Re: saves, seeds, and sessions

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Sun, 1 Jan 2006, Callum McKenzie wrote:

> Date: Sun, 01 Jan 2006 12:21:01 +1300
> From: Callum McKenzie <callum spooky-possum org>
> To: madewokherd gmail com
> Cc: games-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: saves, seeds, and sessions
>
> On Sat, 2005-12-31 at 14:16 -0500, Vincent Povirk wrote:
> > I've been thinking about how aisleriot could accomodate game saves
> > (for playing the same game again in different places and/or resuming
> > across sessions), and Alan's recent comment about seeds has gotten me
> > back on this subject, so here's what I think (sorry if I'm repeating
> > myself, I'm not sure what parts of this I might have said earlier):

Save games would be nice, to help with reproducing bugs and if I ever get
lucky and solve some of the tougher games :) but I dont want to sound too
enthusiastic as I'd rather be implementing more game variations more than
anything else. (To do that properly and in the most efficient way possible
I will have no choice but to do a whole lot of refactoring so things can
more easily be reused which I'm not exactly looking forward to either.)

> > The ability to enter seeds could be implemented as an option specific
> > to Freecell, for compatibility with the windows Freecell numbers (and
> > wasn't there some other program with a larger range of seeds that are
> > sort of standard?).

> There are at least two sets of numbers for the Microsoft games. One had
> a 15-bit seed and a later version had a 20-bit (I think) seed. So it
> probably isn't worth supporting. See the Wikipedia page for details.

Pretty Good Solitaire does make a big deal about number compatibility with
Freecell, but then if you've got it flaunt it.

The way I see it there is the basic question of reproducability at least
within the same (debug/verbose) version of Aisleriot.

Exposing the seed information to ordinary users and keeping it compatible
across versions of Aislerito it seem like a seperate more complicated
problem to me but then if someone feels that is worth doing then they
might also consider making it as compatible with Microsoft Freecell as is
reasonably possible.

(I'm sure there is a suitable equivalent latin expression for "He who
writes the code decides")

> > Now, saving and loading undo history is where this gets crazy. That
> > would really only be needed for preserving games across sessions,
> > which isn't necessary at all (but would be nice--so maybe it's just
> > not worth it).

> I would like the program to simply pick up where it left off. Regardless
> of circumstance. Persistence of State is Good (TM).

Persistence of state would be fantastic (although you still need some kind
of a reset switch in case you get stuck in a dead lock in a badly written
game (debugging what I write isn't fun)) and a huge step even if someone
is determined to take it one step further and implement full save and
restore later.  Having said that I do like what Callum has said previously
and there is a certain elegance to gnome-games not having (needing?) to
save to files which does seem a little like overkill to me.  Either way it
is always great to see someone interested in tackling problems and helping
to improve things.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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