Re: [Enigma-devel] Reorganizing levels?

[Karen Pouelle]

> Maybe we should split them into "puzzle" and "dexterity".

I enjoy the mix of puzzle and dexterity, meditation and Oxyd-hunts.
But I understand wishing to organise them because sometimes 
I deliberately hunt for an unsolved level of a certain type to play.

I'd suggest the XML format allow for a category field.  As for the
LUA scripts, perhaps someone can decide how to denote 
level information within them in a parsable maner. 

> >> Also we should try to sort them according to their difficulty, I think.

Yes, ordering them in difficulty, both time to solve and skill/puzzle level
would make marching through the level pack in order much more
rewarding, rather than to fail some early levels and move along
solving levels in near random order.

> >Maybe we should use tags or
> > keywords. Then one could also sort by author.

To this, I very much agree!

> Several months ago I wrote some kind of 'virtual levelpacks', but it was
> not stable at all - so it did not go into enigma.
> 
> The idea was to have levelspacks like
> 
> 'all levels sorted by author'
> 'all unsolved levels'
> 'all solved levels sorted by seconds behind par' :)

This is easily do-able by just having all references of a new level pack
point back to existing levels.  They'd appear as normal level packs, but
have no new unique levels of their own - and solving them would cause
the levels to show as solved in their original level pack as well.
It also has the advantage of being stable.  However, the level pack menu
could have filters such that "virtual" or "dexterity" or 
"my favorite author"-specific level packs would be shown.  This would
require level packs to also have fields.

Script to re-order levels folder (creates foldered level packs):
Meanwhile, in an attempt to clean up the chaos in the levels root folder,
I've created this ruby script to be placed and run from the levels root folder.

http://www.angelfire.com/jazz/pretzel/Enigma/levelcleaner.rb

Ruby scripts are simar to perl, only more fundamentally object-oriented.
This script has been tested on Windows, Linux, and OS-X.  Ruby comes
installed with many popular Linux distributions.  Its Windows installer 
can be found here:  http://rubyforge.org/frs/?group_id=167

Email me any comments, questions, or complaints.

Karen  "Pretzel"