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by pwinnski 2081 days ago
This is pretty great! Like the original minesweeper, it's easy to get into a spot where you have a 50/50 chance, and some shapes are more likely to have more of those than others, but a lot of games have that element of luck.

Very good job!
1 comments
_fp5w 2081 days ago
Thanks, the beginner/intermediate/expert levels are the only ones that give a different difficulty. All the other maps are expert - hardcoded at about the % age of a classic minesweeper mine density. Trade off is you get three lives, though most people (sigh, like me) just reset when they hit their first daisy.

Plan is to rebuild the menu hexagon with these options so you can set it however you like, but this is a side hobby so won't be until next month that I'll get to it. If you spy on what's sent via socket.io, you can override the density parameter in console and request new games ;)

My favorite part of the game doesn't exist anymore, was actually the death screen animations but somewhere between code updates I tabled it and never reinstated it. Random tiles would minimize into the distance and then rotate every few seconds and everything would blur out except the correct numbers, spitting in your face sort of. Was eerie.

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pwinnski 2081 days ago
Side projects are hard to find time for, but that death screen sounds great! +1 for prioritizing that. :)
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_fp5w 2081 days ago
Removed it and other animations when render and animation speed became an issue and I focused on optimizing render speeds. Then I never got around to putting them back in. Like, a webgl version of this could probably have a hundred times more hexagons and you wouldn't lose any FPS. But in SVG, it's weird. Biggest surprise, Chrome is finally slow at something - SVG renders - whereas FireFox blazed right through it.

Then a very polite Canadian kid I met on a minecraft server helped me with it, tracing the fundamental issues (thanks, BubbyMK2!). Apparently using rectangles (svg:rect) is particularly slow in SVG, because it forces a redraw outside its clipping boundary. But if you draw a rectangle as a path, no sweat. Or some such.

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