Any interest in Mahjong Solitaire?

[RyanBurnside]

I've spent the afternoon (about 6 hours) making some tiles (they're still in progress).
I may do a Medley version of the Mahjong Solitaire game if there is interest.
The graphics I did in GrafX2 then imported.

I play occasionally on my Linux computer.

[pamoroso]

It looks fantastic. By the way, to show a bitmap without the rest of the interface of the bitmap editor you may also use function WINDOWBM of the BITMAPFNS LispUsers module.

[RyanBurnside]

Thanks for the tip!

[nbriggs]

Re: WINDOWBM -- I should point out that it's just a tiny convenience wrapper over createw & bitblt to make a window that's big enough to display the whole bitmap --

(WINDOWBM
  [LAMBDA (BITMAP POSITION)                                  (* JWogulis "26-Dec-84 15:37")
    (IF (AND POSITION (NOT (POSITIONP POSITION)))
        THEN (ERROR "NOT A POSITION" POSITION))
    [IF (NOT POSITION)
        THEN (SETQ POSITION (GETBOXPOSITION (IPLUS 8 (BITMAPWIDTH BITMAP))
                                   (IPLUS 8 (BITMAPHEIGHT BITMAP]
    (PROG ((WIND (CREATEW (LIST (CAR POSITION)
                                (CDR POSITION)
                                (IPLUS 8 (BITMAPWIDTH BITMAP))
                                (IPLUS 8 (BITMAPHEIGHT BITMAP)))
                        NIL 4)))
          (BITBLT BITMAP 0 0 WIND)
          (RETURN WIND])
)

[RyanBurnside]

Think I'm fairly happy with these now. Game in the future once I get some work done on some straggling Interlisp code.
Is it best to load one spritesheet and then bitblt pieces of it in real time or should each tile be a separate bitmap?

[pamoroso]

A great match for Medley's black and white aesthetics.

[nbriggs]

Those look good. I can imagine you might save a little arithmetic if they were separate, but most/all calculations would be smallp, so not causing allocations. Fonts do it as one wide bitmap and store the offsets for each character. I wonder if you might be able to take advantage of the font machinery if each tile were treated as a glyph in a mahjong tile font. Depends on exactly what you'd be doing with it though.

[RyanBurnside]

I'll post a picture of a traditional layout below.
The tiles actually overlap and obscure the ones below. (And tend to stack upward at a 45 degree angle)
I think what I'd need to do is make a mask and erase the shapes below, using white then overlay it with only the black of the file itself in a 2 pass per tile. Draw them from the first row down, one layer at a time, with each tile whiting out the pixels below then rendering the black part. That black tile in the original image was going to be a mask to erase the pixels below, then one of the other tiles is drawn on top.

[MattHeffron]

Ryan, Why do you think that you need to erase first? You can BITBLT in REPLACE mode and that ought to do the job. Or, am I misunderstanding something? On the other hand, to REMOVE a tile, you would need to repaint the parts of the tiles that were covered. Some partially, especially due to the 3D perspective and “overhang”. (And the 4 tiles under the single top-most.) It might be simplest to have versions of tile masks that trim the standard tile for the different cases of displaying the tile: uncovered (no mask), partially covered by tiles on level above East, South East, South (In the image you shared, for the “8 Circles” tile at the left end of the 2nd row, “1 character” is East, “9 bamboo” is South East. For the “5 circles” in the top row “Autumn” is South. The repainting of the 4 tiles after removing the top-most (center), are just unobstructed. The more “brute force solution” when removing a tile (pair) would be to repaint the whole stack to a staging bitmap, and then BLT that to the window. Because of the 3D, repainting from upper left across to lower right should give the correct result image. One advantage of always repainting the whole stack is to see everything happening while debugging. (In debug, just paint directly to the window.) Matt FYI: Mahjong tiles are defined Unicode glyphs: U+1F000-U+1F02B. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahjong_Tiles_(Unicode_block) These are out of the MCCS character set range, but could be generated into bitmaps from BDF files and the glyph bitmaps extracted. From: Ryan Burnside ***@***.***> Sent: Saturday, November 22, 2025 7:05 PM To: Interlisp/medley ***@***.***> Cc: Subscribed ***@***.***> Subject: Re: [Interlisp/medley] Any interest in Mahjong Solitaire? (Discussion #2376) I'll post a picture of a traditional layout below. The tiles actually overlap and obscure the ones below. (And tend to stack upward at a 45 degree angle) I think what I'd need to do is make a mask and erase the shapes below, using white then overlay it with only the black of the file itself in a 2 pass per tile. Draw them from the first row down, one layer at a time, with each tile whiting out the pixels below then rendering the black part. Screenshot_20251122_195727.png (view on web) <https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/2c30bc7f-b600-4f51-8c23-19dce82e3872> — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#2376 (comment)> , or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AB7BB4TSJCOUN7SPQUZGBTL36EP43AVCNFSM6AAAAACMHMPAHCVHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTKMBUHE2TGOI> . You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread. <https://github.com/notifications/beacon/AB7BB4TUECMVPRHQ7TBIZA336EP43A5CNFSM6AAAAACMHMPAHCWGG33NNVSW45C7OR4XAZNRIRUXGY3VONZWS33OINXW23LFNZ2KUY3PNVWWK3TUL5UWJTQA4WRUG.gif> Message ID: ***@***.*** ***@***.***> >

[RyanBurnside]

Matt,

I was considering that if I used replace mode the transparent white corners would just be blitted as white (messing up the tiles underneath and not giving me that smooth 45 degree angle). Essentially I think I need 3 notions of color, white, black and the transparent color for the corners of the tiles.

The other idea has some merit too drawing the different types of intersections and overlaps.
Here is kind of an extreme case. There are a TON of user created layouts this one happens to show off some of the fun edge cases (pun intended) you'd have to make many many images for.

Your brute force idea was what I was thinking ultimately. One function to repaint everything to an intermediate bitmap offscreen that happens once per click if PIECE-REMOVED-P is T. :)

I think Medley just might be quick enough to handle it - though I've not smoke tested it yet.
Rendering to a target offscreen has proven to be the secret sauce to being fast as @hjellinek hinted. Also it keeps the player from seeing all the tiles as they're are drawn in and ruining the game.

Anyway here is the image with all the strange overlaps that can happen. (There are many more in theroy).