Hi @SteffenBauer

This is not really an issue - I am just trying to get in touch with you to ask if you are interested to add a couple of more puzzles.

Some years ago I developed a few puzzles for the sgt-puzzles collection, but for various reasons they didn't make it into the official collection. Which is a pity because I think they are quite good. The most notable one is Kakuro - I don't think any puzzle collection would be complete without it. Then I stumbled upon this repository by chance. So I though that, instead of everyone making their own repositories with add-ons to sgt-puzzles, there might be a point trying to pool them.

Please let me know if you want to know more. Either here, or you can mail me: anders dot holst at ri dot se.
(By the way, I'm into machine learning too.)

Best Regards
Anders Holst

Hi Steffen,

I have hacked quite a bit on your solo extension. I may of course eventually add it on my own page, but first I wanted to check with you if there are any of those modifications that you like, and want to include in your version.

The background is that I by chance (or by youtubes algorithms) found the youtube channel "Cracking the cryptic". I got quite fascinated by the sudokus there with no (or almost no) given clue numbers (but instead various other conditions to make the solution unique). Your manual mode of solo_plus then came in very handy. But I quickly realized that to solve those puzzles in solo_plus, several extra features were needed. So therefore I implemented them. However, many of them can be useful also for normal sudokus.

In summary, what I have added:

• Both upper and lower pencil marks (you need different meanings of the pencil marks, for example "this cell can only be 2 or 3", as opposed to "a 2 must go in one of these cells")

• Possibility to color background of cells (sometimes you know that a set of cells maust be the same number, but not yet which - trying to use numbered pencil marks for this is sure to cause confusion)

• Select several cells at once, to color or set (convenient if you eg want to add the same set of pencil marks to several cells)

• Multi-digit numbers, instead of using letters for numbers above 9 (I prefer "10", "11" etc over lower case letters "a" and "b" etc. And I knew how to do it, and besides I needed the letters to specify colors)

• Extended manual mode, can now input different sizes, x, jigsaw, and killer (by selecting several cells you can specify cages and regions. This was the most urgent addition to be able to play those weird boards from Cracking the cryptic, although you still need to keep track of all special conditions yourself of course)

• As a consequence of the above, I had to slightly adjust the appearance and behaviour of some of your additions, ie the highlighted hints and the +/- keys, hopefully without degrading the functionality too much.

A more detailed description of all the modifications are in the comments near the top in the source code (after everyone else's comments).

Note that this is not the final version. Surely much can be enhanced. Naturally the interface is more complex with more functionality, so it may take a while getting used to what happens when clicking left or right, with or without shift, in selected or non-selected squares. (Squeezing in much functionality in just a few available buttons/keys in a self explanatory and intuitive way is always a challenge, so I can not promise I succeeded, but I tried the best I could.)

I attach the code here (renamed to txt to be able to attach it), rather than creating a huge pull request, since I don't expect you to want it all right now. But please try it out and tell me what you think.

Best Regards
Anders

solo_plus.txt