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Sudoku: Possible enhancements

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chasbas
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Sudoku: Possible enhancements

I love this program. I hope this is the right place for suggestions. Without bloating the program too much it would be great to:

1) Be able to use alternate keys for entering "possible numbers" (PN) (Shift+1..Shift+9). I would like to be able to use either the keypad 1..9 to be PNs, or even QWEASDZXC as 789456123 (mimicking numpad) or QWERTYUIO as 123456789 (the row just below 123456789). That way I wouldn't need that infernal Shift key pressed. Alternatively, allow CAPSLOCK on to signal PNs.
2) Undo last action(s) (e.g., Alt+Z or "U").
3) Allow Branching by Saving current board and Restoring to that state
4) Save undo's when program exits and restarts
5) Be able to see/replay last N actions (esp. when program exits and restarts)
6) Have a timer that shows elapsed time on current puzzle
7) Have a "duplicate" key (ctrl+D?) that copies PNs from one square to another. I would use this when, for example, I determine that the two remaining squares can be either 1 or 5, so I would use PN1, PN5, go to next square, Ctrl+D. Therefore, the program would need to always remember the immediately previous sequence of PNs.

2 thru 5 could be done by saving all moves in a state file that could then be displayed, replayed, reversed, etc.

Thanks for listening!

Charles

Ashes for Tears
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Contact the Author

Just so you know, this sounds like something you should contact the original author about. The applications here are the original binaries packaged with a custom launcher; no changes are made to the actual proram source code.

Ashes

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John T. Haller
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This one is

Actually, Sudoku is an exception. I edited the code to make it possible to make it portable. It was reading the USERPROFILE from the registry rather than the the env variable. It had sound that had issues under Win9x. And it was compiled with Visual C++ 7 which required an additional (closed source) DLL on some systems. So, I installed Visual C++ 6 and hacked it a bit.

That said, I think some of the enhancements might be beyond my current abilities with the code.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

Ryan McCue
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*gasp*

This might be a change in portable app development!
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jugstah
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This is addictive! Nice to

This is addictive! Nice to bring it around with me on my own usb drive.

plj
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enhancements in the pipe

For some reasons we (a college and I) extended the FLTK version of Sudoku heavily
while trialing the Eclipse & MinGw programming environment. We needed a testcase,
but imporving the program was addictive.
I will try to put our version somewhere on the web in the comming days, after cleaning the code a little.
We added a lot of features we liked. I didn't go over you list right now.
But we have Import and save functions, that allows the user to enter a new puzzle
and save the puzzle generated. Also saving and loading the current game (including the users values and hints entered).
We also added a backtracking functions to count if there are more than one solution (is this a real sudoku), but this might take a long time.
Whe changed the way the user entered hints are presented and added funftions to: * automaticly undate the hints after entering a value, * showing other cells with this value *showing unique hints (for this collumn row box/block).
And most important switching of sound if desired.

This was build as an exersice with the programming environment so the sudoku code not considered to be of quality.

CU later

plj
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I put an enhanced version of the FLTK sudoku online

Hi all,

As promised a few days ago I've made a webpage with our enhanced Sudoku game based on the FLTK 1.1.7 example.
I'm open for the portable apps enhancements, and feel free to borrow whatever needed from our sources. The FLTK executable can run on its own.
See the menu screenshots and the Help file on the web page for the features added (or changed).

Our goal is NOT to make or maintain a sudoku program, it was a building environment exeriment (Eclipse CDT, MinGW on M$ XP). I'm open for comments. People interested in programming themself look at the downloadable eclipse project.

Come visit http://sudoku.p-l-j.org or find the page on my (dutch) home page www.p-l-j.org

Greetings Paul

plj
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new version of my enhancements

Hi all,

new version 2.0beta4-build0

I took over the PortableApps enhancement of the FLTK1.1.7 Preferences, and two other little changes (in the help and double click).
The known bugs are solved and initial printable file added.

(John) tell what more needs to be done to make this a real ProtableApp (launcher stuf?)

Come visit http://sudoku.p-l-j.org
And let me know if some other (easy) feature is desperately needed to make playing sudoku's on PCs fun.

John T. Haller
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Nice work

Hey Paul,

Nice work in enhancing so far. Did you check to see if it's working portably as expected? My FLTK changes were to switch it from using the registry to determine the APPDATA path to using the USERPROFILE environment variable (as most apps do) so that I could redirect its settings to the portable device. If you've maintained my FLTK changes, then it should work as expected. I also changed the app icon (you seem to be using the default) as it didn't look as good in 32x32 and 16x16 as I thought it could.

I had compiled mine with the Intel C++ compiled (from Visual Studio 6.0). And then I'd UPX compressed the resulting EXE which got me down to 206KB. Yours is 0.97MB uncompressed, 571KB when compressed with UPX. Is it possible some of this is due to MinGW? I could compile the final using Intel's compiler (which is generally more efficient).

If you think your release is pretty solid (I haven't given it a thorough tire-kicking yet), I can package it up as a test release so we can get some more eyeballs on it.

Thanks again for your contributions!

Regards,
John

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

arqbrulo
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Indeed

Very good job Paul. Sorry, John, I think I'll have to replace your version with Paul's, unless you have something in the works with Paul's version. There's only one thing I did not like, the sound it makes when the game ends. Also, does it have an autosave feature? I won a game, closed it, re-opened it, and it was the same game I had just solved.

"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." -- Robert Frost
"In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: baby ain't mine." -- Adam Holguin

John T. Haller
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Yes

It's a modification of the existing one, so it should still have autosave. And you can drop Paul's right into Sudoku Portable (it's a wrapper that allows you to bring it with you). Paul's, like the original, is meant to be run locally and stores its settings to C:\Documents and Settings. And I am packaging a test version of Paul's and will most likely switch to that for the official release. I may remove the sound though, as I think it's pretty bad.

Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!

arqbrulo
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Well, in that case

I'll just wait for yours, and I'll use Paul's at home
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plj
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pauls version slow progress

Hi all,
I've been testing and playing a little, so little progress.
Thanks Hans-Joachim for your input (if you're here), I will consider a few of them.
I've already changed the FLTK preferences system to the changes John made to FLTK.
I still have to change the Johns icons (will be in beta6 if that finishes).
I want to implement 1 additional set of features for beta6, and then freeze.
(To constructing own puzzles, by adding removing a cell to the puzzle, to be able to make a puzzle with one solution).

I will reserve cleaning up the UI (order of features) to the release candidate.
I thing bothering me are the key accelerators too many/ but which to keep?

The requested history function is not going to happen for 2.0 from my side. We first need to know what undo means (only undo user set values, or also hints?)

Greetings,
PS there is a "weekly" build version on my website, which has atleast 2 bugfixes, and should be as stable as beta5.

plj
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pauls version next beta released

Version 2.0 beta 6-build 5 2006-november-12

These are the last features I'll add before making the my final 2.0 release.
Users can now create their own unique sodoku puzzle (and save them).
The difficulty (number of cells given) is visible in the menu title for user defined and imported sudoku's. Settings can not be done in a useless order.

Enjoy all, Let me know the bugs Smile
sudoku.p-l-j.org
Paul
PS I'll hope John will package it once it became bugfree.

sniperdgs
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layout

i like the game put it gets a little old w. the same layout.

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