Let players choose (in General Options or in View) to display even a negative score. This should also affect the Undo graph.
Especially at the start of alignment puzzles the score often is in negative hundreds of thousands. It's not easy to track progress in score when there is only a big, fat 0, carved in stone.
I like this idea. However, one issue is how to display the score when it is too negative. As things now stand, puzzles tend to have a maximum score in the positive tends of thousands, but a negative score in the negative millions isn't impossible after using the alignment tool. Which of the following options is preferred?
If the score is below a certain threshold, say -100000, display as < -100000 (this has the advantage of simplicity but also the disadvantage of not solving the problem entirely [for practical purposes] if the cutoff is not low enough)
Switch to scientific notation after one point (this allows any number larger than negative infinity to be displayable, but can confuse those who do not understand the format)
I will bring this up at our weekly meeting, but to address the it "can confuse those who do not understand the format" issue… any changes would not occur by default.
This would be an advanced setting that players would chose, probably in general options like Madde suggested, so hopefully anyone who switches to it would not be confused.
Showing a negative score in the "Advanced GUI" is implemented. It will go out in a future release.
This has been posted in an update.
…and how about getting negative puzzle scores also by lua's get_score() command?
This would help the scripts to check easily if there is an improvement of puzzles from "real bad" to "not so good", and we wouldn't have to need the slow "add all segments scores" workaround anymore.
Regards,
Alex
By the way…
Negative scores are also displayed only as zero values on the undo graph, so you won't see positive score changes there, if the scores are not good enough.
How about changing this, too?
I wonder how negative scores could be shown in the undo graph, as they are often in the negative thousands or millions. I am not sure if that is a good idea.
@Christoph:
With a logarithmic y-axis, for example.
The reason is, that most times after an alignment, you have negative score because of the clashes, and you will have to do a shake and wiggle.
But sometimes even this doesn't work, because the backbones are stuck into themselves, so a rebuild is needed, which also results scores below zero most times (clashes again).
Since some time, the rebuild function creates a new point on the undo bar if it found a new shape (thanks for this), so it would be good to pick a good rebuild result, which can be better seen if also the negative scores are displayed relatively, not as a deadline.