Release Sgt-Puzzles

[jeffrey]

I did a port of sgt-puzzles. I don't think anyone else ported it yet. I've been missing these games since my N900 went away.

Go to the author's web site for info about the games.

Updated version with launcher here.

This is my first attempt at doing this kind of thing, so beware!

I did my best to make controls usable. Q quits out of games or launcher. Most games work really well with d-pad and buttons. B is primary button and X is secondary. If using stylus, use alt and control buttons to emulate right and middle click. Otherwise, nubs work fine too.

Thanks goes to sebt3 for Yactfeau, which works pretty damn well.

Please post ideas for improvement here.

 

[skeezix]

In HF4 and earlier, there is a limit of (I think it was) 20 apps per pnd; in HF5 its 50. In theory, if you exceed the number it should just cap out, so if you put 50 in there it shoudl still work for HF4, just showing fewer apps.

An alternative it to use a launcher in the pnd so 6you present 1 game, and when run, it presents a menu (say, using zenity or picklelauncher or whatever.)

ie: This can avoid 'serious spam' .. if one pnd file makes 50 subapps, people might just be annoyed at having their menus fill up (course, one can use minimenu to supress the apps going forward, but still.)

jeff

 

[sebt3]

In HF4 and earlier, there is a limit of (I think it was) 20 apps per pnd; in HF5 its 50. In theory, if you exceed the number it should just cap out, so if you put 50 in there it shoudl still work for HF4, just showing fewer apps.

pndnotifyd segfault in that case.... (in HF4)

 

[Esn]

In HF4 and earlier, there is a limit of (I think it was) 20 apps per pnd; in HF5 its 50. In theory, if you exceed the number it should just cap out, so if you put 50 in there it shoudl still work for HF4, just showing fewer apps.

An alternative it to use a launcher in the pnd so 6you present 1 game, and when run, it presents a menu (say, using zenity or picklelauncher or whatever.)

ie: This can avoid 'serious spam' .. if one pnd file makes 50 subapps, people might just be annoyed at having their menus fill up (course, one can use minimenu to supress the apps going forward, but still.)

jeff

I indeed agree that a version with PickleLauncher would be better than dozens of separate icons... that would be really nice...

 

[jeffrey]

I realized this really isn't news, so why did I post it in News Zone? It's really more beta-y or software-y.

In HF4 and earlier, there is a limit of (I think it was) 20 apps per pnd; in HF5 its 50. In theory, if you exceed the number it should just cap out, so if you put 50 in there it shoudl still work for HF4, just showing fewer apps.

pndnotifyd segfault in that case.... (in HF4)

Hmm, I was getting a segfault when trying to pnd_run the big, single pnd. I'm on HF5. And I think it's only 33 or so items. But that's irrelevant for my purposes because of the following:

In HF4 and earlier, there is a limit of (I think it was) 20 apps per pnd; in HF5 its 50. In theory, if you exceed the number it should just cap out, so if you put 50 in there it shoudl still work for HF4, just showing fewer apps.

An alternative it to use a launcher in the pnd so 6you present 1 game, and when run, it presents a menu (say, using zenity or picklelauncher or whatever.)

ie: This can avoid 'serious spam' .. if one pnd file makes 50 subapps, people might just be annoyed at having their menus fill up (course, one can use minimenu to supress the apps going forward, but still.)

jeff

I indeed agree that a version with PickleLauncher would be better than dozens of separate icons... that would be really nice...

PickleLauncher is an awesome idea. I'm totally going to try to do that this weekend. I bet it's more fun than pyGtk.

 

[jeffrey]

I updated the sgt-puzzles package. It's no longer separated into parts. All games are ran via the launcher, so no icon spam. I also threw in a few keyboard shortcuts and have everything running fullscreen at start.

I tried using picklelauncher, but I gave up at some point. The pygtk launcher is nice though, because it shows icons.

New package here.

 

[Esn]

Hey, thanks! That is indeed a nice launcher.

I actually have no idea how to play most of these games, but I spent a while playing Minesweeper...

 

[jeffrey]

Hey, thanks! That is indeed a nice launcher.

I actually have no idea how to play most of these games, but I spent a while playing Minesweeper...

Thanks! I didn't write it from scratch, but it did take lots of tweaking to make things look and feel ok.

I had no idea how to play most of the games when I first tried them out either. I'd love to come up with a solution to this, because I've found that all but a few of them are extremely addictive once you get the hang of them.

There are three parts to this problem:
1) I don't have time to build a slick interface to access instructions quickly and easily. The N900 build has an option in the help menus to load html instructions from within the games, but even that was slow.
2) The existing instructions for each game are too long when you just want to play the damn thing to see if it's fun.
3) Most of the games have a learning curve, instructions or not.

Instructions are in the PND, though, so I'd suggest to just pick a game and struggle with it until it makes sense. Maybe start with lightup or net. Like I said, most of them can be very addictive once you get over that initial barrier.

 

[Loon]

Great Port, many thanks Jeffrey.

Really like the simple interface and clean look of the games on the Pandora screen. There are some real classics here, anyone who likes puzzle games should try Loopy (AKA Slitherlink), one of the true greats.

Found a problem with Pattern, it does not fit on the Pandora screen.

Also a suggestion / request, any chance you could make the shoulder buttons the click modifiers when using the stylus?

 

[jeffrey]

Great Port, many thanks Jeffrey.

Really like the simple interface and clean look of the games on the Pandora screen. There are some real classics here, anyone who likes puzzle games should try Loopy (AKA Slitherlink), one of the true greats.

Found a problem with Pattern, it does not fit on the Pandora screen.

Also a suggestion / request, any chance you could make the shoulder buttons the click modifiers when using the stylus?

Thanks for your feedback!

Ah, I see the same thing with Pattern. For now, a simple solution is to leave fullscreen mode and then return to fullscreen. You may have noticed that the comma key is supposed to do that (according to the game menu), but I haven't figured out how to link menu items (and their shortcut key) to events in GTK. So fall back to GTK's fullscreen shortcut for now: Alt + F11 or in our case Alt + Fn + F11.

I wouldn't have a problem with implementing your request for shoulder button modifiers, except these are GTK apps, and I'm really just connecting modifiers to Alt and Control. So the right shoulder should already be one modifier if you haven't changed the default shoulder layout. But the left shoulder, by default, is Shift, and I really don't want to override shift, because it's essential for moving windows that take over the screen. I could get around this by only having shift as the modifier when in fullscreen mode, but this goes back to the reason I haven't connected comma to fullscreen toggling--because I'm a C/GTK noob