After slightly less than two years, I am happy to announce that I have released Version 1.2 of Shades.

In this update, I have added:
-A pause feature ([mode]) and a restart feature.
-A "ghost" line of color beneath each tile that is dropping.
-Instantaenous tile dropping (when you press the down key).
-The [2nd] key now acts as another enter/selection button.



Hope you all enjoy.

Yay! This is a great long-awaited feature!
Now if I could edit my review, I could tell people about this.
/me nudges admins

Wow, I didn't even think about adding this. It'll definitely be useful when trying to see the different shades!


Will do!

Shades has just reached 1500 downloads! Thank you so much guys!

If you haven't downloaded v1.2 yet, be sure you do. Also, be sure to leave a rating/review!

I really like the new update, especially the ghost line. It makes it a little bit easier though, but I like it, since it was rather hard to determine the right greyscale.

It has recently come to my attention that there are 2 minor bugs in the program. These don't occur very often, but they are still there.

1. I haven't been able to pinpoint exactly when and why this happens, but some time when the tiles are all stacked to the top, the game will crash and prevent you from keeping your high score, if you made one. Since becoming aware of this, I have not been able to replicate it, so I can't say what type of error it is.

2. Let's say you have a black tile on top of a medium gray tile, and on top of the black tile is another medium gray tile (see picture below). If you create an entire row of black tiles, and that row gets cleared, then you end up with 2 of the same color tile stacked on top of each other. What needs to happen is that once the black row gets cleared, the medium gray tile falls down and merges with its twin.


Anyways, I hope to get these bugs resolved as soon as possible. I believe PT_ was also willing to look into it if he has the time.

I have been working a little bit on a Shades CE bot, which would allow you to watch the calculator play Shades on it's own for a while. Currently, on average, it gets up to 30,000-35,000 points before losing, which is due to unfortunate circumstances that force it to place multiple darker blocks on top of lighter blocks.

The algorithm may need a bit of revising, but here it is:

Code:

It may not be much, but let me know if you're interested in this! And also your thoughts on what a perfect algorithm might be. I might have to incorporate placing blocks as low as possible, but saving the spot for a darker tile would still have to take priority.

You may get the current program here: http://www.mediafire.com/file/q0iwa4rcxbca24m/LRNSHADE.8xp
(Note: you still need the ZSHADES subprogram from the main project)