MoonShadow/PuzzleSyntax

List of puzzles people have written, in rough order of difficulty (click to play):

..to be ranked:

Puzzle: DragonDrop
Puzzle: AlexChurchill/Puzzle5
Puzzle: MoonShadow/PuzzleFamily (you can only solve one at a time, you'll have a block with two letters left at the end of the one on the right)

To play: Drag labelled shapes over coloured boxes; when a shape is positioned such that the same letter is always over the same colour, the letters grow to show that you can let go to get rid of the coloured blocks underneath the shaded bits; coloured blocks above empty space will fall down; object is to get rid of all coloured blocks.

: - should these be rewritten to be more understandable? - MoonShadow

The [HTML file] is designed to be very easy to copy to your own webspace. Alternatively, just define your own puzzles on the wiki using the syntax below and links like the one at the top of this page.

Definition for Puzzle: MoonShadow/PuzzleSyntax follows. puzzle: and templates: must be at the start of their lines. The single space before each row of numbers is important. All rows in a shape must be the same length. Use "." to miss out a block entirely.

puzzle:

 0123
 2331
 0121

templates:

 .0
 0.

 01
 01

 1.
 .0

 01
 21

Comments

What do you mean, no interest at all? I'm interested, and I like the puzzle; I sat and thought about it for a minute and then solved it on my first try. Nice JavaScript, though. If a Wiki syntax appears you can be sure I'll play with that! And it ought to be fairly simple to modify the puzzle so that it generates blocks of shading which in some order will fit the randomly generated blocks of colour. But I've just been busy in the, um, 14 hours since you put it up. --AlexChurchill

Um... in between the last edit of this page and now, the puzzle's stopped working for me. The page has been changed to add a link to this Wiki page, and now I can't drag the things around. --ChessyPig

Odd. Before you edited it, I couldn't move the things around (although I could drag and drop, they just didn't appear anywhere in between). Now I can. --CH'

Chess - what browser/OS are you using? Is it any better now I've got rid of the background images and the framerate capping? --MoonShadow

Today it decided that the first time it loaded the page, the things would move around fine. Subsequant loads of that page and the other puzzle pages, it just refused to respond to me dragging the mouse in their vicinity. I'm using Firefox under Debian (the version currently in the 'unstable' distribution).

Have reduced the animation framerate, which will hopefully make dragging more responsive under Mozilla / Firefox. Have tested with Debian mozilla/unstable and Debian FireFox/unstable, appears to work here. I'd be very grateful if you confirm it has fixed the problems for you when you get a chance. Am considering making the framerate cap a per-browser setting since it makes the movement very jerky in MSIE. - MoonShadow

: Works now. Thanks :) --ChessyPig

Ahem. The second . in a row doesn't get turned into a -1. At a guess, a RegExp somewhere needs a g adding. --AlexChurchill

: Fixed! Thanks ^_^ - MoonShadow

Two more bug reports. (1) On AlexChurchill/Puzzle, try placing the rightmost template in the middle at the bottom. The blue block which should fall two levels only falls one. (2) When a colour becomes completely eliminated, it seems the remaining templates can no longer be moved...? (Not sure that's the actual condition for when this occurs, but it happened at that point when running through the correct solution to AlexChurchill/Puzzle so there's your reproduction steps: the data are correct and solvable now ;) )--AC

(1) now fixed. Am trying to reproduce (2), which involves me solving the puzzle - might have to wait 'till lunchtime ^^; ..have removed remove-self-from-linked-list code which creates potential race conditions since JavaScript has no semaphores and no general way to implement them (I'd need a sleep() or equivalent) but mouse events and timeouts are preemptive - could you confirm if (2) still happens for you? I cannot reproduce it in test cases, but have not solved the puzzle yet so can't say it's gone. - MoonShadow

It's gone. I was just able to play my puzzle through to completion. (It'd be nice to have some kind of display saying "Puzzle solved" or "Congratulations" when it's solved: I can see some random visitors thinking they've got things wrong when they eliminate all blocks and nothing happens.) --AC

: Implemented. - MoonShadow

Wah, I can't get this (or Alex's one) to work at all! I click the puzzle link and get a completely blank white browser page. --Rachael (Mac OS X, IE 5.2 for Mac)

Bleh - no way can I reproduce that - no macs around here :( It's probably dying in the browser-specific stuff - assuming JavaScript is turned on at all, that is. Is there an exclamation mark you can click on in the bottom left of the screen that gives you an error message? - MoonShadow

: No. But it's OK - it seems to work on Safari. --Rachael

I get that too - on IE5 on a Mac running 9.x, and on the same Mac with Netscape Communicator 4.75 (bleagh) - SunKitten

Can you bring up the javascript console in Netscape (type javascript: into the URL bar and press enter) and see if it says anything relevant? - MoonShadow

Did you mean that? I just get the results of a net search... - SunKitten

[odd] - "..to use it, type "javascript:" (without the quotes)..". Oh, well - maybe Netscape 4 on a mac is different or something ^^; - MoonShadow

: That's exactly what I did. Macs are evil and Netscape an abomination anyway. I'll try the puzzles when I get home :) - SunKitten (8'28" to go...)

I'm variously getting Buffer Overflow (line 180) and Out of Memory (line 139) errors. IE 6.02 SP1 running on Windows XP Pro. --CH
New bug report: Using Firefox, on AlexChurchill/Puzzle2, move the "A" block onto the blue tiles where it fits, then move the "e" block onto the red blocks where it fits. The falling down doesn't animate, and I seem to end up with two blue blocks on top of each other (in the z-plane!). In IE6 (W2K), doing the same thing also gives me error 180: Stack overflow. --M-A

Code updated - please check if these have gone- thanks ^^ - MoonShadow, who's wondering about some sort of versioning system in case he ever needs to revert any of this..

The FireFox one is gone. :) --M-A

: That process still gives me Out of Memory at line 139. --CH

Is it possible to speed up the block-falling animation? They fall at less than one block-height per second, which feels especially slow on a puzzle like Alex's second one where there's a long distance for them to fall. --Rachael, being picky

: Have now increased speed to 2.5 pixels per frame; game currently runs at around 30 frames a second if the browser is fast enough, block height is 30, so blocks should fall quite quickly. If someone tells me a good cross-browser way of obtaining the current time in milliseconds I can try and make the framerate self-adjusting. - MoonShadow

Should we move the instructions and master list of puzzles to DragonDrop? - MoonShadow

: If you're okay with that, it sounds good to me. --AC

..have done some performance optimisation; should hopefully fix the last of the Gecko-based browser (Mozilla, Firefox etc) problems. Could someone with MSIE verify I've not broken it for MSIE? Ta.. - MoonShadow

: Verified in IE6.0 and FireFox 1.0 (on WinXP). --AC

If you drag two templates over each other, it is impossible to seperate them. --Vitenka

: Fixed. - MoonShadow

There are no instructions on the puzzle page, so I'm left somewhat clueless as to which colour I'm actually upposed to overlap. Other than that, it seems to work. --Vitenka

You can use any template on any combination of colours, as long as there's a one-to-one mapping between letters in the template and colours you overlap. So an A in a template could be blue, red, or any other colour: but if it's blue then every other A in that template must be blue and no Bs can be. Play around with Puzzle: AlexChurchill/Puzzle6 and see where the templates turn bold. --AC

Am considering changing the set of template symbols to something like the following:

◊
♠
♣
♥
♦
∴
•
Θ
O
X
+

..are there any browsers in the wild which do not support them and/or on which two or more look the same? (browsers on which the game doesn't run anyway don't count :) ) - MoonShadow

Looks good on IE6 and FireFox on WinXP. Not the most useful test case, but no objections here :) --AC

: Character 1-6 and 8 have the default 'character does not exist in this font' representation. This will vary depending upon which font the user is using. This is a bad idea. I'll offer up little graphical icons again? --Vitenka

Number 6 is the default rectangle on IE 6 on WinXP at work. Mind you, none of the others are so it's not a problem, but I don't know if it's intentional. --CH

: I orginally started with a set of little graphical icons: , and so on which would be tiled by the browser to create shading; unfortunately, MSIE reloads an element's background image every time the element is moved, i.e. at 30fps, killing the webserver. I had hoped that the fact that all these characters correspond to [well-defined HTML entities] would mean that modern browsers would generally try to support them despite user-selected fonts; but no biscuit. Looks like it's just ASCII letters then :) - MoonShadow

Well, you could always use + * @ # ~ | = etc, if you want to escape letters... --AC

: Judging by people's reactions to RogueLikes, I think that unless a set of ten such symbols is *very* well chosen, letters are less offputting :( I'll have a think, though - perhaps something like X, O, +, =, #, *, ., ~.. - MoonShadow

CategoryPuzzle