WordPuzzle Help

Description

Play a puzzle game with words. The game ends when no words can be put on the board, that is, when there is no more space. This also happens in Scrabble, usually before the letters run out.

You can't run at the same time more than one instance of the program.

Playing

The dialog automatically resizes (only when the program starts) to fit on most part of the desktop.

The board panel is divided in columns and rows; you can set these numbers in the dialog.

To create a puzzle do the following: press "Ctrl + N". If you want to use another dictionary and start a new game, use the "Load dictionary" menu. To increase the difficulty of a game, increase the number of columns and rows before you begin a game.

The stock letters are unlimited. They are generated randomly, proportional with the letter probabilities specified in the current dictionary.

Drag a stock letter on another to swap them.

Drag a stock letter on a free cell of the board, to move it there. Each such letter is called loose.

Drag a letter from the board on a free stock letter cell, to move it there.

Drag a letter from the board on a free cell of the board, to move it there. Right click on a loose letter from the board to send it to the first empty space on the stock letters.

Click the "Put word on board" button to permanently put the word on the board. To be able to click this button, on the board must be a word formed from at least 2 letters. All loose letters (and the letters they connect to) must form a word readable left to right or top to bottom; only one word must be formed, not more. It is not mandatory for the word to be in the current dictionary.

The "Put flipped word" button is just like the "Put word on board" button, but the word must be readable right to left or bottom to top.

The score for each turn is the sum of each loose letter's score plus the score for the length of the word (actually, just for the number of the loose letters).

Click the "New stock letters" button to change all stock letters (the loose letters from the board are deleted). If you want to change just one stock letter to a specific letter, click "RMB" on it and choose the desired letter from the menu. You can change letters only a limited number of times, depending on the size of the board.

You can save a puzzle (into a ".wpg" file), so that you could close the program at any time, and resume the puzzle later. You can directly load a puzzle file by viewing or running it.

Create dictionaries

You can create a dictionary for any language. The alphabet can have maximum 40 letters.

There are two types of files that have to be created. The dictionary file (a ".wpd" file) contains values for the initialization process; this file must exist. The words list file (a ".txt" file) contains words; this file is not mandatory.

Both files must be put in the "WordPuzzleDictionaries" directory.

Dictionary files

These files are distributed along with the program.

The "WordsListName" field contains the file name of the words list used by the dictionary. If you change this, you can use different wordlists for the same language.

The "FontName" field contains the name of the font used to display the alphabet. You can change this according to your language (actually, the language of the dictionary).

If the "Main" section contains the "Alphabet" field then the alphabet is extracted from this field, and letter probabilities are automatically calculated from the words list (which must have at least 1'000 words), and therefore the "Char?" and "Prob?" fields are not used. This field can contain up to 40 consecutive characters; there must be at least 10 characters.

The "Alphabet" section contains the letters used for words. The alphabet of each dictionary can be set by the user. There can be up to 40 characters defined as letters of the alphabet; there must be at least 10 characters.

The "Char?" fields contain the characters of the alphabet, used as letters; "?" can be a number between 0 and 39. They must be organized alphabetically (according to the order you consider to be alphabetically).

The "Prob?" field contains the probability for the associated letter to be randomly generated on each turn, as a number between 0 and 1000; "?" can be a number between 0 and 39. The probability for each letter, used by the program, is the letter's probability divided by the sum of all letter's probabilities. The score of each letter is automatically calculated from its probability, as a number between 1 and 10.

The "LengthScores" section contains the score for each length of the word (actually, just for the number of the loose letters) put on the board. For the lengths that are not specified, the score is zero.

Words list files

These files are not (all) distributed with the program, but you can download them from the program's website.

The word that will be put on the board is searched within this file.

Each line of the file must contain one word. It does not matter if the words are sorted or not, or if there is any duplicate word. The letters are not case-sensitive, so they can be both big and small. However, some characters (those outside the normal Latin alphabet) must have the same case in both the alphabet and words list, preferably in uppercase for better visibility.

Words lists files can contain other characters than those specified in the alphabet, but these characters can't be used by the program (though they can be displayed).

You can create a dictionary for any language and send it to be integrated. If it includes a words list file that contains at least 10'000 words, the file will be available for download on the program's website. If the words list is domain specific (like geographical names) then it has to contain at least 1'000 words. On request, your name and email address will also be available to the public.

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