| Shades |
Burko
Kwon-Tom Fan
Puzzles: 89 | Posted - 2006.04.04 17:17:03
Further to the "Hold Shift for X" topic, I was wondering whether an option might become available in the future, that would allow the gamer to shade the squares, either on the outside or inside of the loop. My vision is impaired due to a bad accident and I believe it would help greatly as I have difficulty following the lines (it ends up looking like an Escher drawing!). Anyway, your comments on this would be appreciated. |
drnull
Kwon-Tom Obsessive
Puzzles: 1053
Best Total: 23m 25s | Posted - 2006.04.04 18:09:04
This has been talked about here before, and discussion kinda of dropped off when the question of "What new information does it give you" was posed. Obviously, for you, it's very important. I was wondering, though, if you had a few starter rules for us that explains what is gained from shading instead of drawing lines? Besides the 0 adjacent to 4 of same color, 1 adjacent to 3 of same color, etc basic rules. |
foilman
Kwon-Tom Admin
Puzzles: 3406
Best Total: 24m 6s | Posted - 2006.04.05 16:00:26
The big problem from my point of view is actually implementing the shading. It might look like the puzzle is made of lots of squares, but in reality each square is formed from lots of little rectangles, each of which would have to be shaded!! I did have a look at how easy it would be some time ago, but decided it was a bit tricky with the puzzle done the way it is... |
AmyR
Kwon-Tom Obsessive
Puzzles: 911
Best Total: 30m 18s | Posted - 2006.04.10 13:48:32
I for one agree with the shading... though it doesn't give you any new information, it allows you to see the information you have faster, and to link up sides of the board with ease. Though I'm not a programer, I believe that earlier Erick came up with an idea for implementing colouring... Erick, care to comment? |
Erick
Kwon-Tom Obsessive
Puzzles: 1302
Best Total: 31m 39s | Posted - 2006.04.10 21:34:20
Yes, I thought of a simple way to add basic colouring to the Kwon-Tom board, and somewhere in my files I have a working prototype of a converted Kwon-Tom page. If you just give up on trying to shade the entire square and only try to adjust the background colour of the inner (12x12 or so) square, then it becomes very easy. You then just need to change the GIFs for the digits to have transparent backgrounds so that the colour shows through. I can't remember where the event handler is loaded but it wasn't hard to get that working either. Judging by how smoothly you've been able to add other features to the web site, foilman, I expect you'll have no trouble.
I will try to upload my prototype somewhere and let people give it a try and see what they think (but I think AmyR and Burko should have the first crack  . One of the things that could be improved is to make the shading feature toggleable to prevent accidental unwanted colouring. I think it could really help on the larger puzzles, where the slowdown effect procrastinator hypothesized becomes negligible (no one's forcing you to colour all the squares, just the key ones). |
foilman
Kwon-Tom Admin
Puzzles: 3406
Best Total: 24m 6s | Posted - 2006.04.11 07:52:11
Just doing the background of the numbers is easy enough, but I think it'd look clearer if I could change the colour of the entire square. Still, I've not given up on the idea, so I might get something working... |
foilman
Kwon-Tom Admin
Puzzles: 3406
Best Total: 24m 6s | Posted - 2006.04.11 17:46:42
Ok, I've added shading as an option on puzzles now. If you use the "shading" button to turn it on, you'll then be able to click in the centre of the squares to shade them - red on the first click, yellow on the second click, then back to white again.
Like placing lines and crosses, you can also hold down shift to change the shade in reverse (yellow on first click, red on second click). Shading should be stored along with your lines and crosses when you save your position, and the "fix position" functionality should also work as expected. Kwon-Tom Wrongs don't have shading, as they're supposed to be more difficult anyway.
I've tried using the shading to help me out on the puzzles, but I obviously have no idea how it helps, so it just ended up looking pretty rather than being of any assistance! But if you find it useful, it's there...
Hopefully this hasn't caused any problems with anything... but I wouldn't be surprised if something else had broken...
Last edited by foilman - 2006.04.11 17:48:16 |
AmyR
Kwon-Tom Obsessive
Puzzles: 911
Best Total: 30m 18s | Posted - 2006.04.11 21:55:36
I like the colouring. the first took me a while, and I'm unused to the pink, but I think this wil help in connecting sides for the big puzzles... |
