Re: Maintainership of gnome-games

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 24 May 2006, Vincent Povirk wrote:

> > (I'm still hoping to push Aisleriot to over 100 games but it takes a
> > lot to get in the mood for lisp.)

> Are any of these games you particularly want to play? Or anyone else for
> that matter? I'd be happy to code games if I knew people wanted them.

You wouldn't happen to be using gmail?  Had to manually add those >> since
the reply didn't quote properly.

Take a look at goodsol aka Pretty Good Solitaire.  It contains hundreds of
variations some more interesting than others and there is plenty of room
to add more interesting and fun games to Aisleriot.  I prefer the easier
open games with a bit more skill and less luck.
http://goodsol.com/pgs/games.html

One simple variation is to play a game in reverse, from King to Ace
instead of Ace to King.  This doesn't actually make the game any harder
but if you play one way it can be difficult to switch around and play the
other.  I also quite like some of the games with a pyramid layout.

The games I played most heavily were the classics, but I did enjoy playing
the variations even a few times to keep things entertaining.  If you would
like me to play around with goodsol again and recommend a few of my
favourites (and a few I think would be reasonably easy to implement) I'd
be happy to do so.

There is also quite a bit of generalisation and code consolidation which
might make it easier to create new variations.  A lot of the varations I
(re)created were based on Klondike since it was much cleaner code and
easier to override and reuse.  I would have liked to make a few variations
of Freecell but it was too difficult to disentangle the autoplay code and
generalise things.

The hundreds of games in goodsol are a bit excessive (some of the
varations are barely different) but we could certainly expand Aisleriot
more without things getting silly.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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