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, JPEG, or PPM 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 somewhere 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 showcase, 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 destination by pulling them
at on edge. The piece will automatically 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 direction. The Images
are automatically rotated in portrait orientation before
they are sliced. Therefore x usually should be smaller than
y of the next option. The default is four.
-h y Select number of tiles in vertical direction respectively.
The default is six.
-ts n Select average tile width. Instead of explicitly 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 according 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 constant.
-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 puzzle 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 features to control
the view on your desk. They are controlled 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 suffer. 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 software 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