I though it would be usefu to copy over the developers (Yariv Hastilow) comments. You may find one of your questions answered here.
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Hi everyone and thanks for your comments. I’m the developer of World of CryptoPics. I didn’t know that my software was going to be up today, but it seems here it is!I’m very happy to see that your comments so far have been so positive.
I’d like to respond to some of the points that have been raised so far.
> There is no shortcut installed to the desktop or Start menuAs someone else mentioned above, it does, or least it should! If anyone else finds that it doesn’t, please let me know.
> It feels very dated overallI take your point and I’d certainly agree that it does have something of an old-school or unpolished feel. It’s aimed partly at serious nonogram players/creators who want a tougher mental challenge or software with more features rather than a straightforward “bit of fun”. It was partly a conscious decision to keep the native Windows menu/dialog styles because A) it will match whatever else is on your desktop, and B) it allows you (via Windows) to customize them, at least to a certain extent. It’s supposed to match your Windows options, even if they are set to “Windows 95″!So I do agree that it could be more polished, but I think what we have is sufficient for the type of game.I haven’t played “World Riddles”, but I imagine it’s much nicer-looking but with much less depth of features. Horses for courses I suppose.
> There’s something really bad about this game. It’s that there is no win trigger.As was mentioned above, you do need to fill in the dots too – BUT you can do this in one click of the right mouse button on the diagonal arrow.
> The “show errors” options does not show only rows in which there are errors, it highlights rows that are wrong **or incomplete**. It shows that those rows which you have completed are correct, but always marks any incomplete row as wrong.
True, and in fact, the “show errors” function won’t tell you if you’ve actually got the real answer, only if your answer matches the clue for that row/column. Otherwise it would be too easy The feature is really intended for if you’ve filled in the whole grid and are thinking “Why hasn’t it detected this?!” The chances are that there are one or two rows/columns where you’ve got slightly wrong numbers, or you’ve left a blank square somewhere.
> For dragging, squares that are already marked should not be overwritten. This allows me, for example, to mark the two blocks in a row that are filled, and then drag “empty” across the row. Since that option is not available (or I missed it), I had to click, individually, every square in a row.
You can fill complete rows/columns with the arrows outside the grid, and this does NOT overwrite. Dragging DOES overwrite under normal rules, but not in rules where you know the square to be correct (because you’d have lost a life otherwise).
> The ‘box-to-box’ filling with held mouse button only works properly with the right button on my puter (win7pro), whereas when trying to mark filled boxes with this method a message window pops up saying “This will erase the whole grid. Continue?”
This sounds like a bug. I will investigate.
> Also, when marking a column in a row you easily can slip out of way and start marking a different row – with the ‘World Riddle* games you remained within a row till you released the mouse button.> Another con is that only the numbers are highlighted – in the above mentioned “World Riddle” games the whole rows and columns are also highlighted, what I prefer more.
These could be a good ideas for improvements.
> Question: I went to the link to get the additional puzzles from their website, and it says to put them in the “Puzzles” directory; however, there is no such folder in the installation.
I hadn’t thought about this, I think the information needs updating. However, you can put the unzipped puzzles anywhere and then copy them automatically to the correct folder (wherever it is!) with the “Add to List” button on the Load Game dialog.
It’s getting late here in Japan right now, but I will be back tomorrow to answer any further questions and comments.
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Thanks for the comments, I’ll answer your questions in a separate post shortly.I’m really glad that people are enjoying my game, especially the serious puzzle fans. I don’t think I’ll ever make much money from my games, but at least if lots of people play and enjoy them then it’s worthwhile!I actually made the first version of World of CryptoPics for myself, because I found the Nonograms available elsewhere to be too easy. So it’s primarily intended to provide ways of creating enough puzzles (randomly, from images and by hand) that you will never run out. Hence I didn’t spend too long on special effects, although as some people have pointed out, there are a range of themes and you can edit the display icons too.
Of course there will be plenty of people with no interest in this type of puzzles, or who want a more linear game experience, so I guess a 65% positive rating overall is pretty good.
If you did like this game, I strongly recommend trying the standalone Nonosweeper software, and my original puzzle game Mallet Mania (links above comments section).
Please also feel free to join the World of CryptoPics forums I’ve recently added to the site, and send me any puzzles you make for the CryptoPic library.
Finally, if anyone has a home page or blog, any links to World of CryptoPics or any of my other sites are greatly appreciated!
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I’ve commented on the suggestions in the “Share your ideas” box above, so here I’ll just answer the issues not covered there.
> there is a misleading option in the menu. “Restart Puzzle” to me means start the same puzzle over, not regenerate a new puzzle.
The reason you can only regenerate, not restart, a random puzzle is because if you could replay one you could cheat to get a high score. However I didn’t want to rename the menu item just for this case.If you do want to restart a random puzzle, you can switch to the editor and then “Play this puzzle” again, but you won’t then get a high score upon completion.
> Something is wrong because I am unable to choose anything from the Challenge Mode Dialog Box or the Display Options dialog. Crippleware?
Er, no. Sounds like your install failed.
> I couldn’t figure out how to win a game
Several users have said the same, so I clearly need to explain this better. I’ll see what I can do about this. See also the suggestion above: http://cryptopics.idea.informer.com/proj/?ia=52043
> I like the numbers on the top and right sides of the grids. Maybe there could be an option for that (maybe there is and I missed it).
For some reason this never occurred to me, but yes, this would be a good option!
> The installer provided a start menu icon for the standard account I run under, however the user files and folders installed only to the admin account
I’m not an expert on Windows’ labyrinthine security settings, so I don’t know if I can really help. Fortunately most users don’t seem to have this problem. All I can say is that I didn’t direct the files to any specific account or level, I just let Windows do it and assumed that it’d put them all under the same account. Naive perhaps?!
> I agree with some others that it can be difficult to find rows which are incomplete. If rows could somehow be marked when all the squares are filled (even if incorrectly), that would help.
Selecting “Show Mistakes” from the Game menu shows you which rows are filled correctly. Why would you want to distinguish between rows filled incorrectly and rows not filled?
> I clicked on ‘save puzzle’, give it a name, looked for a good map (name of map was ‘new puzzles’ , the name of the file was ‘Is this art?.cry’ (what does .cry mean?)) , i klicked on save (10 times), and it doesnt worked! How can i save this now???
As someone said above, you can’t save any file on Windows with a question mark in the name. Remove that and it should save correctly.As for what “cry” means, I’m sure it’ll come to you eventually!
> It would be nice if when I’ve given up on a puzzle and want the solution revealed, that it could somehow also leave what I had so that I can see where my mistakes were.
I suppose so – although the “Show Mistakes” option should give you a good idea in most cases. I’ll see if it’s possible to implement.
>Also, when using the ‘show mistakes’, instead of showing that the whole row is wrong, show which groups are in the wrong position.
If you mean to show the groups which don’t match the clue, this is difficult because, for example, if you had a clue of “1 2″ and you’d actually “2 1″ how does the software know whether the 1 is right and the 2 wrong, the 2 right and the 1 wrong, or neither? Or if the clue is “1 2 1″ and you have only 1, is the first 1 correct or the last?
> It would also be nice to be able to slide groups within a row or column once I’ve input the correct # of blocks. ie a 10 block row with a 5 2 solution would allow me to slide the 5 filled, 1 blank, 2 filled along the row.
I understand the idea, but it would be difficult to implement without making the control system complicated. Perhaps holding the shift key or something. Also, in the above case, you don’t know how many blanks go between the 5 and the 2, so I assume you would want to slide each one independently?
> I’d also like to be able to ‘lock’ a row or column when the number of blocks and spaces can only be one configuration. ie a 10 block row with a ’7 2′ solution can only be 7 filled, 1 blank, 1 filled, with no ‘wiggle’ room. Once a row was locked, tiles could be slid thorugh it as long as filled or blank tiles remained filled or blocked.
Now we are getting really complicated – it would be useful to have functions like this, but I think would require a major overhaul of the input system.
> For BonusPack03 the title is Digging Deeper, I completed the puzzle but have no idea what the picture is supposed to be. Anyone else?
Ah, yes, ahem. Quite possibly nobody reading this will have ever seen it before, but it’s the cover of “Dig Your Own Hole”, the second album by the Chemical Brothers, which was popular at the time I first wrote the software. Popular in England, anyway…!! I’ll add a comment to the puzzle info.
> Would also like an option to play only games that have only a single solution – some had multiple answers that could have been correct.
This shouldn’t be the case for picture puzzles, although those in the online library (i.e. not made by me) may occasionally have multiple possible answers. Random puzzles are checked for ambiguities (if the box isn’t unchecked) but this isn’t 100% foolproof – see the help file section on ambiguities.
> The annoying thing is that when I left click and accidentaly DRAG the mouse over a field that’s marked as empty, that “lock” doesn’t work and I lose a life.To me this differentiation between clicking and dragging doesn’t seem to make sense…
I agree. I’ll fix this.
> One thing that’s nice about the other game I’ve played is that there are darker lines every 5 blocks, so you can quickly calculate the positions for marking.
Well, the grid lines are thicker every 5 blocks, but maybe this isn’t obvious enough? Perhaps I could try shading the backgrounds.
> Another suggestion would be to tweak the Show Mistakes option, so that it actually shows mistakes, or if that is not possible, change the name to Show Incomplete Rows/Columns or something similar. Also it would be good to make it a permanent option i.e. you can toggle it on/off whenever, rather than needing to turn it on with each new puzzle.
Not quite sure what you mean about “actually showing mistakes”. It shows rows/columns which are not fully and correctly completed to match the clue, and it’s intended to help pinpoint the reason why a seemingly complete puzzle isn’t recognised as such.It’s not a permanent option because I’m trying to discourage people from relying on it too much, but I did consider making it permanent. What does everyone else think?
> Improvements: greying out the completed rows and colums
Oh, I see other people agree with you then
> Next puzzle directly from the completed puzzle, not back to the menu.
Do you mean in Challenge Mode? I suppose it could move you on automatically, but on the other hand it’s only one more click.
> Never found the puzzle folder.
Sorry about the confusion there, but in fact you don’t need to know where it is if you add new puzzles via the button in the Load Game dialog.
Anyway, thanks again for all your suggestions, I’ve learnt a lot from the users of this site.