Trinity Solitaire was written as an excercise in how to write a game using the object-oriented programming techniques available in C++. Far from its original text based interface, the current version of Trinity Solitaire supports a fully scaleable 256 color window complete with varying card back and background patterns. Rather than have all of the cards written in a graphics file somwhere, Trinity Solitaire also draws each card individually. This makes for a much smaller executable without any "helper" files and also allows the user to scale both the card size and the display font depending on the working environment (the default size is the largest window possible). This also allows for varying types of background. We realize that not all machines are as fast as the newer ones (and not all have color, either) so one can choose between normal or reduced patterns and also dispense with background color all together.
Trinity Solitaire is a simple version of the solitaire card game klondike. The game consists of 13 piles: 1 draw pile, 1 in-use pile, 7 play piles, and 4 aces piles. The object of the game is to move all of the cards into the four aces piles, each of which must have cards of only one suit and must also be in acending order starting from the ace and ending with a king. Play starts with the cards being dealt into 7 piles (the play piles) of sizes ranging from 7 down to a single card. The top card in each one of these piles is initially face up. The remainder of the cards are placed face down in the draw pile. Moving cards in the in-use and play piles can be accomplished by placing a card of opposite colored suit on top of a card with a face one greater than the card to be moved. For instance, a six of hearts could be put on top of a seven of spades, but not on top of a seven of diamonds. A face down card cannot be moved. When a card is moved from a play pile to a play pile the card underneath the moved card is made face up (assuming it wasn't already). When a play pile is empty only a king can be moved onto it. Groups of cards can also be moved by selecting the card lowest in the pile (closest to the top of the screen) to be shifted. Cards moved from the in-use pile onto a play pile work the same way, except once removed, a card cannot be replaced onto the in-use pile. By clicking once on the draw pile (represented by the single face down card) three cards will be flipped onto the in-use pile. There is also an option to flip just one card over at a time (although toggling this item will restart your game). When the draw pile is empty, an empty card frame will appear, clicking in it will flip the entire in-use pile over, which becomes the new draw pile. That's about it.
This version of solitaire also supports two different ways of selecting and placing the card. One can move the cards by clicking once on the card to be moved and then on its destination or the card can be moved by dragging it's outline to the destination. The method of highlighting the cards can be switched from a small pointer to full card color inversion, depending on your taste. By double clicking on a card one can move it from the play piles to the aces pile (assuming it is a legitimate move). For instance, if you double click on a two of hearts and the ace of hearts is in an aces pile the program will determine which pile to put it in and place it there. Hitting "f" at any time during the game will move as many cards to the aces pile from the play piles as possible. This is very convinient for placing many cards at once. When it is clear that your are going to win (all the play piles are face up and the draw/used piles are empty) then the computer will offer to finish the game for you. (again, you can also do this manually by just hitting "f")
There are also (ahem) a couple of "cheats" built into Trinity Solitaire (we wanted to make this as lifelike as possible). Firstly, one can "peek" at the cards in a pile by option clicking anywhere in the pile (this won't work on the draw pile, tho). You can also toggle between filp three and flip one games without restarting your game by holding down the option key when you select it. This is useful when trying to get that one darn card you need that's always covered up by some other lame card in the draw pile. Another smaller cheat is the ability to move partial piles of cards rather than the whole pile. For instance, if you have a range of cards from king to two you can move just the cards under the ten. We've been told that technically this is cheating, but it seems pretty logical to us, so we left it in.
You can also turn off the (sometimes annoying) sounds if you really want to. That's about it, have fun!
PS - there's a secret in the about box if you can find it. ;-)
Trinity Solitaire, is hereby released into the public domain, and may be
freely distributed provided it is copied intact with all supplemental files. You may not charge for this program other than regular copying/ shipping/ media fees without the explicit permission of the authors. Blah, blah, blah.
We thank you for your support.
Ken Coste (kcoste@trincoll.edu)
Bryan Horling (bhorling@trincoll.edu)
Thanks to Thomas Reed for his asynchronous sound source.
