Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Nomv 1.1 "Agilulfo"

Time is ripe for yet another Nomignolov version. From now on, all new versions will have a code-name, rather than a version number. You can download Nomv 1.1 "Agilulfo" here.

What's new in this version? I focused on the player experience.

Threads. Now Minimax runs on a separate thread. This mean that you can do a number of things while Nomv is thinking: you can stop it, tell it to hurry up (with the button with the exclamation mark), browse the list of moves, move the window, etc.

Lines on board. From the Lua script it's now possible to draw colorful lines on the board. This may seems a trivial feature, but just try to play Hex oblivious of what sides you should connect... I made use of simple line in Wari and Diffusion to divide the board in half.

Highlighted cells. Via the Lua code, it's now possible to "highlight" some cells. This feature comes in handy when you want to make clear what was the last click. Try compare the game 3verse with/without this feature. Cells can be de/re-highlighted thanks to the button with the nice highlighter mark.

Puzzles. I made the promise I would not add a new game until someone else* does. So I added 3 puzzles, just for fun. Nomv solves the problem of 8 queens in a board and a magic square of order 4. I made it solve the problem of the knight's tour using Warnsdorf's heuristic. It needs near one hour to solve the puzzle, but if you keep clicking the button with the exclamation mark it's faster :-)

*the pdf manual is included. Lua is a beautiful language. This is not a subliminal footnote...