[Kde-games-devel] Adventures with Palapeli

[Ian Wadham]

I have been having some interesting experiences with Palapeli in
the last week or two.  All good except for one not so good.  More
on that later.

A week ago I gave an update of my talk on KDE Development to the
local Linux Users' Group (called Linux Users of Victoria or LUV for
short, http://luv.asn.au ).  At the end I gave a demo of the latest
Palapeli build and it went over very well.  There was a lot of interest
in Palapeli and lots of questions and suggestions, but almost all
along lines we have already been discussing here, however it showed
that the game is on the right track.

The only open question was what to do when the viewport is smaller
than the table size and you drag a piece to the edge of the viewport.
Should the viewport start moving with the piece?  It sounds as though
it would be a good feature, since you are probably heading towards
the partly-finished puzzle, but I am not so sure.  Maybe it is better as
is.  The piece stops at the edge of the viewport.

After rebuilding my 1000-piece puzzle of Rothenburg ob der Tauber,
I spent a few evenings solving it again.  It was much easier to handle
the pieces this time, due to changes Stefan has already made:-

  - Right mouse-button to move the viewport, left button to move pieces,
  - Mouse-wheel zoom centered on the piece under the mouse pointer,
  - Different mouse-pointer,
  - Easier selection of pieces, even at their tiniest size.

It is a lot quicker and easier now to find and pick up small pieces.

The only problem I found is that, as the solution progresses, the
fitting of pieces into the finished part of the puzzle becomes slower
and slower.  For the last hundred or two pieces it was taking a few
seconds per piece for the animation to complete.  What happens is
that you place the piece in position and Palapeli seems to realize
very quickly that it is a correct fit, but then all pieces, including those
in the part already solved, are frozen for a few seconds and then
the piece suddenly clicks into place.  If the piece is not a correct fit,
there is no freezing and you can move it away immediately.

I think this may be a QGV "hiccup", but silly me forgot to save the puzzle
when about 800 pieces were in place.  I had a look at the Palapeli engine
code and it seems to do the right thing, e.g. moving the less "massive" of the
two parts to be fitted together and keeping the other one still.  If you like,
I can re-solve the 1000-piece puzzle and save it before it is complete, as
a test case, but it takes a few evenings to get that far ... :-(

All the best, Ian W.