Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!ncar!gatech!hubcap!ncrcae!ncr-sd!hp-sdd!hplabs!sdcrdcf!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban
From: urban@spp2.UUCP (Michael Urban)
Newsgroups: comp.sources.d
Subject: Re: mahjongg tiles
Message-ID: <345@algol.spp2.UUCP>
Date: 20 Jun 88 15:08:43 GMT
References: <319@opus.analogy.UUCP>
Reply-To: urban@algol.UUCP (Michael Urban)
Organization: TRW Inc., Redondo Beach, CA
Lines: 45

In article <319@opus.analogy.UUCP> markh@analogy.UUCP (Mark Holm) writes:
>Well folks, you asked for it so here they come. I posted the
>icons to the moderator of comp.games.sources for mahjongg along
>with a patch to hide the covered tiles while the board gets
>redrawn. He is going to integrate the patch and do another
>complete posting of mahjongg (mahjongg2). It will trickle out
>over the next few weeks. There are ~34 parts when all the icons
>are included. Now do you understand why I did not post them the
>first time?? 3 Mbytes of data take a long time to propagate.
>
>Anybody have any suggestions for improvment?? I am currently
>working on a better shuffling algorithm and a solve button
>for those of you who can't quite figure out how to win. Anything
>else wanted??
>

This seems extreme.  Why do you not instead post a relatively short
C program which can be linked with the ".o" file you distributed
for the tiles, and which will spit the source code for the
desired set of tiles onto standard output?  

As for the program itself: it does not play the game that I
know by the name of Mah-jongg.  It does play the game which is
sold by Activision under the name "Shanghai".  To the best of
my knowledge, this game is original to Activision, although
they have apparently done nothing to protect the game
from duplication.  You may want to change the name of the
program to something else to avoid misleading Mah-jongg fans.
(A networked mah-jongg game would be a nice project for someone,
by the way).

Yes, the original shuffling algorithm with the game is definitely
deficient.  Several reasonable substitutes have been posted in
rec.games.programmer recently.  I have used one of these in
the "Mah-jongg" game with apparent success.

Incidentally, the tone of this reply seems, on re-reading, to
be rather grouchy.  So it seems obligatory to observe that I
have very much enjoyed the mahjongg game and have blown several
lunch hours with it already.  
-- 
   Mike Urban
	...!trwrb!trwspp!spp2!urban 

"You're in a maze of twisty UUCP connections, all alike"