SGT‐SLANT(6)

📦

version 20250730.a7c7826 · 4 versions

20250730.a7c7826 · ubuntu stonking (latest)
20191231.79a5378 · ubuntu jammy
20230122.806ae71 · debian bookworm
20230410.71cf891 · debian trixie, ubuntu noble, ubuntu questing, ubuntu resolute

✨ SGT-SLANT(6) — Games ✨

okay bestie sit DOWN because today's manual page is sgt-slant from section 6 (that's "Games" to you and me 🎮) and it is literally a maze-drawing puzzle and I am obsessed.

🌸 NAME 🌸

sgt-slant — a maze-drawing puzzle. that's it. that's the whole vibe. 🦋

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

sgt-slant [--generate n] [--print wxh [--with-solutions] [--scale n]
[--colour]] [game-parameters|game-ID|random-seed]

sgt-slant --version

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so picture this: you have a grid of squares. that's your canvas, your moment, your main character era. 🫶

your goal? draw a diagonal line through each square, and decide which way each line slants so that these conditions get met:

the diagonal lines NEVER form a loop. not ever. no cap. 🔥
any point with a circled number has precisely that many lines meeting at it. so a 4 is the centre of a cross shape — iconic — whereas a 0 is the centre of a diamond shape. or rather, a partial diamond shape, because a zero can never appear in the middle of the grid, since that would immediately cause a loop. 💀

credit for this puzzle goes to Nikoli (https://www.nikoli.co.jp/ja/puzzles/gokigen_naname/ — that link is in Japanese, iykyk).

🖱️ Slant controls 🖱️

left-click in a blank square → drops a \ in there (a line leaning to the left, running from the top-left of the square down to the bottom-right).
right-click in a blank square → drops a / in there (leaning to the right, running from top-right to bottom-left). ✨

and if you just keep clicking either button, it cycles between the three possible square contents:

spam left-click and a blank square goes blank → \ → / → back to blank.
spam right-click and it goes blank → / → \ → back to blank.

(which means you can play the whole entire game with one single button if that's what you need to do. one-button queen behavior. 👑)

you can also use the cursor keys to move around the grid. pressing return or space will place a \ or a /, respectively, and will then cycle them the same way as above. you can also press / or </kbd> to place a / or \, respectively, independent of whatever is already sitting in the cursor square. and Backspace removes any line from the cursor square. clean slate bestie 🧚

(all the actions described below are also available. yes, all of them.)

📐 Slant parameters 📐

these live behind the ‘Custom...’ option on the ‘Type’ menu.

Width, Height — size of the grid, in squares. 🌈
Difficulty — controls how hard the generated puzzle is. at Hard level, you're required to do deductions based on knowledge of relationships between squares, rather than always being able to deduce the exact contents of one square at a time. (for example: you might know that two squares slant in the same direction, even if you don't yet know what that direction is, and this might enable you to deduce something about still other squares.) and even at Hard level, guesswork and backtracking should never be necessary. we love a fair fight. 💅

⚙️ Slant user preferences ⚙️

on platforms that support user preferences, the ‘Preferences’ option on the ‘Game’ menu will let you configure which way round the mouse buttons work. yes bestie, you can flip them. live your truth. 🙈

🎮 Common actions 🎮

these actions are all available from the ‘Game’ menu and via keyboard shortcuts, on top of any game-specific actions.

(one tiny note: on Mac OS X, to conform with local user interface standards, these actions are situated on the ‘File’ and ‘Edit’ menus instead. it's giving ✨platform conventions✨.)

New game (N, Ctrl+N) — starts a new game, with a random initial state. fresh start, new era. 🌱
Restart game — resets the current game to its initial state. (and yes, this can be undone. so don't panic.)
Load — loads a saved game from a file on disk.
Save — saves the current state of your game to a file on disk.
Print — where supported (currently only on Windows), brings up a dialog allowing you to print an arbitrary number of puzzles randomly generated from the current parameters, optionally including the current puzzle. (only for puzzles which make sense to print, of course — it's hard to think of a sensible printable representation of Fifteen! 😭)
Undo (U, Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+_, *) — undoes a single move. (you can undo moves all the way back to the start of the session. no judgment.)
Redo (R, Ctrl+R, #) — redoes a previously undone move. the comeback arc. 🔥
Copy — copies the current state of your game to the clipboard in text format, so you can paste it into (say) an e-mail client or a web message board if you're discussing the game with someone else. (not all games support this feature, so don't come for me.)
Solve — transforms the puzzle instantly into its solved state. for some games (Cube) this feature is not supported at all because it is of no particular use. for other games (such as Pattern), the solved state can be used to give you information, if you can't see how a solution can exist at all, or you want to know where you made a mistake. for still other games (such as Sixteen), automatic solution tells you nothing about how to get to the solution, but it does provide a useful way to get there quickly so that you can experiment with set-piece moves and transformations. some games (such as Solo) are capable of solving a game ID you have typed in from elsewhere. other games (such as Rectangles) cannot solve a game ID they didn't invent themself, but when they did invent the game ID they know what the solution is already. still other games (Pattern) can solve some external game IDs, but only if they aren't too difficult. also: the ‘Solve’ command adds the solved state to the end of the undo chain for the puzzle. in other words, if you want to go back to solving it yourself after seeing the answer, you can just press Undo. 👑
Quit (Q, Ctrl+Q) — closes the application entirely. goodbye bestie 😭
Preferences — where supported, brings up a dialog allowing you to configure personal preferences about a particular game. some of these preferences will be specific to a particular game; others will be common to all games. one option common to all games allows you to turn off the one-key shortcuts like ‘N’ for new game or ‘Q’ for quit, so that there's less chance of hitting them by accident. you can still access the same shortcuts with the Ctrl key. 🫶

🧩 Specifying games with the game ID 🧩

there are two whole ways to save a game specification out of a puzzle and recreate it later, or recreate it in somebody else's copy of the same puzzle. generous of them honestly.

the ‘Specific’ and ‘Random Seed’ options from the ‘Game’ menu (or the ‘File’ menu, on Mac OS X) each show a piece of text — a ‘game ID’ — which is sufficient to reconstruct precisely the same game at a later date. 💖

you can enter either of these pieces of text back into the program (via the same ‘Specific’ or ‘Random Seed’ menu options) at a later point, and it will recreate the same game. you can also use either one as a command line argument (on Windows or Unix); see below for more detail.

the difference between the two forms is that a descriptive game ID is a literal description of the initial state of the game, whereas a random seed is just a piece of arbitrary text which was provided as input to the random number generator used to create the puzzle. which means:

descriptive game IDs tend to be longer in many puzzles (although some, such as Cube (sgt-cube(6)), only need very short descriptions). so a random seed is often a quicker way to note down the puzzle you're currently playing, or to tell it to somebody else so they can play the same one as you. 📝
any text at all is a valid random seed. the automatically generated ones are fifteen-digit numbers, but anything will do — you can type in your full name, or a word you just made up, and a valid puzzle will be generated from it. this gives you a way for two or more people to race to complete the same puzzle: you think of a random seed, then everybody types it in at the same time, and nobody has an advantage due to having seen the generated puzzle before anybody else. 🏁✨
it is often possible to convert puzzles from other sources (such as ‘nonograms’ or ‘sudoku’ from newspapers) into descriptive game IDs suitable for use with these programs.
random seeds are not guaranteed to produce the same result if you use them with a different version of the puzzle program. this is because the generation algorithm might have been improved or modified in later versions of the code, and will therefore produce a different result when given the same sequence of random numbers. so use a descriptive game ID if you aren't sure that it will be used on the same version of the program as yours.

(use the ‘About’ menu option to find out the version number of the program. programs with the same version number running on different platforms should still be random-seed compatible.)

a descriptive game ID starts with a piece of text which encodes the parameters of the current game (such as grid size). then there is a colon, and after that is the description of the game's initial state. a random seed starts with a similar string of parameters, but then it contains a hash sign followed by arbitrary data.

if you enter a descriptive game ID, the program will not be able to show you the random seed which generated it, since it wasn't generated from a random seed. if you enter a random seed, however, the program will be able to show you the descriptive game ID derived from that random seed. 🔄

note that the game parameter strings are not always identical between the two forms. for some games, there will be parameter data provided with the random seed which is not included in the descriptive game ID. this is because that parameter information is only relevant when generating puzzle grids, and is not important when playing them. thus, for example, the difficulty level in Solo (sgt-solo(6)) is not mentioned in the descriptive game ID. lowkey makes sense, highkey still confusing. 💀

these additional parameters are also not set permanently if you type in a game ID. for example, suppose you have Solo set to ‘Advanced’ difficulty level, and then a friend wants your help with a ‘Trivial’ puzzle; so the friend reads out a random seed specifying ‘Trivial’ difficulty, and you type it in. the program will generate you the same ‘Trivial’ grid which your friend was having trouble with, but once you have finished playing it, when you ask for a new game it will automatically go back to the ‘Advanced’ difficulty which it was previously set on. 🌈 periodt.

💅 that's the end of part 1 bestie — part 2 is right there waiting for you, don't go anywhere ✨

okay so if your game has a ‘Type’ menu, it might be hiding a lil list of preset game settings in there. Pick one of those and boom — you're in a brand new random game with exactly the parameters that preset specifies. ✨

That menu might also have a ‘Custom’ option, which is the one that lets you fine-tune your game parameters like the little control freak you are (affectionate 💅). And here's the thing: the parameters available are specific to each game, and they're all described in the sections that follow. iykyk.

🌸 Specifying game parameters on the command line 🌸

heads up bestie: this section does not apply to the Mac OS X version. 🫶

So the games in this collection deliberately do not ever save information on to the computer they run on — like, ever. No high score tables. No saved preferences. Nothing. (The reason is adorable and a little chaotic: the author expects at least some people to play them at work, and those people will probably appreciate leaving as little evidence as possible! 😭💀)

BUT. If you do want one of these games to default to a particular set of parameters, you can just specify them on the command line. easy.

The easiest way to do this:

Set up the parameters you want using the ‘Type’ menu (see above ✨).
Then select ‘Random Seed’ from the ‘Game’ or ‘File’ menu (see above).

The text in the ‘Game ID’ box will be composed of two parts, separated by a hash. The first of those parts represents the game parameters (the size of the playing area, for example, and anything else you set using the ‘Type’ menu).

If you run the game with just that parameter text on the command line, it will start up with the settings you specified. no cap. 👑

For example: if you run Cube (see sgt-cube(6)), select ‘Octahedron’ from the ‘Type’ menu, and then go to the game ID selection, you will see a string of the form ‘o2x2#338686542711620’. Take only the part before the hash (‘o2x2’), and start Cube with that text on the command line: ‘sgt-cube o2x2’.

If you copy the entire game ID on to the command line, the game will start up in the specific game that was described. This is occasionally a more convenient way to start a particular game ID than by pasting it into the game ID selection box. genuinely iconic behaviour. 💖

(You could also retrieve the encoded game parameters using the ‘Specific’ menu option instead of ‘Random Seed’, but if you do then some options, such as the difficulty level in Solo, will be missing. See above for more details on this.)

💜 Unix command-line options 💜

this section only applies to the Unix port, bestie.

In addition to being able to specify game parameters on the command line (see above), there are various other options:

--game, --load — these options respectively determine whether the command-line argument is treated as specifying game parameters or a save file to load. Only one should be specified. If neither of these options is specified, a guess is made based on the format of the argument.
--generate n — if this option is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a number of descriptive game IDs will be invented and printed on standard output. This is useful for gaining access to the game generation algorithms without necessarily using the frontend.

If game parameters are specified on the command-line, they will be used to generate the game IDs; otherwise a default set of parameters will be used.

The most common use of this option is in conjunction with --print, in which case its behaviour is slightly different; see below.

--delete-prefs — this option causes the puzzle to delete the configuration file in which its user preferences were stored, if there is one. bye bye preferences 🧚
--print wxh — if this option is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, a printed representation of one or more unsolved puzzles is sent to standard output, in PostScript format.

On each page of puzzles, there will be w across and h down. If there are more puzzles than w×*h*, more than one page will be printed.

If --generate has also been specified, the invented game IDs will be used to generate the printed output. Otherwise, a list of game IDs is expected on standard input (which can be descriptive or random seeds; see above), in the same format produced by --generate.

For example:

sgt-net --generate 12 --print 2x3 7x7w | lpr

will generate two pages of printed Net puzzles (each of which will have a 7×7 wrapping grid), and pipe the output to the lpr command, which on many systems will send them to an actual printer.

There are various other options which affect printing; see below. ⭐

--save file-prefix [ --save-suffix file-suffix ] — if this option is specified, instead of a puzzle being displayed, saved-game files for one or more unsolved puzzles are written to files constructed from the supplied prefix and/or suffix.