Forum archive

As some of you may know, I have spent a while making a sudoku game, known as Patz Calculator Sudoku, or PCSUDOKU. It is a sudoku program for the TI-83 Plus series of calculators, and features:

• Speed optimized
• Size optimized (under 2.2k on calc!)
• Use of only 7 reals!
• Fully random sudokus
• Puzzle numbers
• Game saving/loading
• Graphical menus
• Hint system
• 5 levels of difficulty: simple, easy, medium, hard, and suicidal.
• GPL v2 licensed

Currently, though, I feel as though I have beaten this program so much that there isn't really anything more that I can do with it So, I need some ideas! So, wanna give me some recommendations? I've been on a programmer's block and can't think of anything more to do with it, and if there's nothing more to do with it after my to-do list below is completed, I'm going to declare it a dead project.

Anyway, here are some screenshots:


You can download Patz Calculator Sudoku from here.


My to-do list:

Well I never played sudoku since I was never into puzzle games but your program looked nice. How long does it take to render a random sudoku?

On my 84+, making the random sudoku usually takes no more than 4 seconds. Removing the blocks are what takes up the most time (notice how the Simple difficulty takes a much shorter time to load than Suicidal)

sounds good, not too long, I may give it a try at one point

I really like Sudoku!

This game is laid out very nicely! Awesome job!

cool!

how're you generating the sudokus?

I'm not entirely "generating" the sudokus per-se, but more like scrambling it.

I give it an already valid sudoku, and it scrambles it up. This idea was actually first of HarrierFalcon, but I modified it a bit.

Glad to hear that people are enjoying it. My mission with it was to be simple, fast, and small. Hopefully I have done at least that


Edit: Actually, thanks for bringing the scrambling routine to my attention. I'm going to optimize it to this:

Should take up less space and go quite a bit faster

do you have an idea of how many combinatiuon possible there is?

It looks goo but I still prefer Tari Sudoku2 with its cool eye candy and other fun stuff.

ya, swapping was the only thing I could think of. but there's kinda only so much you can do w/ swapping

as you also just randomly taking out #s? or are you using preset masks to remove #s?

Using preset masks doesn't work so well when using different levels of difficulty, so I ended up just randomly removing them. Though it works slower, it reduces program size and allows for more difficulty levels.

Funny you should mention it, today I got bored at school and fixed up my blanking routine.

Anyway, in general news, I have made most of the optimizations I'm planning to do. I've added the feature which shows which numbers originally were generated with the puzzle. It marks them with a small line over the number on the screen. Those marks are even saved when saving and reloading your game.

If I get any more ideas, I'll implement them, else I think I'm pretty much finished with this project. Now down to 2104 bytes. I plan to make my final release as a halloween present to you all, so check back here on the 31st

Now that is a pretty clever idea!


How do you adjust the difficulty level?

If you look at the above code, you can see its blanking routine. D is the variable I have set aside for the puzzle's difficulty. It removes more blocks as the difficulty increases.

26 for Simple, 34 for Easy, 42 for Medium, 50 for Hard, and 58 for Suicidal.

Edit: Oh, and if you meant how to adjust the difficulty level in the game, go to difficulty on the main menu and press 2nd or Enter.

interestingly, mathematicians say that 17 is the smallest # of known squares for a solvable single solution sudoku.

duno how they proved that, and duno if that means every 17 # sudoku is solvable.

You don't need to store C to a variable; Ans can be used instead.

However, if you use the randInt(1,9 statement elsewhere in your program, you can store it to one of the graphing variables (such as u or v) and then use that instead.