Inside Technique : DHTML Sokoban Service Pack 1
By Rajeev Hariharan

We updated the DHTML Sokoban game as well as the Level Designer HTA, fixed some bugs, added support for XSokoban levels, and most importantly, added a new public domain levelpack featuring over 50 horribly difficult levels. It's the masochist's favorite dream come true. Read on...

BugFixes

The Level Designer HTA unfortunately sported two ugly bugs, which, while not affecting the functionality of the program, were definitely annoying. First, the Instructions command would not work, because I had inadvertently left out the help file. Second, the Goto level command popped up a browser window out of seemingly nowhere. This happened because I seem to have left out the "return false" at the end of the onclick handler. Hey, nobody's perfect! Anyway, both these "issues" have been fixed in SP1.

XSokoban support

XSokoban is the granddaddy of all Sokoban implementations. Unfortunately, this amazing program works only on UNIX boxes, but there are literally thousands of levels designed for this program available on the Internet. In the earlier release of DHTML Sokoban, you could not port some of these levels to the sgp format, because XSokoban supported the game element BOXREST in the level design, while our program did not. Anyway, we added this feature, so now you can merrily port all the XSokoban levels you find to the sgp format.

XSokoban autogenerated gamepack

Yoshio Murase has compiled a list of over 50 devilishly difficult Sokoban levels that have been automatically generated by XSokoban. We ported these levels to the sgp format, in the file YOSHIO.SGP. If you enjoy these levels, be sure to tell Yoshio.

XSokoban levels are text files which contain one level per file. You can find these files by searching through two of the best Sokoban resources on the Internet, Yoshio's Sokoban Page, and Andreas' Sokoban Homepage. These sites have links to other pages that contain XSokoban levels.

We posted a special version of DHTML Sokoban (IE4, IE5 Only) to play these extremely difficult levels online, or you can download the entire gamepack and play it on your own system (22,850 bytes).

The DHTML Sokoban Series

The DHTML Sokoban Gamepack is the result of a three-part series that explores building the strategy game, DHTML Sokoban. To learn more about how DHTML Sokoban was created, we highly recommend you read the following articles.

Part I - Client-side Data Access
Explore using the common dialog control for file selection, using the tabular data control (TDC) for data retrieval and manipulation, and techniques for saving data on the client.
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Part II - DHTML Sokoban
Learn the design issues behind the development of the DHTML Sokoban game.
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Part III - Client Data Access with HTML Applications
Introduces you to IE5 HTAs (Hypertext Applications). Learn the differences between HTA and HTML pages and how to use the ADO Connection object to manipulate delimited text files.
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What's coming up

Next week we introduce Explorer Solitaire. This is a JScript library of playing-card functions which you can use to create your own Solitaire games. As a demonstration of this library, we will be presenting a collection of classic Solitaire games. See you then!

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