Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection - Untangle.

[ledow]

Hopefully the first of many games from this excellent puzzle collection. Untangle the dots so that none of the lines cross.

This was a port of the SVN version r7703 for which I (Ledow) had to write an entire SDL frontend. It now works on the GP2X, as do many of the games, but I need people to test with this one! F-200 users, USB mouse users especially because it *could* work on the touchscreen but I don't know.

Even so, I have another 10 or so games approaching release for GP2X, waiting for feedback on this.

A simple game to start you off.

Note that this port isn't affiliated with Simon Tatham himself, I'm just using his puzzle code. So credit for puzzle and framework to him, credits to SDL conversion and GP2X port to me! Enjoy!

You can download it here: http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,25,2526

 

[peelie]

hi

thanks for this

on the F100 the joystick is very unresponsive

 

[ledow]

on the F100 the joystick is very unresponsive

I know, it will be! It's only a test at the moment. Thanks for trying it out, though. It will be fixed, hopefully quite soon, and I'm aware it's a problem. The fix is quite trivial.

If you're interested in technical details, it only responds to pure UP, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT joystick presses, there's no de-bouncing, no auto-repeat and a fixed movement step (5 pixels). So you'll find yourself constantly tapping the joystick/buttons. It's easily fixed when I next do a big programming run but at the moment I'm resting after fighting with ARM cross-compilation.

 

[DARKGATE]

GREAT!!!!!
I hope of see alls the games converted for the GP2X !!!!

Thank you!!!

 

[ledow]

Since posting the game, I have made already progress on quite a lot of things.

I already have about six or seven more games from the collection working perfectly, ready for release.
I have improved the cursor control but it's still not how I want it. It's now much more usable though. Any F-200 users tried out that version yet?
All games compile perfectly but one or two show bugs that they didn't on a Linux PC - I'm in the middle of fixing those.
Two games need numeric input which I haven't started on yet but shouldn't be too hard.

I'm in the middle of fixing the little things, commenting code, zipping it all up and releasing a big batch of files. That's gonna take a while, so in the meantime I'm also working on keeping up a steady stream of updates of individual games that already work. The first few will probably be released one at a time like "untangle" but after a couple, I'll just release the whole batch and gradually fix the more awkward ones in updates of the entire collection. The beauty of having such a nice framework to work from means that every improvement improves ALL games and in the future, new games added to the collection get automatically ported with zero effort.

I've also been approached by someone who wants to port them to PSP using my SDL version, so it looks like I wouldn't be the only one working on the code once I've got the source code to the point it can be released.

 

[TrevorBradley]

I'll be happy to test this on the F200 with touchscreen support once you get it working...

 

[Manjuu]

I tried it out on my F-200. Nice little game.

I had to figure out the controls, as they were not mentioned anywhere.

The touchscreen doesn't work, but it's still playable using the D-pad. As mentioned before, the controls do need work. Also, when a dot is dragged to right edge of the playing field, garbage would be left.

Is there any indicators that you solved the puzzle, aside from a brief blanking/flashing of the screen?

Centering the puzzle, and applying some sort of border would make it look nicer.

Good work, and keep at it. Looking forward to an updated version and the rest of the games.

 

[ledow]

I tried it out on my F-200. Nice little game.

Thanks for trying it out, I've been waiting for F-200 feedback especially in case I did something stupid and it didn't work on them.

I had to figure out the controls, as they were not mentioned anywhere.

Well, they were quite simple and I did them to the comments/description on the archive download a few hours after uploading, but it was only a test program. Each successive puzzle I release should get better and better and have better instructions.

The touchscreen doesn't work, but it's still playable using the D-pad. As mentioned before, the controls do need work.

That's a shame that the touchscreen doesn't work but I can't do much about that at the moment, because I can't debug that. The games have the code in them to handle SDL mouse devices so making it touchpad-compatible should be a breeze. I believe that USB mice should work as they are - I use the same base code to run them on a Linux PC and all mice work via SDL on that.

Also, when a dot is dragged to right edge of the playing field, garbage would be left.

That's a known problem that should be trivial to fix - that's because it simply isn't checking that you've gone off the edge of the puzzle. That's a two-line check and totally down to me being a lazy coder.

Is there any indicators that you solved the puzzle, aside from a brief blanking/flashing of the screen?

There aren't in this version but there is a set of functions for a "statusbar" that displays things like logical errors, start, finish, etc. of puzzles in English that I hope can be easily converted to display on the screen. At the moment, the flash is the only indication but that should be easy to fix.

Centering the puzzle, and applying some sort of border would make it look nicer.

Centering is a bit more tricky as everything blits directly to the drawn surface from the functions - I'd have to adjust a lot of code to center the screen each time. However, there are options to grow/shrink the puzzles which I've left in for now and it should be possible in the future to run puzzles that fill the whole width of the screen. At the moment, you can even run enormous puzzles (if you edit one number in the code) and it'll shrink it down to 320x240... everything shrinks properly because it's based on drawing of shapes, not pixels. The fonts get impossible to read quite quickly but the non-font games can be played down to ridiculous sizes. However, it takes far too long to generate some puzzles.

Good work, and keep at it. Looking forward to an updated version and the rest of the games.

I'll probably update "untangle" along with my next release. At the moment, the base code has a couple of problems fixed already and I just need to type "make" to get it to build all the games, so it's no problem to update "untangle" and release a new game from the update base code simultaneously.

Thanks for the feedback!