[Kde-games-devel] Statusbar messages in KPatience

[Karl Ove Hufthammer]

Parker Coates:

> The trouble here is that it takes time to determine if a particular
> game state is winnable. If we just show "Calculating" while the solver
> is thinking, people feel the status bar is too jumpy. So one might
> propose that we just display the old state until the winnability of
> the new state is known, but unfortunately if the user made several
> quick moves, he might be fooled into thinking that the moves were good
> and the game was still winnable, when in fact the solver was just
> trying to catch up.

Would it be possible to have a type of intelligent ‘pre-fetching’, so that 
when the user lifts a card the game tries to solve the game for all (usually 
there’s just a few) possible places he can put it. This should lead to a 
more immediate result when finally placing the card.

Also, I have noticed that the solver sometimes is very dumb. For instance, I 
have experienced the following situation: I have a pile that’s completely 
moveable (i.e., all the cards are in the right order) and an empty pile. The 
game says it’s winnable. I move the entire stack over to the empty pile 
(thus creating a new empty pile, and effectively doing absolutely nothing). 
The solver times out. If I move it back again, the game is winnable, and if 
I move it back to the empty pile after that, the solver once again times 
out.

Obviously, there should be no difference, and there should be a shortcut in 
the solver that notices that nothing changes if you just rearrange the 
placement of piles.

I do have a saved game that demonstrates this if anybody is interested.

-- 
Karl Ove Hufthammer