Re: PySol...

[Shlomi Fish <shlomif iglu org il>]

Hi all,

in addition to what people said - my 2 cents.

On Saturday 12 Feb 2011 22:50:34 Timothy S. Nelson wrote:
>  	...have you all had a look at PySol?
> 
>  	:)

First of all I should note that I'm just a lurker here, and don't really 
consider myself a GNOME games or GNOME in general contributor, though I'm 
happy to use some Gtk+/GNOME programs and libraries such as GIMP (which I 
contributed some code to it, some of which is still in the git version), 
Inkscape (♥ it, but I'm not a big artist), Pidgin, XChat etc. while still 
using either KDE-4.6.0 with a fallback to LXDE as my desktops. GNOME seems 
impressive and polished and a fine piece of engineering and all, but I just 
don't like to use it and prefer KDE. 

Now, I've been using PySol for many years, being a long time enthusiast of 
Freecell back from when it was the demo Win32 program for Win32s on Windows 
3.11 (don't know if anyone still remembers it) and also eventually having 
written http://fc-solve.berlios.de/ which solves Freecell, and now several 
other variants of Solitaire, and is MIT/X11-licensed FOSS written in mostly 
portable C. 

I don't recall how I learned about PySol, but it was love at first site. It 
had many different card sets, some of which I liked, many features, nice sound 
effects (and somewhat stupid background music), ran on X/Unix, and Windows, 
and was very usable and polished. As opposed to Microsoft Windows FreeCell it 
had drag-and-drop instead of point-and-click which was less ambiguous for 
FreeCell (though now I think it can be configured either way.).

I ended up contacting its original author (Markus Oberhumer - 
http://www.oberhumer.com/ ) about integrating fc-solve into it. While we 
communicated for a while and he made some steps in the direction, eventually, 
Markus abandoned PySol, and only made the sources available and said he 
planned to release PySol 5.x under a non-GPLed licence. However, the demise of 
that caused a flurry of online forks, including UltraSol which ended up 
culminating with PySolFC:

http://pysolfc.sourceforge.net/

PySolFC has greatly expanded the number of games in PySol (which was very 
large) is 100% open-source (formerly GPLv2-or-newer, now GPLv3-or-newer in 
PySolFC v2.0), has introduced a Solitaire generation wizard, and has many 
other improvements. They also added support for fc-solve for most of the 
supported games, which allows the computer to play a deal on its own:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EHQ2bWGeYMg

PySolFC has accumalted some bugs and missing features since v2.0, including 
some that I reported - I don't know what happened to its maintainers, but it's 
still the best one as far as most factors are concerned. Some people I've 
talked with prefer KDE's KPatience for various reasons (like better graphics 
and animations due to the SVG cards), but I still prefer PySolFC.

So you could take a look there to incorporate some code into AisleRiot. 
Naturally, it's not trivial to translate Python code into Scheme, and last 
time I checked the hint system of AisleRiot in an attempt to integrate a 
solver for Freecell, I realised that integrating my solver would require some 
effort of either refactoring or writing an ugly hack.

For more information see:

* http://cards.wikia.com/wiki/PySol

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PySol

I would not recommend anyone to use the older PySol - PySolFC is superior in 
almost every way.

Hope that helps and sorry for the lenght of this E-mail,

	Shlomi Fish

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Shlomi Fish       http://www.shlomifish.org/
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