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xjig
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1996-07-24
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NAME
xjig - the jigsaw puzzle
SYNOPSIS
xjig <options>
DESCRIPTION
XJig is a puzzle, that tries to replicate a jigsaw puzzle
on the screen as close as possible. As in every jigsaw
puzzle, the goal is to set all the pieces together. If you
like, you can watch the time that you spent for it.
Any image-file in gif-format can be used as the source for
the puzzle, which is then randomly created regarding the
sizes selected by the options.
The control should be as intuitive as possible in the way
that you will usually pull the freely rotatable pieces at
one edge, drag them to the desired destination and drop
them so they will snap together easily when close to an
neighboured tile.
SPECIAL EFFECTS
Tiles are freely formed and rotatable with texture mapping
routines to give the appearance of a real mess on the
screen.
Tiles snap together very easy if they are dropped some-
where close to another matching tile, when turned in the
correct direction.
Puzzles can be doubled sided so you might have to flip the
tiles to the correct side to let them snap together.
If the Xserver supports the Shape-Extension, the tiles can
be opened directly on the desktop, which is a pretty show-
case, but you need a very fast machine for really getting
this playable. (Any ideas on how to add double buffering
to the shaped-window approach of the jigsaw are warmly
welcome!)
CONTROLS
The usual way to move the pieces on the screen should be
to drag the piece with the left mouse button to their des-
tination by pulling them at on edge. The piece will auto-
matically rotate like if you pull or push them with your
fingertip on a table.
In addition, the following movements are possible:
click left: rotate 90 degrees left
click right: rotate 90 degrees right
click middle: flip tile to backside
drag left: rotator drag (as mentionned above)
+middle: pause rotator drag for a straight drag
drag middle: straight drag
+left: pause drag for a static rotation
+click left: rotate 90 degrees left during drag
+click right: rotate 90 degrees right during drag
CTRL+click left: same as click middle
The right button has actually the same functionality as
the middle button so that 2 button systems shouldn't have
problems. Only the "drag middle+click right" move will not
work in that mode, and the flipping has to be done with
the help of the CTRL-key.
OPTIONS
Tile Selection
-file name use the specified file as the source image for
the puzzle
-side p select the side of the image to be on top, if
you don't like the mess with the double sided
tiles.
Size Selection
-w x Select number of tiles in horizontal direc-
tion. The Images are automatically rotated in
portrait orientation before they are sliced.
Therefore x usually should be smaller than y
of the next option.
-h y Select number of tiles in vertical direction
respectively.
-ts n Select average tile width. Instead of explic-
itly specifying the number of tiles by using
the previous options -w and -h, the average
tile width in pixels can be selected and the
values for x and y above are computed accord-
ing to to the selected size.
Image Options
-ww x Select width of image in pixels. This can be
used to scale the image before playing for the
case that a very large image is the source.
-wh h Select height of image in pixels. If only one
of -ww and -wh, the aspect ratio is kept con-
stant.
-no_crop The image is usually automatically cropped,
since many images are surrounded by frames or
textual comments. The cropping stops at a
reasonable amount of colors per line or row.
If this is not desired of if you want to puz-
zle with painted images with few color, you
should disable this feature.
-no_flip Before tiling takes place, a landscape image
is rotated to portrait mode, which effects
successive options like -w or -ww. If this is
not desired, you can switch this feature off.
X-Window options
-display name
Select the display to connect to.
-shapes If the SHAPE-extension is supported by your
display, you can use this option to let each
puzzle tile appear in its own shaped window.
The results might depend on the behaviour of
the window-manager. The manager is actually
advised by the override redirect attribute
flag of the puzzle shapes not to do anything
with them. But who knows ...
-no_shm When the program was build with support of the
MIT-SHM extension, it might crash when started
to display on a remote machine or X-terminal.
You can deselect the usage of the extension
with this option.
Miscellaneous
-no_anim Turns off animation of rotation and flipping,
for the case the machine isn't fast enough to
make it look nice.
ZOOMING & PANNING
For not losing tiles at the window border and for getting
more workspace, the game has some zooming and panning fea-
tures to control the view on your desk. They are con-
trolled via the keyboard with the following functionality:
Cursor Keys: Pan View
Page-Up or Add: Zoom in
Page-Down or Sub: Zoom out
Home: Reset to original size
End: Set maximum zooming to view all tiles
The image quality usually suffers from zooming, since gif-
images are usually dithered to be viewed best in their
original size. This also applies to the size options -ww
and -wh.
Color Allocation
The program was tested on PseudoColor- and TrueColor-
displays. On PseudoColor-displays the program might run
out of colors, since colors are very limited and it has to
share its colors with other clients. It tries to share
similar colors with other clients. But if too may color
consuming clients are running, the image-quality will suf-
fer. You should stop other clients in that case or you
might quantize the image to a fewer number of colors with
packages like ImageMagick, xv or netpbm.
SEE ALSO
X(1), convert(1), xv(1), ppmquant(1)
COPYRIGHT
Copyright 1996, Helmut Hoenig, Heiligenhaus
email (for any comments):
Helmut.Hoenig@hub.de
smail (for gifts):
Helmut Hoenig
Hopfenstrasse 8a
65520 Bad Camberg
GERMANY
********************************************************
By the way, I am collecting banknotes! If you want
to join into my collection, get any bill of your
country, sign it on the backside and send it to me
so I will pin it on my world map.
(Don't forget the exact location for the pin :-)
But you can also just send me a picture postcard ...
********************************************************
Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this soft-
ware for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted,
provided that the above copyright notice appear in all
copies.
other fancy things from the author
xcol (1990) - color selector for editing text-files
flying (94/95) - pool billard simulation
xdefmap (1995) - enhanced tool for setting up standard colormaps
xmemory (95/96)- memory with simultaneous multiplayer action
available at ftp.x.org and its mirrors
S