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Crostic Nines, the daily acrostic word-guessing puzzle I've been working on, is now live for its alpha release. Check it out, and please let me know of any bugs you might find!
gemini://gem.bahai.fyi/crostic/
Nov 02 · 6 weeks ago
Looks interesting, but it seems not to accept my client certificate for some reason -- I just get "Certificate required to play".
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · Nov 02 at 14:58:
Hmm, yeah, I saw that a crash happened. I've fixed the immediate issue, but I'm not sure exactly why it happened. If you get the same or different error again, please let me know!
By the way - did this happen when loading the url /crostic/9/ ?
@dragfyre Actually, it seems your server was correct to reject my client certificate. It had an empty Distinguished Name (or rather, one consisting only of an empty Common Name), which is actually illegal according to RFC5280. So this is a bug in my client (diohsc). Annoying... it seems there's no canonical choice for the DN for an anonymous client certificate. I suppose I'll use CN=" ".
Tough game! It seems you need to include the dot in "3. answer", despite the instructions indicating otherwise. After the central capital letter of a correct solution, even outside of ANSI mode there's a character which neither I nor my terminal recognises, encoded as 0xcc 0xb2.
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · Nov 03 at 00:12:
TIL about RFC5280 haha. It does check to see if you have a name attached to the certificate; I'll change it so that it checks for both the name and the hash and gives more informative messages if there's one but not the other.
Regarding the dot, I didn't think it was required, but I might have missed something. 🤔
And regarding the mystery character, it's a Unicode underline - a hack to give a little extra decoration that works in Lagrange, but obviously it's something that should be optional :(
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · Nov 03 at 00:15:
By the way, part of the reason the game is tough right now is that the clues still need fixing to indicate the correct form of the word. For now, if you're stuck, try different forms of the word (-ed, -ing, -s, and so on).
I'm also thinking of overhauling the guess and hint system to make it even easier to enter guesses, after seeing the system you put in place for the gemxw crosswords. :D
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · Nov 03 at 03:54:
The problem with the dot is now fixed! Valid input consists of a number followed by an alphabetic guess; any other symbols are simply discarded. So, the following are both correct:
4. challenging - AND - 4 challenging
It would be nice to have the number of letters given at the end of each clue (perhaps also with any known letters).
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · Nov 04 at 03:18:
Not a bad idea, I'll be mocking up a new guess and hint UI and will see if that works.
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · Nov 05 at 04:55:
The new guess and hint UI is in. I think it's a big improvement overall, although it does make the UI much busier.
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · Nov 08 at 15:09:
I've coded in a settings section to allow players to rename themselves at will and toggle display settings like ANSI colours and Unicode decorations (the underlines) on and off.
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · Nov 19 at 01:04:
There's been a crash and I can't quite pin down the cause 🤔 Crostic Nines may be down for the day today, or at least until I can look into it and fix it. Sorry!
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · Nov 20 at 01:43:
We are back on!
☯️ dragfyre [OP] · Nov 22 at 08:55:
The all-important "Give up" link has been added. Now, if even if the game is too hard, you can still register your personal best!