Friday, October 10, 2008

Sudokool v 2.0 Released


Sudokool v 1.0 was released 3 years back on 25th Sep 2005. It had been in my mind all through past three years to work upon and improve Sudokool. But unfortunately due to lack of motivation and professional commitments, I could not take out time to work on it.

This upgradation took me around 20 days, and I had to go through and modify each piece of code to make sure that everything works correctly. Many changes have to be accomodated in the older code to make the new functionality in sync with the existing one.


Features :
Following are the features of Sudokool v 2.0 :
1. Play unlimited puzzles in 4 difficulty levels : Simple, Easy, Medium and Hard.
2. Option to play with Hints : view all the possibilities on the puzzle grid.
3. Option to play with warnings in case of wrong entries.
4. User can input puzzle (from newspapers) directly on the grid. Then puzzle is validated and if solution is unique, it can be played.
5. User can save and load Games.
6. 3 lowest timings in each difficulty level are recorded and updated on each puzzle submission.
7. Game can be paused and resumed during gameplay.
8. Platform independent : Based on Java, Sudokool works flawlessly on all the platforms (personally I have tested on Ubuntu 8.04 and Windows Vista)
9. Puzzle window can be resized and the window is loaded to this size next time automatically.
10. Cool looks to provide the best GUI experience.
11. Last but not the least : It is absolutely FREE !!!

Future Roadmap
Following are some features which I would personally like to include include in future releases of Sudokool. I will prioritize the features on the basis of user feedbacks:
1. Import puzzle from csv file
2. Undo/Redo moves
3. Provide hint for the next move
4. Customisable look and feel
5. Customisable icons
6. File Menu
7. Take PrintOut of generated puzzle
8. Convert generated puzzle to file format e.g. excel,pdf,csv etc.
9. Web Browser support : generate puzzles on web applets
10. Take user input from keyboard
11. Option to hide time until the puzzle is solved
12. Log and show activities like number of puzzles generated,solved,average timings etc.
13. Adding user name in the records
14. Turn ON/OFF all the sound events
15. Automatic submission along with manual submission

Sudokool v 2.0 download has been disabled due to the availability of the new version. Check the updated link in the latest blog.

After some initial testing there were some issues, and I have updated this download link with the latest package.
If you don't have Java Runtime Environment (jre 5 or higher), download it here

Running Instructions
1. On MS Windows, just double click on run.bat file to launch Sudokool.
Alternately, the following command can be used on command line in both windows and linux:
java -jar Sudokool.jar
2. It is possible that on the first run no digits appear on the grid or dots appear in place of digits on the puzzle grid. This is due to difference of default font on differenct operating systems. This can be resolved by simpling resizing and increasing the Sudokool window size. On next run Sudokool will automatically use the last window size.
3. Please take time to first go through the help menu to understand the functionality of Sudokool.

I would like to thank all Sudokool fans who took time to send me their feedbacks. I will really appreciate any comments, suggestions, feedbacks, bug reports and criticism.
Please write back to me and do mention the features which you would like in future Sudokool releases. My email id is shirazakhan@gmail.com

All the future releases of Sudokool will be updated in this blog. So, keep visiting.

Thanks for your precious time !

5 comments:

Santhosh kumar.S said...

Really nice....

Kamalakar Agashe said...

I tried the custom puzzle feature. After entering the numbers I clicked to verify. It was verified and when I clicked on "ok" all the numbers disappeared, therefore, I could not play the custom puzzle.

Anonymous said...

Please download the latest Sudokool from the links given. I had resolved this issues during initial testing.

Unknown said...

Hi Shiraz:

Its COOL! Do you plan to make the source available?

Ravi

Shiraz Khan said...

I may host Sudokool at sourceforge, but have not planned yet