Hex-a-Hop

This is a puzzle game for Windows or Linux.
I'm almost done:

!http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1887679.png(progress map)!

Has anyone else played this?

Love it!

I did get to roughly the completion level that you've got to about 3 years ago, but then wiped it from my phone. I had the foresight to take a copy of all my level scores, though. I've just started playing it again, and have got to about 80% quite quickly. Some levels I remember being arbitrary, almost annoying, so I have less incentive to even try to complete them a second time. I notice I've done inversion this time round in 166 (but historically 25, the par), but you're still missing that one.

Par for Inversion is 25??!! That's a clue, thanks, but please don't give any more. IMO that is by far the most difficult.

!http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1887947.jpg(Inversion puzzle)

!http://cf.geekdo-images.com/images/pic1887947.jpg(Inversion)!

25 achieved just now ;-)

I'll stick my scores up on a webpage...

Any game like this on android?

I finally figured out Inversion, did it in 25 also. Here are my below par scores:

Moving from left to right and then top to bottom on the map:
|_. Title |._ column |._ puzzle |._ best |._ par |
| Gun Platform | 7th column | 3rd puzzle | 160 | par is 162 |
| A Strange Place | 8th column | 5th puzzle | 88 | par is 90 |
| Bouncing Required | 10th column | 6th puzzle | 31 | par is 32 |
| Sprocket | 18th column | 2nd puzzle | 33 | par 37 |
| Commute | 19th column | 2nd puzzle | 69 | par 75 |
| Outposts | 21st column | 3rd puzzle | 11 | par 23 |

What condition do you use to decide you have to backtrack (that is that the remaining graph is not semi-Hamiltonian)?

Hex-a-hop introduces more elements to complicate matters as you progress. For example, there is a gun cell which fires a laser beam in the direction you jumped on it, destroying the first non-water cell it hits. If that destroyed cell was itself another gun cell, all adjacent cells are also destroyed (but there is no cascade if any of those adjacent cells were gun cells.) The above image of the Inversion puzzle shows a green "tower" cell and four "builder" cells. That green tower must be eliminated to solve the puzzle, but the only way to do so is to either get your hopper character up to the second level, or lower the tower. All green towers on the board will lower at the moment there are no flat green cells on the board. When you land on a builder, all adjacent water spaces turn into flat green cells, and all adjacent flat green cells turn into green towers. Then there are blue cells, which turn green when you jump off them, but the object does not require elimination of any blue cells. And so on.

So, some of the initial puzzles might be completely solvable using graph theory methods, but even there, simply eliminating all green from the grid is not enough. You must survive jumping off the last green to solve the puzzle. You're right that this is much like a "traveling salesman" graph problem, and some of the tactics invloved for solving those apply,

Here are my current ones:

Switch 13th column 1st puzzle best 52 par 61
Somewhat Constructive 18th column 4th row best 37 par 38
Only One Way Up 19th column 1st puzzle best 119 par 120
Spinners II 19th column 5th puzzle best 126 par 134
Forced Fire 19th column 7th puzzle best 100 par 120
Rental Boat 20th column 2nd puzzle best 31 par 33
Outposts 21st column 3rd puzzle best 11 par 23

Historically, I have records of (but can't prove) beating par in 25 levels.

*involved* not invloved :-)
Also I should say, the object does not *directly* require elimination of any blue cell.

I downloaded it a few days ago upon reading this thread and I'm really enjoying it. I'm 62% in now.

The par talk has me confused, though. What is it exactly and how do you determine it? I can't find any mention of it in the game itself. At first I thought it was the minimum number of moves required to solve each level, but it seems I'm wrong.

Meanwhile, I found Inversion completely trivial.

I'm starting to think that I'm not playing the same version of the game as you...

I guess they are using this page:

http://www.freesfonline.de/hexahop/hexahop.htm here, you need to be around 75%, then you upload your data\save1.dat and it munches it for you and tell the number of moves and the difference with the par (I guess what Beaumont thought was reasonable)...

Here are my historical scores, I've not updated them with my new scores.
http://fatphil.org/hexahop.html
100% finished!
78% mastered!
57% optimal!

No cyan :-( (but lots of green :-) )

Phil, why are your

03 Archipelago 30 33
05 Deathtrap 187 295
07 Eagerness 107 110
14 Two Fish 103 104
17 Opportunist 38 43
18 Somewhat Constructive 37 38
shown in green rather than yellow and

06 Deadly Snowflake 94 94
07 More Stripes 175 175
08 Wand 82 82
13 Tri Mesh 128 128
14 Leftovers 80 80
15 Wheel 46 46
19 House 23 23
21 Inversion 25 25
shown in yellow rather than green?

Luis, par is a feature that shows up as you progress. See the golden and green nodes in my map above? Golden indicates I reached par, which is not necessarily the lowest possible score. Green spiky means I got below par.

If Inversion was easy for you, you realized something which took me a while to understand. So maybe you're just smarter than I am :-) But hey, how about Breakthrough, 17th column 1st puzzle? I haven't solved that one yet.

Thanks for the info, David.

I don't have access to Breakthrough yet. I'm 65% in now, and need to solve 10 more levels to unlock the rocky cove where that level is.

@MarleysGhost: Addressing only your first and last examples - 30 is the optimal known score, I have attained it, therefore it's green. 25 is par, but not optimal, so it's yellow. If there's anything that deviates from that pattern, then it's a bug in whatever generated the webpage that I saved.

@Phil: Oops. My mistake. I read "Scores in yellow are par" and apparently extrapolated via brainfutz rather than read the rest. D'oh!

Hmm, David, Breakthrough looks insane indeed. :/

Dunno how I did my historical
17 Breakthrough 119 136
But I've just finally completed it this time in 137, not entirely sure what I did! :^/

Hmm, just did the simplest thing possible, and got 136. Still no idea how to improve on that. I'd need to not blow up 2 hexes.

Hmm, just tweaked that to 132...

Has anyone got green on Laser Surgery? Seems impossible to me.

Is it necessarily possible to get below par on every level?

Historically back in 2009:
20 Laser Surgery 39 38
Not completed this time round.

I think par scores were the best scores achieved by the author of the game, and so are all attainable, and why some are beatable.

I see. I first got 39 and then made a slight adjustment to get to par. I tried similar stuff to get below par but it didn't work.

Inversion 23

Breakthrough 119

Breakthrough 109

Breakthrough 115.

I thought 25 was optimal for Inversion, but I just got 23 as well. :)

Hola Luis - it's just clicked, you're Luis Bolaños Mures on r.g.a!

Inversion == Argh!!!!

I can do it in 25, 27, 28, 29, and higher, but 23 is eluding me!

Hi, FatPhil, yes, that's me. :)

I wouldn't have guessed that Inversion could be solved in 23 moves if na_wspak hadn't said it, but it didn't prove hard to do once I knew it was possible.

On optimal you've got the best scores recorded up to now.
Some were computed using a matlab solver by Bradley Knockel.

Perhaps the next step would be, use an automated solver in conjunction with an automated puzzle maker? Does anyone know of Hex-a-Hop puzzles other than the 100?

Forced Fire 99

and now Forced Fire 98

Commute 65

On my computer, the name of the 1st puzzle in the 5th column is cut off by the top border of the screen. Does this happen to you guys as well?

If so, figuring out the name of that puzzle without looking it up anywhere is a nice little puzzle in itself. Alas, I only realized this after looking the name up on the optimal scores web page. :)

I was trying to run on a Mac and ran afoul of "sdl-config" trouble:

@checking for sdl-config... no@
@checking for SDL - version >= 1.2.0... no@
@\*\*\* The sdl-config script installed by SDL could not be found@
@\*\*\* If SDL was installed in PREFIX, make sure PREFIX/bin is in@
@\*\*\* your path, or set the SDL_CONFIG environment variable to the@
@\*\*\* full path to sdl-config.@

Can anyone help?

I could point out that this was while trying to run @./configure@ but, on the other hand, anyone who knows what that message means probably already knows that....

On linux, some libraries were missing too, I had to :

sudo apt-get install libsdl1.2-dev libgconf2-dev

Hope this helps.