Unclear meaning of the number in the top bar

[mccartney]

I fail to understand what the number 42 is supposed to mean here.

I can only guess the stars indicate difficulty.

[meikpiep]

Will be clickable in the future, with a popup/tooltip to explain the value and the star ranking.

Its indeed the difficulty value: For each cage, the number of different combinations of cell numbers which fulfill the result of the cage where multiplicated. The result is the natural logarithm. This is by far not optimal as it does not match the difficulty of every game, but works kind of okay.

[mccartney]

Thanks for the explanation.

BTW, not sure if intended, but I always see 4 (empty) stars next to the number. Even in a 2x2 game.

[meikpiep]

Just released version 0.17.0 https://github.com/meikpiep/gauguin/releases/tag/v0.17.0, containing a popup if tapping on the info of the top bar explaining the difficulty bounds. I will leave this issue open and supply a link or direct explanation how the difficulty rating gets calculated.

Nevertheless, the difficulties of 2x2 grids are not yet included as they would be 0.0 regardless of the difficulty level which is some kind of weird to display.

[mccartney]

Thank you!

And these four star symbols? What are they? It seems like they hard-coded, I always see exactly 4 of them.

[meikpiep]

The stars symbolize the difficulty level of a game: from 0 stars (very easy) to 4 stars (very hard). The new popup will show these info to hopefully make it more clear.

To classify a game, I run 1.000 games of the given variant to calculate their difficulty and to obtain the difficulty levels. There is a rather large set of variants where this process is very slow or even may not end as not every variant gets proper solvable games.

Long story short: I you are playing a variant without calculated difficulty levels, the old versions showed the static 'very easy' ranking as a fall back. The new version just shows the difficulty value in such a case.

Dealing with a variant with known levels looks like this:

(Its in German, but I think you get the point.)

This popup should clarify the difficulty levels, thought a proper in-game explanation is still missing.

Feedback much appreciated.

[mccartney]

Thank you. Alles klar. I will try it out in practice with various game variants.

[meikpiep]

FYI: 0.17.0 is available via F-Droid.

[meikpiep]

I'm closed this issue. If anything is still unclear about the top bar, feel free to submit a new issue.