My new puzzle test and markup engine (5^TH generation!) now supports quite a few types, and I’m going to be supporting more types later.

Probably the coolest thing about my current setup is that I can mix and match rulesets, layouts and renderer types at will, or if I want to, even at random. This means the paint metaphor actually supports a whole bunch of different puzzle types now. (Hacking them into the interface has been double-painul.)

The current types I support:

• Normal sudoku at any N×M size (includes 4×4 Super Sudoku and 5×5 Sudoku the Giant, plus much larger)
• Sudoku-X at any N×M size
• Killer Sudoku at any N² size
• Killer Sudoku-X at any N² size
• Nonomino Sudoku (AKA Irregular Sudoku, Geometry Number Place or Kikagaku Nanpure) at any N² size
• LCDoku Sudoku / Digital Magic Number sudoku puzzles at any N×M size
• Disjoint Set Sudoku / Non-Connected Nonomino Sudoku at any N² size
• Hyperdoku Sudoku / 4D Sudoku
• Hyperdoku-X Sudoku / 4D Sudoku X

• TwoDoku Sudoku / Sensei / Gattai-2 sudoku puzzles at any N² size
• DoubleDoku Sudoku / Gattai Near-2 sudoku puzzles at any N² size
• Triple X Sudoku / Gattai Half-Near-3 sudoku puzzles at any N² odd-n size
• Ring Sudoku / Gattai Near-4 sudoku puzzles at any N² size
• Samurai Sudoku / Gattai-5 sudoku puzzles at any N² size
• Flower Sudoku / Gattai Near-5 sudoku puzzles at any N² even-N size
• Wing X Sudoku / Gattai Half-Near-5 sudoku puzzles at any N² odd-N size
• Butterfly Sudoku / Gattai Far-5 sudoku puzzles at any N² even-N size
• Shogun Sudoku / Harakiri Sudoku / Gattai-11 sudoku puzzles at any N² size
• Daimyo Sudoku / Sumo Sudoku / Gattai-13 sudoku puzzles at any N² size
• Shaolin Sudoku / Gattai-25 sudoku puzzles at any N² size

• Arbitrary Non-2d Surfaces
• Non-square Grid / Alternate Tesselation shapes

• Numeric grid renderer
• AlphaDoku grid renderer
• Alphanumeric grid renderer
• Wordoku Sudoku / Scramblets grid renderer
• Color patch grid renderer

Things I intend to support soon, or things whose current implementations are unsatisfactory:

• Binary Background Sudoku (If the predicate is evenness, these are called Even/Odd sudoku or Guusuu Kisuu Nanpure; if the predicate is region count and there are no more than one given for each digit, these are called Magic Sudoku)
• Magic Sudoku (Warning: PDF)
• GT/LT Sudoku
  
• DominoDoku / Domino Sudoku
  
• Disallowed Number Sudoku / Hitotsu Chigai Nanpure
• Color Killer Sudoku – my own variant, similar in several ways to Disallowed Number but with non-summing killer range boxes; very, very difficult
• Color Killer GT-X Sudoku (really)
• Clueless Sudoku

• Template pre-form markup

• Image patch grid renderer
• CodeDoku Sudoku grid renderer
• Binary Background grid renderer
• Disjoint Set and Hyperdoku grid renderer
• Sequential Sudoku Renderer

Things I’m not yet sure whether I’ll support:

• Metadoku
• ChessDoku
• Latin Squares

Anyway, if you see something I’m missing, please let me know. I am fibbing a little bit in this list: killer works fine in my old renderer, but I haven’t brought it over to the new one yet. I’m still using the old renderer to make those; there are serious problems with the way I handle killer in the old layout engine, as the interface just paints it as a layer on top of a layer. However, since the new renderer doesn’t actually know anything about layout (the user inputs it) it can’t handle Killer adjacency the way it should. I’ll fix it, but I haven’t yet, and I’m not entirely sure how just yet. Getting GT/LT puzzles working was a bear and a half.

On the bright side, I’m back down to about two minutes to paint up a new Sudoku puzzle with five rulesets on at the same time; I can paint them faster than people using pure computer generators do just to make them. Yay for understanding machine cache behavior. DLX is a great algorithm, if you don’t give a damn about cache performance, but for the same reason judy trees are superior to normal trees despite being inoptimal due to hardware concerns, my negascout ply sudoku test driver massively outperforms any of the programs I’ve seen so far with five rulesets on, compared to their one.

In other words: pwnt.

So I’ve been writing a small app to eat my puzzles and spit out a preformatted book. That way I can just make puzzles, test them, dump them in a directory and have them automatically rolled into a book for me.

The basic version of the app has actually been working for quite a while; it was almost the first thing I did when I decided to make sudoku books. However, there are a lot of things that needed to be done, which had not yet been done; I’ve been working on them, and now the book generator is very nearly done. The books may in fact be up tonight or tomorrow.

The things that were already working:

• Accept page layout engines
• Place puzzles within page layouts
• Draw puzzles as normal or solution (removes the background color from givens and changes line thicknesses)
• Select puzzle type from book script
• Select page type from book script
• Set page layout from book script
• Accept page shape metrics from book script
• Draw normal sudokus (arbitrary size)
• Draw puzzle titles
• Best-fit puzzles to page
• The cover art

Things I got done yesterday:

• The Instructions Page
• The Copyright/ISBN Page
• The Title Page (artist)
• The Chapter Title Pages (artist)
• A 6×10 puzzle layout for compact solutions pages (still readable, surprisingly, and you can find things by title just fine)
• The actual book layout

Things that are newly working as of today:

• Placeholder page support, so that gutters will be correct even for pages where generation isn’t expected
• Support for various placeholder types with slightly different rendering behaviors
• Support for arbitrary text rendering within placeholder pages
• Automatic solution page generation including walking the existing puzzle stack without changing the puzzle draw pointer
• Support for passing alternating page states around
• The required trailing blank page (huhu yeah that was real hard)

Things that I need to finish in order to have a usable result:

• Automatic gutter support. The page metrics are in place for this; I just need to do a little boring API update stuff to get a page handler to be able to tell whether it’s on an even or odd page. I’m gonna try to get this done tonight.
• Chapter title page generation. I have the template done, but I need to work out some stuff about fonts and placement, then go through the process of converting my artist’s design into procedural behavior. This is going to suck, and I will probably skip this and do it manually on the first few books.
• Suppress page numbers on certain pages (title pages, special pages, solution pages.) I’m gonna try to get this done tonight too.
• Reset page number to 1 for first chapter title page, to skip numbering for front matter (copyright page, etc.) Another thing for tonight.
• Support for multiple puzzle stacks, to remove title and endcap puzzles from the primary puzzle stack, to unify solution pages (this is going to suck badly, and I’m certainly putting this off for later books. My god am I putting this off.
• The Other Products Page. Not entirely sure about this one.
• The Site Promo Page. Not entirely sure about this one either.

Anyway, not long yet. Closer and closer.

So, the cover art prototype is in, for the sudoku book series I’m going to have up and on Cafe Press and Lulu, and maybe even in stores, Real Soon Now ™.

Sometimes it’s hard to remember what life was like before I had a reliable artist. Luckily, at least for a while, I don’t have to remember what that was like. For now, it’s enough for me to know that my cover art is most of the way ready, and that that means the books themselves aren’t far behind. I’ve actually had the puzzles themselves ready for several weeks now, but things were badly timed; at any rate, now is better than never, one supposes.

The cover art prototypes for the new book series can be found here. Commentary is welcomed. The spine and tail material are next, then the product page inserts, and finally we should be good to go.

My sudoku store is already up and running, if you’d like to buy merchandise. The books should be up probably within a week, though no promises. Each book should be 300 puzzles, and I’m leaning towards a price neighborhood of about eight bucks a pop. Eight books’ worth of puzzles are already made – four each Sudoku and Sudoku-X, one for easy, medium, difficult and expert level. Next will be some mixed difficulty books, then compilation books with 1500 puzzles. After that, it’ll be time to start making Killer and Gattai-5 (Samurai Sudoku) puzzles.

And, once that’s over with, it’ll be time to make my giant sudoku poster puzzles. Wait’ll you see them – the software support is already done.

There will be more soon, which is to say “when I get around to it.” But, for now I’ve put up one thing, and that thing you shall buy. This is the fifth store joining my panoply of pointless shopping options, alongside my sudoku store, my anti-Bush store, my go store and my programmers’ bookstore.

Buy, my monkeys, buy!

The problem? PDF. The solution? FPDF, PHP, and the force of anger incarnate.

So, I’ve got the puzzle drafting application up and running in a non-painful way, which took no small (read: Herculean) effort and a pinch or two of CSS Ninja Magic. This means I have a relatively pleasant interface in which to hand-create my sudoku puzzles, instead of this pencil and paper bullcrap slowing me down.

Of course, I like my puzzles (being an egotist that’s a given, but let’s ignore that for now.) As a result, I want to share them with others, preferably for money. The logical choice is a place like Cafe Press or Lulu, but they both want books kind of already laid out, so they can just print them and be done with them.

This all sounds perfectly reasonable, until that horrible death knell comes gonging around the dark recesses of your animal hindbrain, into places your soul is afraid to go, where ancestral memory remembers stuff like dinosaurs and being hunted by eagles and effective presidents and other scary relics of an antiquarian past.

The name of that knell? PDF.

So, in order to provide content for these places, one has to give up a standardized-ish format which is designed for print. Luckily, postscript doesn’t really much exist in modern tools, so god forbid I be able to go in with a programming language for my layout application, guns a-blazing. (Interject here with fond memories of my father showing me Display PostScript on his NeXTslab as a programming language in which to write actual applications.) At first my plan was to get one of those PDF printer targets like Primo going, then to use Word automation from Delphi to do the actual printing. That worked well enough for my blank boards, but it got hella cumbersome when I wanted to do non-trivial boards, so I started to look for alternatives.

Then I found FPDF, which in many ways rocks. It’s a PHP class from which you derive classes which implement printing behaviors. You override methods to handle when page breaks might occur (for example, to set up column driven layout, keep some variable off in a corner somewhere, and when FPDF says “time to page break,” you override by saying “No, just move ten inches to the left and back up to the top.”) The methods to get things done are relatively straightforward, measured in user-chosen units relative to the edges of the current page, and so on. It’s relatively pleasant, despite a few seriously annoying bugs.

Granted, it seems either that FPDF only implements a subset of PDF, or that PDF is entirely simpler than I had previously believed. Really, you just have a few graphics primitives with simple color and thickness controls for line and fill, the ability to place form elements and the ability to place images. That’s pretty much it, and that surprised me.

But, you know what? That’s all I need for Sudoku. My generation tool now knows how to crap out a homebrew sudoku format (including for all those purty variants I’ve learned about,) and I have a PHP script that turns many instances of that format straight into CafePress ready books. (Actually, with some tweaking, I intend to extend this script to handle other puzzle types, too. I’ve got a genuinely funktronic layout model going on, which I’m getting fairly into.)

So, some standard Sudoku books are on the Very Near Horizon™, as soon as I teach my generator how to put together title pages and instructions pages (there’s a lot of automatic scaling and placement going on, so that’s not as trivial as it sounds) and to place some niceties in the books. You’ll need to buy one to find out what those nicities are, natch.

Right now, my book generator only knows how to draw standard and off-rectangle sudoku (3×3, 4×4, 2×5, et cetera.) Soon, irregular backgrounds. Afterwards, disjoint backgrounds. Promptly following? ”The World”.

I have some very neat things I intend to reveal on that store in the near future. Be sure to go buy things. Right now.

While I was out, I found myself wishing I had my printer, to make Sudoku grids. Thanks to my CafePress store, it won’t be an issue again.

Well, it’s really not ”’that”’ big a deal, but still.

I’ve been really addicted to Sudoku (aka Su Doku, Nanpure or Number Place) lately. Hand-making puzzles is calming to me, in a sort of mantra fashion, and since a puzzle takes about 20 minutes to build, it’s a good way to shed brain-fry. I had made a quick PDF to print to make boards, to save myself loads of sloppy grid drawing, but as I was on the road over the last several days, I didn’t have my printer.

Being a tightwad, I didn’t want to pay Kinko’s umpty million dollars a page to make games, so I toughed it out on a blank pad. That said, as I was on a plane back, it sort of hit me: I have a fulfillment line already set up for Sudoku at Cafe Press. Next time, I can just have one mailed to my hotel, at a reasonable price.

So, I made the book, and I’ve put it up at Cafe Press for the rest of you Sudoku fans who like to make their own puzzles. Enjoy.

What better way to start the new year with a new game and a new store selling that game?

So, the first time I saw sudoku, I thought “wow, that looks boring.” I ignored it for several years; this has proven to be an error on my part, though possibly a serendipitous one. I finally broke down and tried the game the other day; it turns out to be wonderful fun.

The basic idea is simple. In the standard puzzle, you make a 9×9 grid of squares, subdivided into 3×3 grids of 3×3. In each row, column and subgrid will exist the numbers 1 through 9, each once, none missing. The grid starts with something on the order of 20% of the cells filled in, and is constructed in a fashion such that careful deduction will allow you to fill in the remainder; one very important characteristic of a proper Sudoku puzzle is that there is only one legal solution for each game board (something frequently failed by low-grade puzzle producers.) There are a bunch of variations, such as using non-square subgrids, different grid sizes and arrangements, using letters instead of numbers (typically spelling a word down one of the major diagonals of the board,) using greater-than/less-than borders as clues, cuing the backgrounds by color to indicate even/odd, and a bunch of other neat subtypes.

The example to the right is a larger puzzle, constructed of smaller puzzles, such that some of the corners overlap. That puzzle is particularly difficult; head over to my store for my free sudoku mailing list, which includes novice oriented puzzles, for free material on which to cut your teeth.

At any rate, I find this game fascinating. It seems like it’s going to be too simple, too easy, too boring; in my opinion it turns out, surprisingly, to be none of those things. Making the puzzles has also turned out to be a delight, which is why I created my blank sudoku puzzle books, with which for people to make their own puzzles at their convenience on the cheap (because of the cost of printing, it works out to about 1.2 cents per puzzle, shipping to the 50 states included.)

I’m also working out a software process to generate not just legal puzzles, but puzzles of high quality. There are several issues involved in generating good puzzles, such as forcing players to make choices, creating symmetric or aesthetically pleasing patterns of stable cells, and so forth. I’ve only put a few days into it, but the software already generates legal games; generating high quality games is proving to be an interesting challenge indeed. Once I have that nailed down, I’ll start creating sudoku puzzle books for sale for probably $7.50 or so. (Nikoli, Japan’s premiere puzzle gaming company, charges about the same for their books of 80 puzzles; my books will contain 500, and not all of them will be the standard size. I’ll be providing a hell of a lot better value.)

Stay tuned. My burgeoning Sudoku addiction will generate a lot of free gaming material for all of you in the (my laziness notwithstanding) very near future.