Gnome-sudoku - features, menus and memory usage

["Thomas Andersen" <phomes gmail com>]

After gnome-sudokus inclusion in gnome-games I have played it a lot,
fixed a few bugs, and followed the bugtracker somewhat closely. These
are my observations so far:

- lots of unfixed crasher bugs
- many inconsistencies with other gnome-games
- some features are imho not needed
- the menu is cluttered
- it's memory hungry

The following are my suggestions for solving these issues.

1) Save/resume
The save/resume feature is the main offender regarding bugreports
(File corruption, full disks, confusion caused by the feature). I've
found that I never use this feature. A sudoku is something you solve
here and now, just like solitaire. You need to have the numbers fresh
in you memory.
Saving was also once specifically stated as unwanted in gnome-games. I
Don't know the current opinion on this thou.
Seeing as this is the cause of many crasher bugs and not really an
essential feature for the game I suggest to simply remove it.

2) Highscores
Gnome-sudoku uses it's own highscore system instead of the one
supplied by gnome-games. One reason is that you can replay a sudoku
solved earlier. More than saving just the score it also saves
statistics like: fills used, hints, date, unfillable squares, etc. I
don't really think this is useful information later.
I suggest to port to gnome-games highscore code using the categories
Easy, Medium, Hard, Very Hard and scoring based on time.

3) Fill / Fill all
Currently you can have the computer fill out a specific (or all)
numbers on the board. This completely ruins the gameplay imho and
allows cheating in the highscore list. I suggest to replace both
"Fill" and "Fill all" with "Give up" that would end the game and show
you the solved puzzle.

4) Puzzle generator / storing puzzles
Currently puzzles are stored in a file and loaded into memory at
startup. This leads to high memory use and bugs regarding corrupted
files. A puzzle generator is provided in the game but the puzzle must
be saved to allow replay/save/resume. Without those features it would
be possible to generate needed puzzles on the fly when a new game is
started.

5) The "New" dialog
Picking a difficulty on a slider is, well, difficult. Why not do like
the rest of the games and have a menu item "Difficulty" (easy, medium,
hard, very hard). Pressing "New" would immediately start a new game of
the selected difficulty.

6) "Puzzle Statistics" dialog
Some of the provided information is already present in the status
bar(level# and difficulty). Is the rest really of any interest? Could
it be moved in a nice way the status bar as well?

7) Add a preferences dialog
Highlight, always show hint, tracker enable/disable, "warn about
unfillable squares" would fit nicely in a preferences dialog.

Removing features is never popular but I believe in cutting to the
bone and only keeping the essential features. Doing these things would
make gnome-sudoku look and behave a lot more like the rest of the
games in gnome-games.

- Thomas Andersen