JSoko
JSoko is a Java program for playing the Sokoban game.
It's developed as an open source program at www.sourceforge.net
Current version of JSoko is 2.22
Suggestions or any questions? Write to: JSoko(at)mail.de
Sokoban News
Sokoban YASC 1.679 has been published
Brian Damgaard has published a new version of his great and widely used Sokoban YASC program.
The release notes for this new version:
- New puzzle editor feature: Convert untraversed floor squares to wall squares.
This new tool enables puzzle authors to automatically convert floor tiles unused in existing solutions and snapshots to wall tiles.
It contributes to the puzzle creation process by removing unnecessary open space, resulting in cleaner and more focused puzzle designs.
Thanks to Matthias Meger and Anian Wu for this suggestion. - The thread limit for the Sokolution solver plug-in has been raised from 85% to 100% of the available logical CPU cores.
- Minor changes.
Sokoban YASC 1.678 has been published
Brian Damgaard has published a new version of his great and widely used Sokoban YASC program.
The release notes for this new version:
- Updated the Sokolution solver plug-in to support the new features and accommodate the new parameter syntax introduced in Sokolution version 7.2.
Sokoban YASC includes plug-in scripts for several major solvers, such as Sokolution by Florent Diedler and Festival by Yaron Shoham.
These programs must be downloaded separately from their respective websites due to license restrictions.
Once installed, the plug-in scripts seamlessly integrate these external programs into the Sokoban YASC environment, allowing users to launch, stop, and manage tasks from the solver queue.
Thanks to Matthias Meger and Florent Diedler for contributing to this update.
- Minor changes.
Sokoban YASC 1.677 has been published
Brian Damgaard has published a new version of his great and widely used Sokoban YASC program.
The release notes for this new version:
- The "Find similar puzzles" variant of the puzzle duplicate finder has been significantly improved.
It now uses the Levenshtein edit distance algorithm for comparisons. ("Levenshtein" is spelled correctly - it's not a typo.)
Previously, this variant relied on a simpler, more direct comparison method.
While it also used normalized puzzle boards and also allowed for a match threshold percentage to account for variations, the results were less flexible than those achieved with the new algorithm.
The other two duplicate finder variants, "Find all duplicate puzzles" and "Find duplicates of the current collection", remain unchanged.
They still search for exact duplicates (considering puzzle normalization) rather than similar puzzles, as the computational cost of a similarity-based search would be prohibitive. - The built-in puzzle generator has been enhanced to produce better-quality puzzles.
Previously, it was prone to carving dead-end tunnels and placing goals or boxes in them.
While this was an easy way for the generator to increase the number of pushes - a key metric for creating more complex and interesting puzzles - such puzzles often turned out to be trivial and too easy to solve.
For example, here is an auto-generated puzzle with a promising beginning, but after unwinding its initial knot, the remainder becomes trivial:
"--9#|--#3-4.#|--#--6#|--#3-#|3#-$-#|#-$--4#|#7-#|4#-$$-#|3-##@-##|4-4#".
The improved algorithm now avoids creating dead-end tunnels in most cases, resulting in more challenging puzzles. - Bugfix: Filling the optimizer task queue with solutions from a puzzle file containing thousands of puzzles can take so long time that the user might choose to switch to another application during the import.
This worked as expected, but if the user switched to the Windows desktop instead of another application, then a harmless but highly technical error message would appear on the screen.
After dismissing the message, the user could restart the import from where it left off.
This issue has now been resolved for the optimizer task queue and the puzzle generator task queue.
The solver task queue, which uses a similar import mechanism, already handled this scenario correctly.
- Minor changes.
Sokoban e-mail group
Visit: Sokoban group
Acknowledgements
JSoko is developed with the help of the YourKit Java Profiler.
YourKit is kindly supporting open source projects with its full-featured Java Profiler. YourKit, LLC is the creator of innovative and intelligent tools for profiling Java and .NET applications. Take a look at YourKit's leading software products:
