[Kde-games-devel] How do you play jigsaw puzzles

[Matthew Woehlke]

Arturo Silva wrote:
> Wow!  I'm speechless, now THAT was a review.  @v@
> Mine is a fly on a car windwhield by comparison... ^^;

I have perhaps an advantage... I don't do jigsaws very often, but I've 
certainly done them in my time, and I am pretty hard-core when I do. 
Certainly I am an experienced veteran of the 1000-piece genre, and so I 
know exactly what I am looking for in a virtual version.

(And I have another lengthy post that will be arriving shortly ;-).)

> Well clearly you know your stuff, as it never occurred to me that
> piece rotation could be a feature -- heck, for even more gruesome
> difficulty, one could even go as far as randomly "flipping" some of
> the pieces to their cardboard bottom, so the user has to flip them
> back into place to see what they are (just like in real life).

Sure, you *could* do that, but IMO that's just saddistic. You're not 
adding challenge at that point, just wasted effort...

...Almost.

There is actually one sense in which I could see doing that... double 
sided puzzles :-). Either different pictures, or (even more annoying) 
the same picture. But that's a long-term feature.

> That, and a lot of other interesting suggestions you made, sound like
> they're along the lines of professional jigsaw [puzzling?, lol ^^' ],
> and a bit out of my league.

I don't think there is such a thing as "professional" jigsaw puzzle 
working... but yes, if there was, I could probably compete, at least at 
an amateur to intermediate level.

> But the background observations are interesting especially since I
> didn't particular mind the default ones, but I also love high-contrast
> textures.  So perhaps a texture or two for people who do need
> something a bit softer could be in order. ^^

Except for the default, I like the background textures. It's just that 
you don't want the background to distract from the pieces. Ideally you 
want a background that contrasts strongly with /all/ the pieces, and 
also has limited texture. You still /want/ some texture because it looks 
better :-), but not much.

I wouldn't "replace" any of the textures (except maybe the default), 
just tone them down a bit. Even better might be leave them as is but 
with a 'contrast' slider to satisfy both of us. For the built-ins, do 
some image processing to dynamically "soften" them.

Actually another idea would be to turn them into something that can be 
applied by image processing onto any color. Basically break them into an 
overlay channel, hue shift channel, and remove the base color.

Maybe I'll even look into doing this myself.

> I will be experimenting with one that's fairly soft itself -- when
> finished, I'll ship it over to you and tell me what you think.  Then I
> can create a few other using similar styles.  ^__^

That sounds awesome :-). Now... we need to teach you enough code to make 
slicers also, I bet you would have some cool ideas there.

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
So, an astrophysicist, a quantum physicist, and an astrologer walk into 
a bar...