Freecell Solver 2.40.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.40.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This release contains a fix to a string overflow with processing the command line arguments, and an optimised command-line preset that can be invoked as -l blue-yonder (or -l by for short) that solves the Microsoft 32,000 deals in under 100 seconds on a Pentium 4 2.4GHz machine. It also contains some more minor changes: there is now a Scan: header with the name of the current soft thread, when debugging under -s -i, an off-by-1 iterations count was fixed and the iteration handling callback is now applied globally to all the instances. Finally, make_pysol_freecell_board.py has support for generating PySol's and PySolFC's "Black Hole" Solitaire deals, intended for my newly released Black Hole Solitaire Solver.

Enjoy!

Freecell Solver 2.38.0 was Released

Freecell Solver version 2.38.0 has been released. It is available in the form of a source tarball from the download page.

This is a minor release which makes sure one can build Freecell Solver outside the source distribution (e.g: mkdir build ; cd build ; cmake ..) without AsciiDoc, adds a --pysolfc (or an -F for short) flag to make_pysol_freecell_board.py and fixes one of the help displays.

Screencast of Freecell Solver in Action

Yesterday, I spent some time on preparing a screencast of PySolFC auto-solving a deal of Freecell using Freecell Solver . Here's an embedded player:

I remember the first time I saw KDE's KPatience automatically solving a deal of Freecell, while using Freecell Solver as its back-end. Seeing the cards move on their own was very cool, and brought me a lot of joy. Now that PySolFC has built-in support for Freecell Solver, I was able to use it to prepare the screencast. I hope you'll enjoy seeing this screencast, and would be interested in trying out PySolFC and Freecell Solver.

I'm going to blog about how I prepared the screencast on my tech blog, which may prove instructive to other people wanting to prepare screencasts on Linux. This was the first video I ever prepared and producing it proved to be a pleasant experience, even though some tasks did not work right away.