A minesweeper clone allowing for insanely large minesweeper boards (88 times bigger than the Guinness World Record!).
The insanely huge boards!
Typical minesweeper implementations update the entire board for every click. This is extremely inefficient computationally, and puts a maximum limit on the boards that are possible to generate while guaranteeing a responsive game without delays.
To put it simply, this version of minesweeper makes this as efficient as can be: Infinisweeper only updates those cells that need updating based on what the user clicks, and the app immediately knows which cells these are, since it calculates this when generating the board, rather than calculating this on the fly when the user clicks the cell. (This makes the board generation take longer, though! But when the game is generated, the experience is flawless.)
Here's a minesweeper game in progress with 4 088 by 4 088 cells, equaling 16 711 744 cells, which is the biggest board I could successfully generate on my current setup. The cell resolution is 4 by 4 pixels. This is at expert level, 20 % bomb density, for a total of 3 342 349 bombs.
This board is 89 times larger, or almost two orders of magnitude larger than the Guiness World Records' Largest game of Minesweeper in 2015.
Here's a zoom in on the top left corner:
Note that if this is too small for you, you can always use a higher cell resolution, such as 8 by 8 pixels for better readability, see an example below:
Note that higher cell resolution impacts the size of the maximum board you can generate (in my case the maximum board at this resolution is 2 045 by 2 044 = 4 179 980 cells).
Also note that you need a sufficiently large screen (or array of screens) and/or high resolution to acutally play these big boards properly! (Otherwise you'll need to move the window a lot!)
If you're on Windows (tested on Windows 10), the easiest way to get started is to download the latest release.
Unzip the release and navigate to InfiniSweeper_x_x_x/dist/__init__.exe and run it.
Also, make sure that your antivirus software does not interfere. You may need to disable it. Windows may also prompt you to trust the file.
If you're on other systems, or want to contribute, you will need to set up and build the project.
Open all the tiles that are not bombs to win the game. The number in a tile tells you how many bombs are surrounding it. Click on a bomb and you lose! It's minesweeper!
LEFT CLICK to open tile
RIGHT CLICK to flag/unflag tile
LEFT AND RIGHT CLICK, or DOUBLE CLICK, or SHIFT + CLICK to open all non-flagged surrounding tiles if number of surrounding flags is equal to the tile number
ARROW KEYS to move the game window, if not in fullscreen mode
R to restart (a new board with the same settings)
P to take a screenshot of the current board (they are saved with the executable)
ESCAPE to quit
A screenshot of your most recent win is automatically saved in the same directory as the executable.
Some specific combinations of games can't be generated (at time of writing), such as:
- Too big boards (reaching into memory limits issues I believe)
- Big boards with too few bombs. (This is due to the optimization allowing for big boards in the first place; the reverse island search exceeds the maximum recursion depth, optimiziations to fix this are surely possible, feel free to contribute!)
- If you're having trouble generating boards that should work even when considering the above points, try restarting the app.
There are also a few bugs and possible areas of improvement (feel free to contribute!).
However: Once a board is launched succesfully, it should work as intended without any issues! (in singleplayer mode). The game logic should be flaweless to my knowledge, any remaining bugs are in the launcher and on game generation.
Basic multiplayer functionality is implemented although there still are bugs for the multiplayer mode. (Again, feel free to contribute! I imagine a proper multiplayer mode could make these huge boards actually fun to solve together!)
Personally I was mostly curious about generating huge minesweeper boards, beating the world record, and also some basic networking for a networking course back in university, and since I succeeded with those goals, I'm probably not working much on this app going forward.
It would be fun if someone wanted to contribute, however!
If so, I have the following suggestions:
- Fix generation of big boards with a low ratio of bombs (fails due to overstepping the max recursion depth when the ratio of bombs is about <12 %)
- Make the launcher better, such as input sanitation. I would be careful of disallowing too big boards though, if someone wants to test the limits, but some warnings and a better UX would be nice.
- Loading bar to approximate time to generate huge boards, so we can see what the board generation is currently doing! Currently users need to wait without much clue of what's going on. For me, generating the largest board at the top of this page took almost 4 minutes!
- Optimize bomb drawing on game over, currently it takes a long time on big screens. Could probably be done in O(1) if you precompute a sprite for the bombs with transparency to put on top on game over. Alternatively, add a spiraling traversal algorithm with an animation, etc.
- Finalizing game board navigation with arrow keys in fullscreen and windowed mode.
- General refactors, optimizations, bug fixes, and cleaner code.
- Improve the build process (Docker etc). Support Linux/Mac. More user-friendly releases for those who just want to play.
- Finalize the networked multiplayer (I think big boards could be really fun with friends!)
The crux normally prohibiting huge minesweeper games are the blank fields, if a blank field is clicked we need to check its neighbors to see if they too are blank, and so on until all blank fields are opened. Most implementations of minesweeper (all those that I found at least!) computes this on the fly when the user clicks, or even just checks all cells on the entire board, which is extremely inefficient. Infinisweeper instead uses an island search approach, to precalculate the addresses to all blank fields on board generation. So let's take a square board n by n cells. A normal minesweeper has time complexity O(n^2) to compute the new game state when the user clicks a blank cell whereas Infinisweeper does it at O(1) when the user clicks a cell regardless of cell content, since everything is precalculated on board generation.
The best way to support me is to listen to my music: Acoped.
This project uses PyInstaller
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Navigate to the '/launcher' folder in windows file explorer
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Open the command prompt, by writing 'cmd' in the address bar
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Make sure PyInstaller is installed, if you are unsure, simply run 'pip install pyinstaller'
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Run the command 'set PATH=%PATH%;C:\Windows\System32\downlevel;'
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Run the command 'pyinstaller --onefile __init__.py'
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The directories 'build' and 'dist' should have appeared, as well as the file '__init__.spec', move those files to the project's 'builds' directory, under a new sub-directory with the version number, for example '0_0_1'
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Copy the 'resource' folder and place it in the directory above the '__init__.exe' file
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Test that the build works. IMPORTANT: Even if it probably works to just run the file 'dist/__init__.exe' now, it will only work for the current computer.
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Right click '__init__.exe' and select 'Properties' ('Egenskaper'), then 'Security' ('Säkerhet')
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Click on 'Edit...' ('Redigera') then 'Add...' ('Lägg till'). In the big entry field write 'Everyone' ('Alla') and then 'Check Name' ('Kontrollera namn'), choose the 'Everyone' ('Alla') post, and then 'Apply' ('Verkställ'). Click 'OK' and before you exit, for the 'Everyone' field, select ('Full control')
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OPTIONAL(?): While you are at it, you should try to remove the other permissions, as they should be redundant. You need to go to the advanced settings and remove inherited permissions. When you are done with steps 9-11, the permissions should look as follows:
Figure 1 Permissions for __init__.exe
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Move only the relevant files from the project unto its own folder (for example on the desktop). The working build for version 0_0_1, has the structure as follows:
Figure 2 Permissions for __init__.exe (directories only)
Figure 3 Permissions for __init__.exe (more detailed)
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Rename the '__init__.exe' file to 'InfiniSweeper.exe' for good looks
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The build file should then work for any Windows machine. TEST IT on another machine before you commit in git and push the new build to Github!
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Upload the compressed .zip directory to Github and make a new release, with the appropriate naming conventions, release notes and instructions.
Figure 3 The design drawing for the Network Model of InfiniSweeper. The implementation was 95 % like this I would say