The best move has the highest possible score, but it is also the one
leading to the most interesting game. This is a subjective notion, but
some heuristics can help, such as:
- a move sparing a blank is better than one using it
- a move with many prefixes and suffixes is better than one without
extensions
- a move "opening" the game is better than one blocking it
- a move leaving a nice rack is better than one leaving "bad" letters
At the moment, only the first heuristic is implemented.
When a master game is defined, the racks and moves played from the
current game will be the same as in the master game. This can be
practical to replay a game in a different mode, or to replay at home a
duplicate game played in a club, for example.
The arbitrator has to specify them manually. Otherwise, we cannot know
when a turn is complete and thus we cannot determine if solos can/should
be applied.
Re-assigning a move is not limited anymore to the last turn (only to the
current turn, and even that limitation could be removed without too much
work).
It is mostly working, but many things are still missing.
In particular:
- ability to enter (or change) moves for a past turn
- ability to change the rack (manually, or randomly)
- ability to add/remove players during the game
- support for solos, warnings, penalties
- support for table number
- more ergonomic interface
- non regression tests
- ... and probably bugs to fix
Internally, commands are now stored a bit differently: some commands
which were at the end of a turn (like the players rack in duplicate
mode) are now at the beginning. But from a user point of view, there is
no visible difference, except some details in training mode (and the new
behaviour is arguably better :)).
Only (known) problem: after loading a game saved before this commit,
navigating in the game history may be less nice (in particular, racks
may not be fully restored).
Knowing the actual player is not always possible, since potentially none
of the players has found the played move (for example in arbitration
mode). This ID is now only used to retrieve the rack from which the move
was formed, so any player ID will do.
The non-regression tests have been adapted accordingly.
Status:
It works well, but there are still a few details to improve/fix
More details about the changes:
- New dependency on Arabica and Libxml2 to parse the XML
- Loading the old format is still supported for this release, but won't be supported anymore in the next one
- Games are now only saved in the new format
- In training mode, the player is now created externally, like in the other modes
- Avoid using GameIO (the one from game/) whenever possible
- Do not use a FILE* argument anymore when loading a game
- Throw and catch exceptions correctly when a game cannot be loaded or saved
- The non-regression tests now use a new method to print the game history
