Creating new puzzlesTable of Contents
As described in the previous section, you can create new puzzles by clicking on the Create new puzzle button on the puzzle collection.
Clicking this button opens the puzzle creation dialog, which consists of three pages:
On the first page, select an image file which shall be sliced into pieces. Be sure to enter the correct metadata for the image: You should give attribution to the author of the image (e.g. the photographer or the painter); please respect the copyright of the image author.
On the second page, you can select the type of pieces into which the image shall be sliced. Palapeli comes with a collection of slicers preinstalled, but third-party slicers may also be available.
On the final page of the dialog, the selected slicer can be customized e.g. by choosing a different piece count or by adjusting parameters of the piece shape. The available set of options depends which slicer has been selected.
This manual will continue to discuss the slicers which come with Palapeli. If you have downloaded a third-party slicer plugin for Palapeli, please refer to the documentation of this plugin if you have trouble installing or using it on your system.
The Palapeli Slicer Collection produces realistical jigsaw pieces with various basic patterns:
- Rectangular grid
Contains the well-known rectangular pieces.
- Cairo grid
With its pentagonal pieces and unequal edge angles, it's rather hard to puzzle because the pieces fit together in an unfamiliar manner.
- Hexagonal grid
Produces hexagonal pieces, arranged like honeycomb cells.
- Rotrex grid
Through a special composition of triangular, hexagonal and rectangular pieces, the pieces form a pattern resembling to many intersecting circles.
- Irregular grid
This grid is available only if you have installed qvoronoi from the qhull package. qvoronoi is used to calculate irregular piece shapes from randomly placed points.
The Palapeli Slicer Collection has various parameters which control the appearance of the piece edges, especially the plugs on them. Default settings are provided for all of these parameters. An additional preset mode is available which reduces the amount of parameters to a bare minimum. The following parameters are available usually:
- Approx. piece count
- Flipped edge percentage
The probability for each plug to be flipped. A plug is considered flipped if it points in the opposite direction as it would in a fully regular grid. On the rectangular grid, this results in pieces with 3 or 4 plugs pointing inwards resp. outwards. Position the slider at the very left to obtain the normal fully regular grid. In the middle, plug orientation is random. At the right, the grid is fully regular again, but with an "alternate" rule. This does not mean reversal of all plugs: In the alternate regular grid, for instance, each piece has four inward-pointing or four outward-pointing plugs. This setting has no effect in the irregular grid.
- Edge curviness
Determines how curvy the edges are, i.e. how strongly the borders dent in or bulge out. Move the slider to the very left to obtain straight edge lines (except for the plugs).
- Plug size
Determines the size of the plug part of each edge. The default setting (middle position of the slider) is chosen to look like a real puzzle. The slider ranges from 50% to 150% this size, which already looks obscenely large. The program tries very hard to avoid collisions between plugs. Colliding edges are reshaped multiple times and shrinked in small steps. However there still remain cases where no solution can be found, especially for large plug sizes.
- Diversity of curviness
Determines how much the curviness (see above) varies between edges. Move the slider to the left to make the dents and bulges look all the same. At the right, there may occur very curvy and very straight borders.
- Diversity of plug position
Determines how much the position of the plug on the edge varies. At the very left, plugs are affixed to the middle of their edge.
- Diversity of plugs
Determines how individual the plugs look like. At the very left, plugs look all the same. At the very right, each plug will be a unique piece of art crafted especially for you.
- Irr.: Diversity of piece size
Only for irregular grid: Determines how the piece size varies. A very small setting means nearly no variation; crystallite-like structure arise. Higher settings produce very small and very large pieces.
- Dump grid image
Save an image of the grid (black edges on white background) at
~/goldberg-slicer-dump.png. If a previous dump exists, it is overwritten.