Re: Pre-player for "Gay gordon" in AisleRiot.

[Callum McKenzie <callum physics otago ac nz>]

On Sun, 2005-01-09 at 23:29 -0500, JeffBatHome Clowder-House net wrote:
> I'd like to integrate it into AisleRiot to check out GG games before 
> they  are presented so that (A) the player will *know* in advance 
> that every game presented is winable and (B) can be shown the 
> solution if the player gives up.

Traditionally we haven't distinguished between winnable and unwinnable
games in aisleriot (doing so doesn't even make sense for some games),
but I am open to the suggestion. Especially if I can get the per-game
options code working again (2.11 material) so it can be made optional.

There are some technical problems though:

With (B) there is currently no easy way to show the entire solution
(although we can show single move hints). However, you have said that
you would prefer not to do (B), so I'm probably just confirming that
prejudice.

The more significant problem is that it is written in C. The games for
aisleriot are written in scheme (which is then integrated with C code
for the UI). We can call C code from the scheme code, but for
game-specific code this in inelegant. It would be preferable if it could
be rewritten in scheme. Now, and this is just a wild guess, you probably
don't like that idea.

Since you don't want to put much more time into it, and we don't want to
loose an interesting bit of code, would you be prepared to post it on
bugzilla.gnome.org and possibly games-list too ? I can't guarantee that
once it is in bugzilla anything will get done with it. It will probably
hang around like a zombie until someone ports it to scheme or someone
else decides that extra, game-specific, C code is OK. On the other hand
it does stand some chance of being used.

Otherwise, integrating the code into the game to implement (A) is
trivial and something I will happily do for you.

 - Callum