Green Felt News

Last night we pushed a bunch (literally hundreds) of changes up to the main site. What do they mean for you, the user? Well, you shouldn’t notice anything visually different, but hopefully things will run a little smoother than they used to. The changes were designed to address the hiccups and slowdowns seen from time to time. Whether they actually will remains to be seen.

We’ve already found at least one large bug that slipped past our rigorous (ahem) testing, so be on the lookout for anything weird and make sure you send us a bug report if you do find something wrong.

These changes should ease development for Jim’s and I as well. We’ve been unable to add certain features to the site because of design decisions we made 4 years ago. Even simple things like changing your user name were pretty much impossible because of the way we did things originally. We look forward to being able to add some neat features in the future.

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We just rolled out a change that will probably affect all of our players. Whereas you used to double-click a card to make the default move for that card, you now only need to single-click it in order to do so. This should make playing faster and easier. Let us know what you think about the change.

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Recently we added automatic double click on all cards above any card you try to move. Now we’ve added automatic double click to all cards above those you might drag to. Give it a try on Sea Haven Towers or Spider. Also, from the small change department, undo animates now.

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Earlier today we added a usability feature to the solitaire games that have stacks of cards. We now allow moving cards that are not at the top of a pile by first automatically (if possible) moving any blocking cards out of the way. By moving the blocking cards using their default (double-click) move we avoid giving too much help while still allowing more efficient play.

This means for example that in Free Cell and Sea Haven Towers you can now often drag the bottom card in one of the tableaus as the very first move! Give it a try and let us know what you think.

Currently in Klondike you can even move cards that are still turned over if the cards above can easily be moved. This seems a bit like cheating in this case since if you let go without moving, you can get sneak peak at the card without incurring the normal undo penalty. We may disallow this in the future.

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Flower Garden has been updated with support for super moves. So if you have any empty piles then you can drag 2 cards at a time instead of just one. If you have 2 empty stacks you can drag 4 cards. Note that the super moves still follow the rules as if you were moving one card at a time so you can’t drag 2 cards onto an empty pile if it’s your only empty pile.

As a Flower Garden fan, I think this improves the gameplay a lot when you are towards the end of a game.

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Today I fixed the last showstopper bugs in Sudoku and put it up on the main site. So now you have a new game to play.

It doesn’t seem that new to us because Jim wrote the first rough draft of it in September of 2005. Wow, we move kind of slow sometimes! It’s been 99% done for almost a year and a half but we had a bug where it wouldn’t let you type numbers into your username or password so many of you wouldn’t have been able to log in when the page was up. I finally got that fixed today (in a way that made me happy) and so you will now see Sudoku on the leader board and in the menus.

Have fun!

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About a year ago we got frustrated with some of the behind the scenes workings of the site. Certain things were too slow or just written using old techniques that weren’t making us happy. So we upgraded all of the back-end code and site templating functions which should be faster and easier to work with in the long run.

We’ve been testing them internally for the past 9 months and we haven’t found any bugs in the past 6 months, so today I loaded all the new stuff onto the main site.

It looks like everything is working to me, but if you have any strange problem first try holding down shift while reloading/refreshing the page. If that you still have the problem after that, report it to us so we can fix it.

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If you’ve played pyramid recently you may have noticed we modified the game a bit. Specifically, we added a new discard pile. This makes the top card of the waste pile (the one next to the deck) available for play. So now you have a chance to dig back through the waste pile to get rid of the pyramid which makes it slightly easier.

Thanks to Michael Keller for noticing that we had the rules wrong.

-David

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There is anew game available now called “Fourteen Out”. I think it’s an interesting variation of pyramid style play. It’s not on the leader board or in the menus yet.

We’d like some volunteers to pound on it for a little while. So if we could get you to go play the game and then come back here and comment on it. We’d love to hear anything you think. Is it too easy, boring, fun, pointless? Let us know!

Play Fourteen Out.

-David

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We’ve been busy lately. Or, more acurately, we’ve not been busy lately–Green Felt is our “spare time” project. However you look at it, we’ve made a bunch of under the hood and user visible changes lately. I’ll explain them one by one:

1. We added a new graphic to represent an empty card pile and got rid of the cheesy old-school html table borders. I have to say I’m really happy with the way this turned out. I originally wanted the empty pile to look like a depression in the green felt background, but I was unable to draw it in Illustrator. I’m not much of an artist. I still have hope that my brother Michael will come through with a nice picture. In the mean time I think the dotted outlines look good enough.
2. We added a little box in the top right that tells you when there are new posts on this blog or in the forum. I don’t like that it takes a long time to load, plus it doesn’t wrap nicely when the window is too small (especially in Internet Explorer for some reason), but I like the functionality. I wish it were quick and built into the static HTML instead of being AJAX.
3. We added redo support! If you undo too far or decide it was a bad idea to undo you can redo back to where you were. Control-Shift-Z (or Command-Shift-Z for you Mac heads) is the key shortcut for redo. Note that if you undo and then start moving cards around then your redo history is lost.
4. We moved the Forum to our hosting provider and updated it to the latest version. This is more of a behind the scenes change, but you should notice that the forum is more responsive now that it’s hosted by a provider with a lot of bandwidth and not from my personal cable modem. 🙂 We also added some spam protection which, for the moment, seems to be keeping the spam bots a bay (which may not have been annoying you, but it was making us delete a bunch of stupid spam messages every day).
5. We also created a new forum just for resolved bugs and moved all the bugs that have been fixed into that forum. That way the bugs forum only lists outstanding/unresolved issues.
6. It’s not quite done yet, but we’ve done a lot of work on a new game. Suduko! There’s a couple bugs we have to fix and loose ends to tie up, but you can try it out now if you can guess the address. 🙂

-David

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