Re: [Aisleriot] Freecell game selection, Redmond style

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Fri, 16 Feb 2007, Bastien-F Jonathan wrote:

> Date: Fri, 16 Feb 2007 18:42:08 -0500
> From: Bastien-F Jonathan <J Bastien-F cgodin qc ca>
> To: games-list gnome org
> Subject: [Aisleriot] Freecell game selection, Redmond style
>
> Being intrigued by how MS Freecell generated its games, I have looked
> into this topic and managed to modify Aisleriot to generate the same set
> of games. No reverse engineering was required as the specifications are
> publicly available (use the google my friend).

This is a good thing but I should mention that the ability to start games
based on a specific seed was previously removed from Gnome Games.  It was
a rather a fiddly option and there were some calls in bugzilla for seeds
which actually matched the pattern of Microsoft Freecell as you have now
implemented.  If you can put a nice unobtrustive user interface on this
feature it should be good.  For what it is worth Pretty Good Solitaire
(Goodsol) sticks to the same pattern, as much as is possible.

Being able to start specific games with easily predicted out comes (like a
completely unshuffled deck) might serve as useful test cases to smoke test
Aisleriot.

In terms of implementation I hope that your work can be accepted to just
change the standard deck completely rather than needing to use a different
(make-redmond-deck) function, as I see little reason to keep the old
system around.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan
http://alanhorkan.livejournal.com