Re: Aisleriot: suggestions from a Windows Spider fan

[Vincent Povirk <madewokherd+8cd9 gmail com>]

Thanks for the feedback. Sadly, I don't think we can do much with it.

On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 1:43 PM, Fernando <ferkiwi gmail com> wrote:
> However, in Aisleriot you get a popup dialog that shows just some text
> with only
> 1 possible movement (I don't know if it calculares the best movement or not,
> but it doesnt show you any other choices when you request hint multiple times)
> and you have to click "accept" to close the popup and then search for the
> cards. He didn't liked that at all, he thought that it was annoying,
> slow and not
> so useful.

I worry that if we use the status bar for messages, people will not
see the message and wonder why the hint button isn't working. Or it
may not fit in the appropriate space. The fact that we use the
statusbar to explain the "empty slots must be filled" rule makes me
unhappy.

Perhaps a firefox-style temporary message ribbon that dismisses
automatically would be good, but I'm not the one who would have to
code that.

We would like to have animations go to with the hints. We have a bug
for that. I expect to go through and modify individual games to make
this possible, for unrelated reasons, but again I'm not the one who
would have to code the feature into the main program.

Multiple hints would be difficult from a coding perspective (I'll have
to think about how we can design for that) and possibly a UI
perspective.

> * Identifying initial states *
> Another thing that Windows Spider has is the ability for saving the
> initial status of the decks and the card ordering. It codifies the
> ordering in a sequence of numbers, so each game is given a number code
> and called, for example, "game 24552". This way, if you remember the
> number you can play with the same card ordering. You can even give the
> number to some friend so that he can play the same game as you and see
> if he can solve it.

We have a bug for that too, but it hasn't made progress recently.

> * The Game Saving *
> Along with this is the option to save your game for restoring it
> later. If you like how the game is going but you have to stop for some
> reason, then you can resume the game later.

Personally, I'd like to see Aisleriot open to the state in which you
closed it, so that if you were in the middle of a game, quit, and
restarted aisleriot, you'd start where you left off.

We have a (stagnating) bug for that as well.

Vincent Povirk