Re: I'm soliciting requests for aisleriot games

["Vincent Povirk" <madewokherd+d41d gmail com>]

On 2/18/07, Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie> wrote:
> There were some game types I was interested in, such as Reverse versions
> of existing games.  If you have been playing a game and trying to get the
> cards out in order from ace to king, to then go and play a version of
> the game where you need to play backwards and get the cards out in
> order from king to ace can be quite confusing and seem more difficult even
> though it is only equally difficult.  Could take quite a while to do
> something like that with a few of the more popular games.
This seems like a waste of time to me, since reversing the card order
creates an identical game or, if it's done for all games, a confusing
and not very useful new option.
> I'll certianly give it more thought.  (Dig out my old copy of goodsol.)
There are all sorts of lists of solitaire games I could be using, but
I don't want to do that. I only want to bother with a game if I know
someone would play it. I'm also discouraged by the inconsistent and
often confusing/ambiguous rules documentation I find on the Internet
and would rather have a human around to answer questions about the
rules.
> Also if you were interested anything you can do that would make it easier
> to add Autoplay to a game would be great. When I wrote my few new games I
> did make an effort to add more abstractions for things like the tableau
> and the foundations so that a game could more easily be reused to create
> another game with a different deck size.  Even more abstractions and
> cleanup would be need to allow for autoplay, and with that kind of
> abstraction you could slim down many of the existing games and make it so
> much easeir to write new variations.
Hmm, we do need to make autoplay more consistent (and documented? is
it documented anywhere? maybe it needs to be consistent before it can
be documented). Maybe I'll work on that and/or file a bug about it.

As I understand it most games use the convention where a double click
means a move to foundation, so autoplay should be possible by
simulating double clicks on the piles with cards that could be played
there. I think there's a helper function for that. The only cleanup I
can think of that would help on most games would be to replace
hard-coded lists of slots with names like "tableau" and "foundation".

I'd rather not add any new abstractions until I know someone will use
them (such as me adding a game). I'm just too terrible at predicting
ahead of time what sort of thing will be useful.

--
Vincent Povirk