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Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

chiark.greenend.org.uk

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Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#31

Post by sheiyei »

glimshe wrote: post #19
3036e4 wrote: post #2

I installed that on both my computer and phone after someone mentioned it in some HN comment a few months ago. On my phone it has been the only game I have played in several years that wasn't in an emulator (mostly DOSBox). Also convinced my kids to install it on their phones, hoping that it will distract them somewhat from the apps they otherwise use. Not much success with that. I guess there isn't enough bling. If…

I wonder if they would be happy with modern graphics but no twitchy bling. I mean, 3d shaded and colorful tiles. Kids these days associate spartan graphics with old school/boring gameplay.

A version with better UI for mobile could be super neat.

And I don't mean that it needs to be a Flutter app that launches in 3 business days and eats battery like a horse, just that it didn't look like it's from 2012. (Some of the UI design elements are also frankly confusing)

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#34

Post by fsckboy »

kybernetikos wrote: post #21
MITSardine wrote: post #12

I've had this on my phone for years, it's a great collection of puzzles. I haven't tried them all (games on phones), but it's certainly the best I have. No ads, no useless gamification, but well polished and varied puzzles, and quite a bit of control over the difficulty. My favourite has to be "Keen", it's a sudoku-like where a grid has to be filled with no repeated numbers on either columns or rows, and arbitrarily…

Net can be done with reasoning rather than mindless iteration. You start by locking in end points surrounded by other end points except for one free space. if you have a straight line that can connect two end points then you lock it in the other orientation. If a line is locked next to a T pipe, the back of the t pipe goes against the line. If a corner piece is next to a locked pipe, you know that the side opposite t…

i only play Net (largest size or bigger, wrapping) using the locks; I disconnect the surrounding pipes from the center so nothing is lit up, and then start locking squares based on their surroundings. some of them I can't even solve. I can see the answer, but my head can't contain the logic necessary to lock them down

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#35

Post by fsckboy »

V__ wrote: post #14

The same puzzles can be played here with a more friendly UI: https://medmunds.github.io/puzzles/

not exactly the same, the ux cleanup has dumbed some of them down a bit

I play the original untangle on 600 or higher, that "friendly" UI doesn't allow that

I play the original Dominosa 6-extreme but friendly doesn't offer that either, unless it's set them all to extreme

the Net doesn't not allow custom sizes, and it's also broken the mouse buttons, it only allows rotation in one direction

not going to look further into the vandalism

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#38

Post by fsckboy »

if somebody wants a "C lang/linux level" bug/puzzle to figure out (could be as simple as looking at the source), I just discovered it a couple days ago: if you use a large number to set up a board in untangle, the algo is extremely slow to set the board up, probably an O(N*2) or worse or something. You can see this slowness in the web version, put in a 600 or 2000

the bug: anyway, I was running the C version of the puzzle from cli (didn't want to slow my browser down) and I must have put a typo in for an even bigger number than I intended and the process went away for a long time. I got sick of looking at the little window and discovered that I couldn't kill it even with kill -9. I killed the window with xkill but the process was still chugging away in the background at 99% CPU.

I finally managed to kill it with htop but I have a sense that I didn't really kill it, I think it just finished whatever long ops it was doing.

I didn't test much more, but I did load up a board size 600 to play and confirmed while it was building the board, kill -9 didn't do anything, and after it finished it allowed me to play the game. the kill -9 was swallowed and gone.

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#39

Post by drdec »

fsckboy wrote: post #38

if somebody wants a "C lang/linux level" bug/puzzle to figure out (could be as simple as looking at the source), I just discovered it a couple days ago: if you use a large number to set up a board in untangle, the algo is extremely slow to set the board up, probably an O(N*2) or worse or something. You can see this slowness in the web version, put in a 600 or 2000 the bug: anyway, I was running the C version of the p…

This sounds like an OS or kill bug not a with the program. Sending `kill -9`, aka `kill -KILL` is supposed to terminate the process immediately without giving it the opportunity to catch the signal and respond. (This is why you should start with `kill -TERM` and only resort to `kill -KILL` if that does not work.)

So if the process is not terminated this is an OS or kill issue because the process itself is not given a chance to catch the signal.

Re: Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection

#40

Post by ranger207 »

Simon Tatham also wrote PuTTY, which was for the longest time the best SSH client on Windows (I don't use Windows anymore so I can't say if it still is or not). I can't find the quote now, but I remember him saying that between PuTTY and his puzzle collection, his contribution to human productivity was net zero
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