sgt-signpost - Square-connecting puzzle
sgt-signpost [--generate n] [--print wxh [--with-solutions] [--scale n] [--colour]] [game-parameters|game-ID|random-seed]
You have a grid of squares; each square (except the last one) contains an arrow, and some squares also contain numbers. Your job is to connect the squares to form a continuous list of numbers starting at 1 and linked in the direction of the arrows – so the arrow inside the square with the number 1 will point to the square containing the number 2, which will point to the square containing the number 3, etc. Each square can be any distance away from the previous one, as long as it is somewhere in the direction of the arrow.
By convention the first and last numbers are shown; one or more interim numbers may also appear at the beginning.
Credit for this puzzle goes to Janko (http://janko.at/Raetsel/Pfeilpfad/index.htm), who call it ‘Pfeilpfad’ (‘arrow path’).
Signpost was contributed to this collection by James Harvey.
To play Signpost, you connect squares together by dragging from one square to another, indicating that they are adjacent in the sequence. Drag with the left button from a square to its successor, or with the right button from a square to its predecessor.
If you connect together two squares in this way and one of them has a number in it, the appropriate number will appear in the other square. If you connect two non-numbered squares, they will be assigned temporary algebraic labels: on the first occasion, they will be labelled ‘a’ and ‘a+1’, and then ‘b’ and ‘b+1’, and so on. Connecting more squares on to the ends of such a chain will cause them all to be labelled with the same letter.
When you left-click or right-click in a square, the legal squares to connect it to will be shown.
The arrow in each square starts off black, and goes grey once you connect the square to its successor. Also, each square which needs a predecessor has a small dot in the bottom left corner, which vanishes once you link a square to it. So your aim is always to connect a square with a black arrow to a square with a dot.
To remove any links for a particular square (both incoming and outgoing), left-drag it off the grid. To remove a whole chain, right-drag any square in the chain off the grid.
You can also use the cursor keys to move around the grid squares and lines. Pressing the return key when over a square starts a link operation, and pressing the return key again over a square will finish the link, if allowable. Pressing the space bar over a square will show the other squares pointing to it, and allow you to form a backward link, and pressing the space bar again cancels this.
(All the actions described below are also available.)
These parameters are available from the ‘Custom...’ option on the ‘Type’ menu.
These actions are all available from the ‘Game’ menu and via keyboard shortcuts, in addition to any game-specific actions.
(On Mac OS X, to conform with local user interface standards, these actions are situated on the ‘File’ and ‘Edit’ menus instead.)
The Load and Save operations preserve your entire game history (so you can save, reload, and still Undo and Redo things you had done before saving).
Some games (such as Solo) are capable of solving a game ID you have typed in from elsewhere. Other games (such as Rectangles) cannot solve a game ID they didn't invent themself, but when they did invent the game ID they know what the solution is already. Still other games (Pattern) can solve some external game IDs, but only if they aren't too difficult.
The ‘Solve’ command adds the solved state to the end of the undo chain for the puzzle. In other words, if you want to go back to solving it yourself after seeing the answer, you can just press Undo.
There are two ways to save a game specification out of a puzzle and recreate it later, or recreate it in somebody else's copy of the same puzzle.
The ‘Specific’ and ‘Random Seed’ options from the ‘Game’ menu (or the ‘File’ menu, on Mac OS X) each show a piece of text (a ‘game ID’) which is sufficient to reconstruct precisely the same game at a later date.
You can enter either of these pieces of text back into the program (via the same ‘Specific’ or ‘Random Seed’ menu options) at a later point, and it will recreate the same game. You can also use either one as a command line argument (on Windows or Unix); see below for more detail.
The difference between the two forms is that a descriptive game ID is a literal description of the initial state of the game, whereas a random seed is just a piece of arbitrary text which was provided as input to the random number generator used to create the puzzle. This means that:
(Use the ‘About’ menu option to find out the version number of the program. Programs with the same version number running on different platforms should still be random-seed compatible.)
A descriptive game ID starts with a piece of text which encodes the parameters of the current game (such as grid size). Then there is a colon, and after that is the description of the game's initial state. A random seed starts with a similar string of parameters, but then it contains a hash sign followed by arbitrary data.
If you enter a descriptive game ID, the program will not be able to show you the random seed which generated it, since it wasn't generated from a random seed. If you enter a random seed, however, the program will be able to show you the descriptive game ID derived from that random seed.
Note that the game parameter strings are not always identical between the two forms. For some games, there will be parameter data provided with the random seed which is not included in the descriptive game ID. This is because that parameter information is only relevant when generating puzzle grids, and is not important when playing them. Thus, for example, the difficulty level in Solo (sgt-solo(6)) is not mentioned in the descriptive game ID.
These additional parameters are also not set permanently if you type in a game ID. For example, suppose you have Solo set to ‘Advanced’ difficulty level, and then a friend wants your help with a ‘Trivial’ puzzle; so the friend reads out a random seed specifying ‘Trivial’ difficulty, and you type it in. The program will generate you the same ‘Trivial’ grid which your friend was having trouble with, but once you have finished playing it, when you ask for a new game it will automatically go back to the ‘Advanced’ difficulty which it was previously set on.
The ‘Type’ menu, if present, may contain a list of preset game settings. Selecting one of these will start a new random game with the parameters specified.
The ‘Type’ menu may also contain a ‘Custom’ option which allows you to fine-tune game parameters. The parameters available are specific to each game and are described in the following sections.
(This section does not apply to the Mac OS X version.)
The games in this collection deliberately do not ever save information on to the computer they run on: they have no high score tables and no saved preferences. (This is because I expect at least some people to play them at work, and those people will probably appreciate leaving as little evidence as possible!)
However, if you do want to arrange for one of these games to default to a particular set of parameters, you can specify them on the command line.
The easiest way to do this is to set up the parameters you want using the ‘Type’ menu (see above), and then to select ‘Random Seed’ from the ‘Game’ or ‘File’ menu (see above). The text in the ‘Game ID’ box will be composed of two parts, separated by a hash. The first of these parts represents the game parameters (the size of the playing area, for example, and anything else you set using the ‘Type’ menu).
If you run the game with just that parameter text on the command line, it will start up with the settings you specified.
For example: if you run Cube (see sgt-cube(6)), select ‘Octahedron’ from the ‘Type’ menu, and then go to the game ID selection, you will see a string of the form ‘o2x2#338686542711620’. Take only the part before the hash (‘o2x2’), and start Cube with that text on the command line: ‘sgt-cube o2x2’.
If you copy the entire game ID on to the command line, the game will start up in the specific game that was described. This is occasionally a more convenient way to start a particular game ID than by pasting it into the game ID selection box.
(You could also retrieve the encoded game parameters using the ‘Specific’ menu option instead of ‘Random Seed’, but if you do then some options, such as the difficulty level in Solo, will be missing. See above for more details on this.)
(This section only applies to the Unix port.)
In addition to being able to specify game parameters on the command line (see above), there are various other options:
If game parameters are specified on the command-line, they will be used to generate the game IDs; otherwise a default set of parameters will be used.
The most common use of this option is in conjunction with --print, in which case its behaviour is slightly different; see below.
On each page of puzzles, there will be w across and h down. If there are more puzzles than w×h, more than one page will be printed.
If --generate has also been specified, the invented game IDs will be used to generate the printed output. Otherwise, a list of game IDs is expected on standard input (which can be descriptive or random seeds; see above), in the same format produced by --generate.
For example:
sgt-net --generate 12 --print 2x3 7x7w | lpr
will generate two pages of printed Net puzzles (each of which will have a 7×7 wrapping grid), and pipe the output to the lpr command, which on many systems will send them to an actual printer.
There are various other options which affect printing; see below.
If --generate has also been specified, the invented game IDs will be used to generate the printed output. Otherwise, a list of game IDs is expected on standard input (which can be descriptive or random seeds; see above), in the same format produced by --generate.
For example:
sgt-net --generate 12 --save game --save-suffix .sav
will generate twelve Net saved-game files with the names game0.sav to game11.sav.
The following options are only meaningful if --print is also specified:
Full documentation in /usr/share/doc/sgt-puzzles/puzzles.txt.gz.