Re: Aisleriot: Any way to automatically restart game upon layout affecting option change?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Fri, 28 Oct 2005, Zachary Keene wrote:

> Date: Fri, 28 Oct 2005 16:30:37 -0500
> From: Zachary Keene <zjkeene bellsouth net>
> To: games-list gnome org
> Subject: Aisleriot: Any way to automatically restart game upon layout
>     affecting option change?
>
>    This was brought up in passing in a previous bug report about
> mid-game option changes
> (http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=309212), but this particular
> case was never really addressed.
>
>    To see what I'm on about, fire up Klondike and before moving
> anything, toggle the three-card deal option. Then try to play the
> already dealt game. While it will still play correctly, the waste slot
> will still adhere to the original setting (showing one card if
> deal-three was unchecked originally, or vice versa.)

The way I remember playing Klondike you started with the 3 card deal and
later switched to one card deal if you got stuck.  Maybe that was just
cheating to keep the game fun and if you think of it that way allowing
options to be changed mid-game isn't so bad and maybe not something we
should be trying to prevent users from doing.  (I'm also thinking of games
which might include a King Only option which I'd turn off if it was too
difficult and killing the fun of the game).

Another way of looking at it would be to present Klondike and Klondike 3
as different games but I'm fairly sure Callum said he didn't want to do it
that way.

>    Admittedly in Klondike this is just a minor cosmetic issue, and only
> for one game since it'll fix itself upon starting a new game. But if one
> were to add a hypothetical "Include Aces" option to Gaps, it would have
> to add (or remove) an extra column of slots and redeal. But I'm not sure
> how to go about doing that.

In this case I suppose a whole seperate game would be required but it
seems seperate games require a lot of seperate code, at least that is the
impression I got from Bakers Game and Freecell which could in theory share
a whole lot of code.
Initially I wanted to copy the same compact layout from Freecell to Bakers
Game but after a thinking about it for a while I considere the other
features Freecell has adn thought it might nearly be easier to modify a
copy of the Freecell code until it looked like Bakers Game.  I am hoping
our resident experts will tell us there is a way to reuse code in
different games.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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