User talk:Robyn/British Columbia

I was thinking more of a GVRD regional... but this map is soooo cool! Thepiguy 18:30, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

On that note, it would appear that the entire GVRD is contained entirely withing the 49 -123/-122 graticules. This is very disappointing. I was hoping for more of... a challenge I guess. My friend suggested a cool idea for another achievement though, visiting all 8 graticules surrounding your home location. I said it should be called the Minesweeper achievement. =) Thepiguy 18:44, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

That's fabulous. Perfect name. Propose what we should do if you're on the coast and there is just open ocean in one or more of the surrounding graticules? Free square? What should the icon be? The minesweeper happy guy with shades? -Robyn 19:20, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Good choice of icon. Neighbors is another good name for it, but I suspect minesweeper will be the winner. --Thomcat 19:24, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

What about a picture of the dreaded minesweeper's "8" ? Although, that isn't very colourful, and the shades guy is pretty cool...

I don't know how the free square would work. Is it really fare to give out free squares just because of water? The graticule above Vancouver is just as inaccessible as water, if not more so. I think this is destined to be one of those achievements that are very hard to get unless you have a very nice graticule.

This is how mean I would make it, for sure. -Robyn 19:52, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

We could always make the ribbon display your current progress. This user has reached 3 of 8 surrounding graticules. Thepiguy 19:48, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

That's good, with graded ribbons giving the numbers until you get to the shades guy with all eight. -Robyn 19:52, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Also, if you've got a bad location, you could always change your center location to avoid the water or mountains. And a giant series of 8 ribbons would also be really cool! Thepiguy 19:48, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Good point. Your home graticule doesn't have to be the centre. If you live on the coast you go two graticules inland. Now, anyone know where I can find the bitmaps for the minesweeper icons? I'm searching my system32 directory! -Robyn 20:11, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Wow, I would have done it the good old screenshot-into-MS-paint way! Which might have to done, the images are probably compiled in with the program... Thepiguy 20:43, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I don't remember the exact icon - is it this one? [1]

Yeah, I eventually played minesweeper to get it. Of course I played it atExpert level with 99 mines, so it took a while. I was hoping there might be a bigger version, that would scale up to 44 px better. -Robyn 21:05, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

How does it look if you surround the small icon with blank (unclicked) squares? It would make it a little bigger and probably scalable to a decent size. Also, a funny/probably impossible idea, if you did use the central icon (number/face guy) surrounded by empty squares, each person could edit their own version so that the graticules they'd visited had the little red flag instead of blank! Thepiguy 21:16, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

This is what it looks like in my head: Each person could perhaps edit their own, so that the flags are in the right spot? Is it difficult to swap out the ribbon icon? Thepiguy 21:28, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

That's lovely, nicer than what I was doing. I'm not sure how to customize them for exactly which graticules they had visited, but it's easy to have eight different ribbons. Can you make more of those for 1 to 7 and upload them as images to the Wiki? -Robyn 21:46, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Glad to help! I can't do it right now (the only image editor I have right now is Gimp, and that program drives me insane!) But I'd be happy to put them together and upload them later. Should I just do the numbers 1-8 and the happy face? Thepiguy 21:51, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I really hate to be a pain in the butt (Since you'll probably be the one coding it :D ), but is it possible to set it up so the ribbon image is a composite of 9 separate images? If that's possible, it could work like this: there are 9 extra template variables, one for the center number/face, and then 1 for each of the 8 surrounding squares (a 0 or 1, meaning empty or visited-displaying the flag icon). If all 9 images were dumped into a 3x3 table, it could be an "easily" customizable ribbon that would display the number of squares visited, as well as which ones. Thepiguy 21:57, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

I'll see if I can do that. it might be hard to see at 44 px. I'll do a test in a moment.

You don't need the eight, because all eight is the happy face, just one to seven, the flag, the smiley and the unclicked square. I was thinking with the little flags around them just like you did in the example. The only image editor I have is MS Paint. which may help explain why yours are better. Here's what I had: File:Mine5.PNG :-) -Robyn 22:01, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

44px	This user has achieved Level 5 of the Minesweeper Geohash achievement by visiting geohashes in Vancouver, British Columbia and five of the surrounding graticules.

or

This user has achieved Level 5 of the Minesweeper Geohash achievement by visiting geohashes in Vancouver, British Columbia and two of the surrounding graticules.

Oh I was wrong. It looks pretty damned good at that scale. -Robyn 22:09, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

The code is huge and ugly now (and I'm not sure about all of the table variables, they need to be tweaked), but this is what I had in mind. Is it possible to set up additional variables that will change the image? There'd have to be a giant if/else block to manage the center square (unless it's possible to parse the string... *shudder*). I'll upload better image files later, what ever the default program is that I used, did a poor job of it. But the final product looks decent I think.

This user has achieved Level 2 of the Minesweeper Geohash achievement by visiting geohashes in Vancouver, British Columbia and two of the surrounding graticules.

As I said before, the code does not look as good though... Thepiguy 22:32, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

That's fine. I'm thnking about a good user interface and logic to determine what goes in what square. -Robyn 22:36, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

Hey, this is srs0 (I'm the guy who thepiguy mentioned). I'm looking into coding the ribbon now. If you've already started coding it, then never mind, but if not, I'll gladly give it a go. -Srs0 22:42, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

How were you planning on doing the 1-8 (without the flags)? Was it just going to be 8 separate ribbons? What if you just added an extra set of variables (1-8) that correspond to the 8 spaces. If they have a value of "0" it displace a blank space, and a value of "1" displays the flag. The user could just modify them like they set name and other options. Thepiguy 22:49, 25 August 2008 (UTC)

This most excellent discussion continued at Template talk:Minesweeper geohash.

Your graticule is cooler than mine :-)

Then again, British Columbia is about 20x larger than New Jersey. It also puts Florida into perspective, I just saw that regional map and it's smaller than I expected.