Does the following image look more like what you were thinking about? Or did you want the numbers (3D version this time) included and maybe the question mark also included somewhere?
I have got the basic puzzle generation now working. Need to get this checked into sourceforge. It will generate minimal puzzles (meaning that if you take away any single clue in the puzzle then the resulting puzzle is not a valid sudoku - either no solution or multiple solutions). Seems to work ok - I actually hand solved one it generated the other night with not too much of a problem. Rating puzzles is still an unknown entity for me - I know the basics - code up the human solving strategies and try to use these to solve a puzzle. Each strategy can be rated and the most difficult strategy reqd. to solve a particular puzzle determines the difficulty of the puzzle. Fortunately most sudokus don't require that difficult strategies - and I have started looking at coding these up.
I hope to package up what I've got with some UI improvements soon - numbers entered by user will show red if they are incorrect (will make this optional ultimately). Would also like to show the possibilities for the empty squares - should just require a bit of tweaking my cell control so that my code paints the possibilities itself.
Generating good puzzles for humans to solve is a difficult problem and most of the open source code out there isn't great at doing this. I have been digesting the sudoku programmers forum:
As aways I have been somewhat distracted by other things recently (e.g. work, work and more work! and a little bit of xmas stuff too). I am still keen to progress this though.
Ok I finally got around to checking my latest solver/generator.
This actually works and will generate real puzzles.
No guarantee on the difficulty of them (I suspect they will either be pretty straightforward or really difficult!)
Also some minor mods/fixes on the UI.
don't know what I'm doing wrong, but when i click the New Game button, nothing happens and in the error log, I get message after message saying:
12/6/2005 9:54:50 AM render exceptionystem.MissingFieldException: Field not found: 'MediaPortal.GUI.Library.GUIControl.m_dwPosX'.
at sudoku_mp.CellControl.Render(Single timePassed)
at MediaPortal.GUI.Library.GUIGroup.Render(Single timePassed)
at MediaPortal.GUI.Library.GUIWindow.Render(Single timePassed)
I suspect that this is a versioning issue - can't remember off the top of my head what version I built against. However, I'll try and rebuild against 0.2rc1 (not the latest cvs - although I'd like to build against this too soon).