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Congrats to the inventors of Sum Thing, I like the new genre a lot, and the name is cool as well.

I tried my luck creating Sum Thing puzzles in the sandbox. I had two types of problems.

1) The honeycomb layout of the puzzle makes it difficult to construct some shapes, For example it would be nice to be able to connect two horizontal circles which are 1 or 3 circles apart and not only 0 2 or 4 circles apart. I found it very dificult to create relatively simple shapes I drew on paper.

2) When I try to fill in the solution I can only fill in the digit 1 or (leave things null). Has anybody else encountered this? IT is a bug or possibly I'm missing something. I had the problem both using internet explorer and google chrome.

Looking forward for more puzzles,

I'm not sure where the genre originates, we can only take credit for its renaming.

Regarding the second problem: The circle has a light gray number in it, indicating the maximal number it allows as input. Clicking the circle multiple times will increase this number. When in doubt, you can consult the text outputted when clicking update. The circles bear the names "knoop1" .."knoop25".

This also relates to the first problem, as there are more lines hiding behind "knoop25". I now enabled typing the letters 'a' through 'y' to get to those circles immediately. The letter 'z' will bring you to the first line after "knoop25".

Thanks Johan,

You solved all my problems, my first sum thing puzzle is already in the vestibule.

Eranus

I had the same problem when putting in my first puzzle (also why it looks so messy). I was just happy to have finally managed to connect all circles the way I wanted to.

I wanted to make several suggestions to the sum thing puzzle generator:

1) Give the possibility to make longer connection lines.
2) Make some short cut key (Like the Z Johan added to turn circles into lines) to enter the "sum thing" numbers in the areas enclosed by the borders, this would avoid the extra button presses which the possibility of longer lines would create.
3) Why does one have to fill in the value of the max number that can be entered in each circle. Isn't this extra information already given when specifying the 1:N at the bottom right? Would it be OK to limit some of the circles to numbers less than N for a 1:N puzzle?

I really like this genere. Thanks,

Eranus

1) This is possible, but we need some time to dive back into all those coordinates.
2) I now made some shortcuts:
'0' will make you jump to 1,
'1' will make you jump to 10,
'2' will make you jump to 20,
etc.
We don't support multikey inputs, so there is only so much we can do. I hope this makes your life at least somewhat easier.
3a) The fact that we have different objects for different ranges has to do with some design choice we made early on. We thought it is a bit inelegant to support the digit 9 in a 6x6 sudoku, for example. The puzzle maker creates this puzzle (and is confronted with all those objects) only once, but many solvers will have the mentioned "benefit" afterwards. Some future version of the design applet might make this more puzzle-maker-friendly, but for the time being this is what we have to work with.
3b) We also need to take into account the people who print the puzzle. For them the range information encoded in the input elements is not enough to know what numbers they can use. We can not use different ranges for different circles either, because not only can the people solving on paper not know this, also the people who solve it online will not feel like trying every circle to see what it allows and what it does not.

Thanks Johan, the shortcuts are very helpful, I now feel very comfortable making the puzzles. The fact that there are no long lines available just limits the possible layouts one can use, especially when one wants to design shapes within shapes, for example a square inside an outer triangle as a 1-7 layout.

Re point 3. I misunderstand something. I understand the need to limit the numbers that can be entered in the circles, but I don;t understand why this is not taken automatically as "N" by the generator from the "1-N" range that the puzzle maker must define. How would this make things more difficult, less elegant for those solving the puzzle? I'm either missing something or not able to make myself clear.

This has to do with how things are set up here. All applets run the exact same code, which interprets the puzzle types and the individual puzzles, both of which are described in a special language. Most of the feature requests can be dealt with by changing the puzzle type descriptions, but interaction between different elements in a puzzle is currently not supported by the applet code. This is not to say that this is theoretically impossible, but any changes to the applet code could apply to many genres, so we would rather carefully design a general solution to all similar issues across different genres than to make quick fixes for individual genres. Your request will be taken into account once we embark on designing support for this kind of interaction.

Thanks

Makes sense. I really think you built an amazing site.