Re: AisleRiot: two new games

[Callum McKenzie <callum physics otago ac nz>]

On Sun, 2005-09-04 at 23:06 -0500, Zachary Keene wrote: 
> Perpetual Motion:
> http://www.geocities.com/arcanelore2001/sol/perpetual_motion.scm
> 
>    This is a really stupid game, but it seemed like a good place to 
> start since I've never messed with Scheme anywhere before, much less 
> AisleRiot. All you do is deal four cards at a time, and move any cards 
> with the same rank on top of the leftmost card of that rank. Should you 
> deal four cards of the same rank, double click to discard all four. If 
> you discard the entire deck you win.
I think you will find this to be remarkably similar to the game "First Law".
Don't feel bad about duplicating games, you aren't the first and, as you
say, it's a nice simple game to learn with.

> Gaps:
> http://www.geocities.com/arcanelore2001/sol/gaps.scm
> 
>    Deal the entire deck into four rows of 13 cards, then remove the 
> aces. Any gaps in the first column may be filled in by moving a two 
> there. Any other gap can only be filled with a card having the same suit 
> as the card to the left of the gap but one rank higher. Gaps to the 
> right of kings (or other gaps) cannot be filled. Redeals are 
> accomplished by picking up any cards not in sequence with a two at the 
> far left, shuffling them, then redealing them (leaving one space after 
> each row of sequenced cards.)
I don't think we have this one (although it is similar to maze). There
are however two obvious things missing: a file explaining the rules
(copy the format in one of the .xml files under the help/C directory)
and support for the "droppable" feature that we have introduced in 2.12.
I haven't had too good a look at it yet, but if we can fix the
documentation and the "droppable" issues then I would like to include
it.

The game also seems similar to the game "blue" which used to come as a
demo program with the curses library (probably still does). It did
things slightly differently and I might be able to make some suggestions
once I've played gaps a bit more.

>    Unfortunately one bug I haven't been able to shake out of this is 
> that undo/redo don't seem to correctly save the "rows" vector, which 
> keeps track of which cards aren't in sequence, which can lead to 
> out-of-sequence cards getting stuck if you fiddle with undo. I did use 
> the def-save-var macro, but I'm not sure what else to try.
The def-save-var macro should work. If it doesn't then the bug is in the
macro and not your code. As far as I can tell the only thing unusual is
that you try saving a list - which is an untested case. I'll look into
it.

 - Callum