Re: Aisleriot, Klondike menu and other ideas

[callum physics otago ac nz]

>
>
> I guess I'm hoping some of these options like King Only and Autoplay would
> be common enough that they might be shown in all applications but greyed
> out where unavailable (not implemented yet or inappropriate for the game).
> It is another way of looking at the same problem I guess but maybe in my
> desire for consistency I am trying to squeeze a square peg into a round
> hole.
>
Ah, I see what you are getting at. It isn't a square-peg/round-hole thing
at all - in fact it is pretty much what is recommended by the HIG for
common, but not universal, options. At the moment the options are rare, so
I don't see it being of much value and architecturally it is easier to do
it the way we have. The current way is also a lot more flexible - we can
have whatever options we want.

> I mean I'd like the chance for example to implement a game I saw called
> Pyramid which has virtually the same layout as used in Elevator, and is
> even closer to Thirteen (except for the fancy double sided waste) and
> maybe then add a variation with called King Tut which has a three card
> deal (makes it harder and allows us to say we have yet another game
> variation included in Aisleriot).
As Vincent has pointed out in his email, modification of games is
straight-forward, you can just include one and alter the bits that you
want to alter. This is in fact what I want to do with all the spider
variations. The down-side of this method is that the scheme code used is,
at times, absolutely hideous and very hard to decipher, let alone alter to
your needs.

> When I first considered the idea of implementing a new game I spent quite
> a while just going through the games trying to identify if games didn't
> already exist and it is a little overwhelming.
This is why I want to categorise them in the select game dialog. A little
screenshot would also make it easier to identify potential duplicates
since the layouts are often distincitve: but this is not trivial to
implement (the screen-shots have to be pre-generated/cached since we don't
want to load 70 games on the fly just to screen-shot them).

 - Callum