Puzzle interface improvements

[robx]

This is to collect some obvious improvements to existing puzzle types.

• It would be great to be able to easily "shade" the wall in Nanro. Perhaps by shading numbered cells and placing the numbers automatically, or by providing a fully shaded variant puzzle. ✅ (partially done)
• Similarly, bag/corral/cave would benefit from a shading input. ✅
• Fillomino number entry is also awkward, maybe something like what croco-puzzle does?
• Auto-shading of completed clues for Yajilin. ✅

[edderiofer]

• Allow, for example, Stostone to convert-to-image the position where all the pieces have fallen down.

• Allow customization of all colours, including background colour of puzzle, border/text colour of puzzle, input colour (actual), input colour (auxiliary).

• Allow right-click to add crosses in certain loop puzzles that don't already have them (e.g. Yajilin). ✅

[edderiofer]

Meandering Numbers: Allow for drawing lines from one cell to another as auxiliary marks. Also allow for inputting small numbers in the corners (like in Rooms of Factors or Minarism or Skyscrapers). ✅ (partially done)

[robx]

Meandering Numbers: Allow for drawing lines from one cell to another as auxiliary marks.

Good idea.

Also allow for inputting small numbers in the corners (like in Rooms of Factors or Minarism or Skyscrapers).

I think this already works?

[robx]

Herugolf: some way of building lines from the hole back, e.g. auxiliary marks (and perhaps dragging auxiliary marks automatically from a hole)

[robx]

ooh, suggestion: adding gray Xs around dots with two segments would be a nice QoL feature for loop puzzles (like you did with borders for fillomino)

[robx]

This is completely different from how all other puzz.link input works, but when I'm solving spiral galaxies what I really want is the ability to click-drag from a circle, and see where my cursor is rotated 180°.

[edderiofer]

Similarly to Nanro, Sukoro would also benefit from a shading input.

[robx]

Someone's suggesting that, like how we have different colours of lines for loop genres, that we have different colours of shading for shading puzzles for connectivity.

[robx]

Add grey numbers to Sukoro, Nanro, and View based on auxiliary marks, and have said grey numbers be marked when checking the solution.

[robx]

1 - mark edges that can't be traversed like in herugolf: http://puu.sh/Dr6I6/53635ca35d.png
2 - mark cells that can't contain a circle (see this puzzle as an example http://puzsq.sakura.ne.jp/main/puzzle_play.php?pid=208)
suggestion: internal clues in skyscrapers (will likely break url scheme somehow so that needs to be taken into account)
internal clues in (other puzzles of that kind as well)
what I would like is black squares for region clued puzzles like star battle and lits

[edderiofer]

Slalom: "Show gate num" button should also calculate the gate numbers for gates that have been passed through and whose numbers can be directly deduced from the other gates passed through.

[edderiofer]

Moon or Sun: Relax the rules to allow for puzzles with empty rooms (i.e. count an empty room as both "all moons passed" and "all suns passed"). Also, in such puzzles, make sure the solution checking still works with regards to sun/moon parity.

EDIT: The above isn't quite what I want, actually. How about adding an option to "allow not passing through any symbols in a room", and fix up the solution checking with regards to parity here?

[edderiofer]

Auto-add borders in Sashigane and Shikaku based on auxiliary marks.

[edderiofer]

Tentaisho: Auto-colour completed regions.

[edderiofer]

Easy as ABC: Inputting an X or O auxiliary mark on a square should remove corner inputs on that square; similarly, pressing BACKSPACE on a square should also remove its corner inputs.

[boboquack]

kin-kon-kan regions could automatically be marked green when one mirror is placed (like norinori), and should probably have separate blank cell input option too

[boboquack]

Yinyang could have a dividing line option similar to fillomino.

[robx]

I feel the cursor display could be improved, perhaps by using a brighter color or offsetting it a bit from grid

[edderiofer]

• Auto-shading of completed Shakashaka, Akari, Amibo, Roma, and Toichika clues (among other genres).
• Disable the right-click menu when the "Complete!" dialogue box is open, or auto-check only when all cells in certain genres are filled (e.g. Nurikabe, Nurimaze, Toichika) ✅

[robx]

cross marks / dots for heyawake, to mark when one of two cells must be shaded

[robx]

yagit: drawing aux lines is a pain (you typically want to draw a whole list of parallel aux line fragments)

ideas:

1. replace aux lines fully by x-marks (pekes), which could be dragged (at the expense of less of a visual indication of area connectedness)
2. keep aux lines visually, but enter them like x-marks (which might be confusing because you're draggin the other way)

[edderiofer]

yagit: drawing aux lines is a pain (you typically want to draw a whole list of parallel aux line fragments)

ideas:

1. replace aux lines fully by x-marks (pekes), which could be dragged (at the expense of less of a visual indication of area connectedness)
2. keep aux lines visually, but enter them like x-marks (which might be confusing because you're draggin the other way)

3. When drawing a single aux line, automatically draw all parallel aux lines up to the next dot.

[robx]

3. When drawing a single aux line, automatically draw all parallel aux lines up to the next dot.

I don't think it should properly draw them all, but an autocmp setting to do this could be nice. I.e., draw the extra parallel aux lines in gray. Or even do this from a completed dot.

I've implemented 2. for now (on right button only).

[jeffreybardon]

Here are all of the minor genre improvements I can think of at the moment:
Shakashaka: Some sort of marking for when you know a triangle must exist in a cell, but not its orientation.
Hakoiri: Some sort of marking (similar to Nanro) for when you know a shape must exist in a cell, but not which shape.
Roma (and other non-number but still object types): the ability to place candidate values in the corners of cells
Shimaguni (and other types where the size of a clump of cells matters): the ability to place numbers into the grid to indicate the size of a clump of cells. This probably shouldn't be part of "auto" but the functionality would definitely be nice- there are a couple of Shimaguni puzzles out there where tracking unknown numbers through chains is a necessary step.

[robx]

Doppelblock would benefit from showing a number range like easy as abc.

[robx]

For directed loop/path types (icebarn, nagereru) it would be great to have a direction-indicator at the ends of path segments when the orientation is known.

[phenomist]

slitherlink: different behavior for left/right mouse button (similar to other shading genres, where one cycles forward and the other cycles back) when in bgcolor 1/2 mode

[edderiofer]

Moon or Sun: Make moon/sun marks have consistent names. (I think this is as simple as renaming "Marks of moon" and "Marks of sun" in the puzzle editor, but I might be wrong on this.)

[edderiofer]

Nurikabe (and possibly other genres): Allow for inputting question marks by typing / or ?.

[robx]

@psml-imeji notes (#207):

In the puzz.link it can only place 4 marks on each cell, and can only be placed on the corners, which other apps can place any marks you want and will placed based on the number.
Like this site: https://www.sudokuwiki.org/sudoku.htm

[robx]

@tckm notes (#191):

Currently, it is almost impossible for me to tell which cells and regions are shaded in Nondango.
Could the contrast of the shaded cells be increased?

@robx replies:

There's even two subtly different shades of light blue here, where the manually entered one seems a bit darker than the autocomplete-shading. (LITS and/or Nori-nori used to have the same difference -- there it got a lot clearer by moving to dots for the manually marked cells, but we can't really do that here.)

Part of the issue seems to be that the circles only leave so little space for the shading... Perhaps there's a better approach to be found here, such as: also shading the inside of white circles; only shading the inside of white circles; having a two-level thing as in Nori-nori after all where we mark the definitely-white-circles with a dot or something.

[robx]

@tckmn notes (#188):

In most genres where O's and X's can be used to mark the presence or lack of something in a grid cell, the z and x keys respectively can be used to put them there. For some reason in easyasabc it's 1 and 2 instead, which I find a little counterintuitive. Could the z/x method also be supported for this genre?

[edderiofer]

Tapa-Like Loop: Make clue borders thick and un-X-able.

[robx]

A LITS-like autocomplete mode for shimagumi which would mark cells unshaded that aren't reachable from shaded cells in that area. (This might be too involved. I find solving shimagumi to be very visually confusing -- maybe something else could be done instead to keep the rooms more visible, such as a lighter shading, wider margin.)

[x-sheep]

Ayeheya, Bonsan, Heyabon: When shading or coloring, also fill in the opposite square in the same region. This should be opt-in.

[edderiofer]

From the Discord:

• Allow auxiliary shading of Nonogram clues when solving (to keep track of which clues are satisfied)

• Automatically mark the 8 cells around a star in Star Battle as not being stars.

• Add the option to change the aesthetics of Star Battle (e.g. having "not a star" be a shaded cell or an X instead), just like how Yajilin has the option to change aesthetics.

[Danaroth83]

Kin-kon-kan: the interface should be able to mark solved clues in some way. A right click would work awesome for that as that is currently not assigned for cells outside the grid! It could also be marked automatically, similar to what yajilin does.