search

chrisboyle / sgtpuzzles

Android port of Simon Tatham's Puzzles
https://chris.boyle.name/puzzles
Other
595 stars 168 forks source link

Map: mark initial regions #224

Open chrisboyle opened 9 years ago

chrisboyle commented 9 years ago

Dirmansyah Lubis asks:

For Map, can we have a mark for the areas that we can not change the colours?

chrisboyle commented 9 years ago

From Simon Tatham:

I agree it would be nice, but I've never come up with any sensible way to implement it. A distinguished (e.g. thicker) outline around the region would be the kind of obvious approach, but once the region borders another coloured region, how do you make it easy to tell at a glance which of the two sides of that border the distinguishment applies to? Darkening the region a bit is another option, but could easily be hard to see, and also makes reconfiguring the colours twice as painful. Stippling the whole region with some sort of special marker in every grid cell is another possibility, but every time I try it out in my mind's eye it seems to me that it would look unbelievably ugly.

chrisboyle commented 9 years ago

My reply:

How about a black filled square where the label is, with any label text becoming white? (A hollow square is another option, but I'm already worried about Android users' ability to see 1-pixel lines.)

Complications include ensuring it doesn't break the region's bounds when the label is near a diagonal line, and (if filled) sizing it so you can still see enough colour in a 1x1 square region.

chrisboyle commented 8 years ago

Keith Dickinson writes:

You should highlight somehow sections that are part of the games condition and which cannot be changed.

Often had to undo nearly to the start only to find the section I wanted to change couldn't be.

AkiTensai commented 8 years ago

Here are some concepts for marking initial regions. The base is a screen grab from Windows. I purposely kept the resolution low to try and account for smaller resolution displays. Images 1, 2, 7 and 8 I think have the most merit for being easy to see both what is locked, and what an existing cell is. I was surprised that a centered icon in a 1x1 cell made seeing that cell's color difficult.

chrisboyle commented 8 years ago

Thanks, those are great. I think the coloured locks (5, 6) are too distracting, and I would think 7 would have been best except that it breaks the both of the modes that draw text in a region (number to identify it or letter for colour). So it could be a box around the text in that case, though it is tricky to size.

With that in mind maybe 8 is the one to go for; I think it's clear, not distracting, doesn't need to change appearance when you turn labels on, and it's probably not too hard to implement.

(I see Simon's argument about 2 not really conveying which side of a border is locked, and I think 1 fails the same way as 5, too many colours.)

goyalyashpal commented 2 years ago

i would vote for hatching - which thankfully is included in @AkiTensai concepts. There it's partial hatching (which's better than full hatch), and named as "diagonals" , numbered as {3, 8}. Of those two, i'd vote for number 3 (i.e. the non-thick one).

it comes intuitively to me from physics class - the base/floor is fixed and the "fixed" property is shown with hatching.