| Author | Message | ||
| Greg Schmidt (Gschmidt2)
New member Username: Gschmidt2 Post Number: 37 Registered: 1-2007 |
In the description of this game, Karl wrote: [Technical information: Usually fixed (non-random) board setups in Zillions games are manually encoded. This is a very time consuming process, especially for large and complex setups. Here in Pum-Pum Large we demonstrate a different, much faster technique: The board setups for the many challenges (variants) have all been stored as zsg files (stored game files), which normally are only used for the display of solutions. Note that there are no 'variants' in this game encoded at all! It is possible to include solutions in this scheme, but these solutions have to be called via a special 'solution' button on the challenge screen. Feel free to use this 'shorthand' tool for your own games. The downside is that the challenges have to be selected from a special selection screen.] Sudoku Solver does this. I wouldn't be surprised if there are other games that use it as well. There is no requirement that the zsg contain all the moves required to reach a "solution" or end of game condition so it can be viewed as a general vehicle for playing back any set of (partial or otherwise) move sequences. In general, I think I prefer a built-in variant, but if the number of variant's is large, then the .zsg approach starts looking attractive. One idea I had was to create a little program that takes a .zsg file and spits out the variant code containing the corresponding board setup declaration. I could see it working in "batch mode" where you would give it a list of .zsg's. I don't think this would be a difficult program to write. Any takers?  -- Greg P.S. I think the whole area of code generators for .zrf and .zsg files is an untapped realm that could yield many fruitful possibilites. |