Good news Tetzle fans: your long wait for updates is finally over! I have been working on a variety of enhancements to the game during the past several days, and all of them are now available in the git repository. Some of them break backwards compatibility with the current release, so the next version of Tetzle will be 2.0 instead of 1.3.

The biggest visual change is the replacement of the beveled edges (which, to be honest, I never liked that much) with drop shadows! I originally wanted to use drop shadows, but at the time I couldn’t think of a fast way to add them. It turns out that a simple trick is all I needed: render blurry squares under the outside tiles of a piece. 🙂

A related change is the fact that the tiles are now always 32 pixels wide and 32 pixels tall; never larger and never smaller. This means that if you want to see a larger version of the image, play with more pieces! Smaller boards now use less video RAM, so they should play better on slow computers.

I have also improved the algorithm that creates the puzzles themselves. The current version of Tetzle uses a hack of building puzzles out of groups of 8x8 tiles that make interlocking pieces. The new and improved version of the code creates a puzzle of fully interlocking pieces. It even respects aspect ratios to a much better degree than before. In fact, if the aspect ratio of the image is 4x3 it will always use the entire image, otherwise it will use almost the entire image.

Worry not Tetzle fans, these are not the only changes coming; stay tuned for more updates! In the meantime, here is a screenshot of the development version of Tetzle:

I made a release of Tetzle yesterday that fixes two long-standing bugs: firstly, the mouse cursor should no longer drift off of pieces while you are moving them; secondly, the tiles should look correct no matter how zoomed the board is. Both bugs stem from the same issue: the width of the tiles don’t evenly divide, and floating point errors were cropping in.

For instance, if you have a tile that is 64 pixels wide and you want to show it as 6 pixels wide, you multiply it by 0.09375. But if the tile is 65 pixels wide, you need to multiply it by a number that can’t be properly represented as a float. And so most of the tiles will show up as 6 pixels, but some of them will be 7 and stretch the tile border to match. My quick solution was to scale the tiles on the CPU and round the values to integers before passing them to OpenGL. For the 1.3 release I plan to use a faster solution, but I wanted to release a stop-gap bugfix before then.

For anyone who doesn’t read the frontpage of gottcode.org, I released Tetzle 1.2 today with several new and improved features:

• Real collision detection added by Ulrik Mikaelsson
• Complete keyboard shortcuts added by Frank Tetzel
• Toggling borders added by Frank Tetzel
• Added zooming and panning to overview
• Added retrieving pieces
• Added option to use entire image

And then as soon as I uploaded it, my wife went and discovered a bug that has been there from the very beginning! I will be making a bugfix release shortly. 🙂

I’ve replaced Tetzle’s add image dialog with the dialog from FocusWriter. When I wrote Tetzle’s dialog, I had not investigated the Model/View classes enough, and I had come to the erroneous conclusion that there was no easy way to replace QDirModel’s icons. The solution is so obvious that I can’t believe I didn’t think of it: derive a new model from QDirModel! Following that logic, I wrote a fresh version of the add image dialog for FocusWriter. The code is cleaner because of the Model/View split, and faster because I use QImageReader to scale the images (I’m not sure I can get it noticeably faster using Qt, any suggestions are most welcome).

This updating all started with an add image dialog in my recipe manager. I had originally used Tetzle’s dialog, but I replaced it with the improved dialog from FocusWriter. I fixed some bugs, and made a minor enhancement (double clicking an image selects it and closes the dialog). Once I had done that, I couldn’t leave Tetzle with an inferior dialog, so I had to update its dialog. Of course, I made changes to the dialog to make it work in Tetzle, so I had to copy my changes back to FocusWriter.

Now I’ve got three copies of the exact same code in three different projects, and that’s the path to madness and bugs. I’m trying to find a simple solution to share the code. I could go the traditional C++ route and make a library, but that seems a bit overkill for a single dialog. I’m also considering creating a separate git project for the dialog, and using it as a git submodule in my other projects. My hesitation about that is wherever I place my image dialog repository is the “master”. I like the fact that every git repository is equal in authority, and having all git repositories of a project point to the same repository for a submodule rubs me the wrong way. I’m sure I’ll think of something.

While testing things yesterday, I discovered that none of my projects install the executables when compiled from source. Oops. I don’t usually try to install them, so I’m not surprised I missed it. I guess nobody else does either, otherwise I expect I would’ve heard about this already.

I am going to be making releases of Gottet, NovProg2, and Tetzle today. I am also planning on making a release of CuteMaze, but that is being delayed while I work out the last few details of porting it to Qtopia4—thanks go to Alessandro Briosi for porting CuteMaze and Gottet to Qtopia4.