old puzzle types the new Foldit? (for recipe writers)

[LociOiling]

The new Foldit has a some old features lurking in the Lua API. It's not clear whether these features will ever be used again. Recipes that include these fossil API calls are larger and more difficult to maintain, and may be slower than recipes without the calls.

Can we get some guidance on future directions? Fossil functions could be officially deprecated and converted to "no-op" calls for the sake of speed.

• It's been a long time since we saw a contact map puzzle. Are there plans for future contact map puzzles, or can the functions contactmap.GetHeat and contactmap.IsContact be deprecated?

• Puzzle "metrics" were introduced as a slower version of objectives, but quickly disappeared. Can the "metric" namespace functions be deprecated?

• Sketchbook puzzles didn't have any unique Lua functions, but some recipes include logic to support them. Do we see any more sketchbook puzzles on the horizon?

If we do see a future revival of contact map or sketchbook puzzles, it would be nice to have Lua functions to quickly determine their presence. Something like a contactmap.GetCount to determine the number of contacts or a sketchbook.GetMoves to determine the moves remaining. Maybe better yet would be a puzzle.GetType to quickly determine the features of a given puzzle.

[LociOiling]

Not directly related, but another one in the "it would be nice" category is density puzzles. Just a simple function that indicates whether a puzzle contains any density would be a help. The current state of the art is looking at the density subscore of one or more segments. The problem is that the density may be zero for any given segment, so you really need to look at multiple segments to be sure.

[jeff101]

Another workaround might be to use LUA to read the puzzle name into a string,
then search that string for certain keywords that indicate the puzzle type.