a cell grey by short tapping or a range by short tapping and dragging
• crossing out a cell by long pressing or a range by long pressing and dragging
• adding a track by short tapping on a cell border
• crossing out a border by long pressing on it

The latter two methods have become very unreliable. Placing a track or crossing out a border only seems to work reliably if both adjacent cells are highlighted already. If one or both adjacent cells are unmarked instead of placing the track a cell gets highlighted.

Similarly, un-highlighting a cell does not work reliably, either. If I try so by short tapping on the cell a track gets created instead.

[GerReader]

Thanks for the feedback, the Tracks puzzle is really the puzzle in the collection where I am still struggling with finding a good solution for UI handling.

The problem with this puzzle is that it is clearly designed for playing on a desktop computer with a mouse, and that it needs a lot of different things that need to be controlled, compared to the other puzzles in the collection. You have cell highlighting/crossing out, and also track laying and border crossing out. Four different actions, no problem with a mouse, more tricky with only one finger. Exactly placement of a tap is less accurate on touch-screen, and to distinguish left / right click with short / long tap is also introducing a certain sneaky problem. When you click on a screen, first of all a short-click is always delivered to the event handler, and to be sure that it is a long-click the UI interpreter has to wait. There are all subtle differences to mouse handling that one has to take into account.

I was already not quite happy with the Tracks UI in the android version, and the redesign in my port was an attempt to address especially the problem that I regularly had misplacements where I clicked, so for example a track was laid where I only wanted to highlight the cell.

My idea in the redesign was to avoid above misinterpretation by laying a track only when both adjacent cells are already highlighted, similiar the border crossing out. To speed up game playing, laying a track is still possible into a non-highlighted cell when the track line is ending in the cell from which one wants to continue.

But yeah, that these changes make un-highlighting a cell now unreliable is something that also catched my attention.

I am now considering adding a new configuration screen for certain puzzles where you can configure game-specific UI entry methods. For Tracks this could be the option to switch between the old and the new entry method. For other games to choose what a short and what a long-click is doing.

[Kleki]

I don't recall I had any trouble with the Tracks controls in 0.6.x. So I would definitely appreciate turning back to the old navigation method or getting the option to switch. Of course others out there might have a different opinion.

What you describe as speeding up game playing only works sometimes. Even if a track ends in the cell tapping a border with an empty cell often does not lay the track but highlights the empty cell.

[GerReader]

Yeah, I think for the next release will simply revert it mostly to the old method. Especially the glitch in un-highlighting cells is quite annoying me too.

The only change I'm considering to keep is to restrict crossing out a border (long-click on a border line) only to the case when both adjacent cells are already highlighted. I mainly started to rework the Tracks UI because of this. It happened too often that I wanted to cross out a cell, but the UI thought that I clicked nearer to a border, and placed a crossed out border. An accidental track line is very quick to revert as it needs only a short-click, but for crossing out it took another second until the long-clicked was recognized and I finally had a crossed out cell. That was really annoying.

How important is crossing out border lines for you during gameplay? For me it is the least important element in the game, crossing out cells is way more important, so it should make sense to restrict crossing borders so that crossing out cells is more easy?

[Kleki]

Originally Posted by GerReader

How important is crossing out border lines for you during gameplay? For me it is the least important element in the game

Agreed, I rarely use that at all.

[GerReader]

Changes:

• Undead: Now additionally showing number of placed monsters.
• Tracks: Revert UX partially to old behaviour.
• Chooser: Add swiping to switch between pages. Change page indicator buttons.
• Minor optimizations of screen redraw.

Thanks a lot to user Kleki for valuable feedback!

Download at the usual location:

https://github.com/SteffenBauer/Pock...master/release

[Kleki]

Thanks for reverting the Tracks navigation and the additional Undead indicator.

I had a weird problem which I cannot reproduce anymore but maybe you want to know anyway. I was in the middle of playing a game of Undead. The following actions caused the app to crash and exit:

• go back to the game chooser and click on a game
• choose a different preset

After re-starting the app the Undead game continued where I had left off. Restarting the reader and upgrading from 0.7.3 to 0.7.4 did not change anything.

I then finished the game, went back to the game chooser, chose a different game and the app crashed again. Then after again re-starting everything was normal again.

Not sure what that glitch was but maybe you have an idea. As said I cannot reproduce it anymore.

[GerReader]

Originally Posted by Kleki

I had a weird problem which I cannot reproduce anymore but maybe you want to know anyway.

Definitely interesting to know, but of course very difficult to say what exactly is going on.

As the game resumed your last instance of Undead, it looks to me like the PocketBook OS closed the app for whatever reasons, but during that the configuration savefile was probably corrupted. I have mechanisms integrated to heal some corruptions in the savefile, but perhaps those didn't work on the first try.

Should this problem occur again, you could try a complete preset reset by clicking on "Reset Presets" in the chooser menu. Unfortunately, this means that all of your custom game preferences are then gone and set to default values.

In case you can reproduce the problem, it would be very interesting to know exactly what other game and other preset you chose, and a copy of the configuration savefile at "/system/state/sgtpuzzles.cfg"

[ploum]

Thanks for the work. I’m addicted. I reported a couple of bugs on Github, I hope it’s the best place to do that.