There has been quite a bit of progress with gnome-games since 2.10 so it is time to write about some of what has changed. First up is Mines. The changes are mostly due to Richard Hoelscher, myself, and Marco Colombo.
- When you make the first move you are now guaranteed to clear a useful number of mines. The first click has been guaranteed to not be a mine for a long time now, but most of the time you still had to randomly click elsewhere until you either hit a mine or found some usable space thus defeating the whole purpose of the feature.
- Left clicking on a cleared square now clears the surrounding mines – just like using the middle button. This makes the game so much easier to play! The middle button isn’t the easiest to use and so this knocks two seconds off my times on the small board size. The change is so obvious in hindsight, whoever coded the original game obviously decided one button = one function without realising that context made it unnecessary. The old button combinations still work the same way they always did.
- There is now a fullscreen mode.
- If you hit a mine there is now an explosion graphic to show where you went wrong.
- The end-of-game behaviour now matches up with Same GNOME. Including giving you the option to quit (I know you don’t want to – but you should).
- Lots of minor fixups – things like strings that weren’t being translated and odd drawing behaviour if the game ended on after a hint.
- There has been a lot of code cleanup. The mouse-click code is now shorter, more comprehendible, and – amazingly – still correct. Some inlined functions were made non-inlined since they added 4% to the size of the code.