This document is to be distributed with Hua Rong Dao v1.0.
Hua Rong Dao is an ancient Chinese puzzle game. With its simple design yet difficult solutions, it has earned its fame as one of the three "unbelievable" in the puzzle world (the other two, IIRC, are Rubik's Cube and the Tower of Hanoi).
The game is based on Chinese history. During the period of Three States, Cao Cao (pronounced Tsow Tsow, not Cow Cow), Liu Bei and Sun Quan ruled the Land of Wei, Shu and Wu respectively, and all three of them wanted to unite China and become the Emperor.
Once Cao Cao ordered an army of 100,000 soldiers to take water routes to invade South, where Liu Bei ruled. However, Cao's soldiers were mostly Northerners and were not familiar with water, so many of them got sea-sick. Liu Bei had a very smart strategist named Zhuge Liang. When Zhuge Liang learned about the situation, he sent a spy to Cao Cao's camp to tell him that if he chained all the ships together, they would become stable on the water so the soldiers would no longer be sick. Cao Cao was very happy. Then Zhuge Liang ordered Liu's army to burn Cao's ships. Because the they were all chained together, within no time, all caught on fire and burned into ashes. Many soldiers died in the fire and Cao Cao lost. It was the famous battle of Chibi (meaning the Red Wall).
Zhuge Liang had also predicted that after Cao losing the battle, he would have to pass through Hua Rong Dao in order to escape. So he ordered five Liu's generals - Guan Yu, Huang Zhong, Ma Chao, Zhao Yun and Zhang Fei - to capture Cao. However, Cao Cao had done some favors for Guan Yu a long time ago, so Guan Yu took the opportunity to returned his favor by secretly helping Cao Cao escape.
File Menu
Help Menu
Essential Parts
Rules. Believe it or not, there are only three rules.
Objective is to move Cao Cao (the 2 x 2 piece) from the top of the grid to the bottom center where the exit is.
Scoring Method. The score is the number of steps you took to complete a level. Therefore, the less the score you have, the better you performed. Each time a game piece is successfully moved to a new location, you "earn" one step.
Tips. One tip you should keep in mind is to move each piece as far as you want to, in other words, "Don't make it two steps if you can complete it in one."
After you run the setup, you should have those files in the application directory and/or the sub directories:
Warning: You should not remove DEFAULT.BMP and HRD.HTML from their directory, because these files are NOT optional.
Although the game has been traditionally called "Hua Rong Dao," I do not see any reason why you cannot change the theme to something else. For example, it is perfectly cool to change the theme to Starwars, having Luke Skywalker being the 2 x 2 piece escaping from the Death Star and Darth Vader being the 2 x 1 piece "secretly" helping him escape. You can realize this by customizing the skin.
The skin is very flexible, it can be any of the following formats:
theoretically, I could also allow any icon files and cursor files (ICO and CUR), but I have not found any editors that would make an icon or a cursor 370 x 380 pixels in dimension, so I disabled these two formats to reduce confusion. But of course, if you ever come across a graphic editor that does allow an ICO or a CUR file that big, please let me know and I will enable them in the future release.
The following is an HTML table to replicate the skin clip map. The overall size of the skin is 370 x 380 pixels.
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IMPORTANT NOTE: Netscape tends to render the above table incorrectly and users may see a blank area instead of a color coded clip map. If this is the case please refer to DEVELOP.BMP instead. Hope this bug will be fixed in the future release of Netscape.
Levels
The game comes with 70 levels, but I'd rather call them 70 different layouts because Level 1 is not necessarily the easiest while 70 the hardest. They are taken from a website that hosts a Java version of Hua Rong Dao.
I have never tried, nor will ever try to solve all 70 levels. In fact, I am not even certain if all 70 levels are solvable.
The Level Editor
A Level Editor is included in the package for your convenience. It is the very same editor that I used to create the level data file. I cannot guarantee that most bugs have been worked out, but it has been working fine for me. As long as you create legitimate levels, you should not have problems. By legitimate, I mean a level that has all the pieces there, and there are no overlaps (theoretically the level editor should not let you create overlaps unless you leave a level blank).
It is recommended that you clear the level before doing any changes to it. Click on the option buttons (or the color bars) on the right side to select the piece you want to place, then click on the grid to seat the piece. If you want to "move" a piece to a different location (given that it has enough room), you do not need to "blank" it first. Simply select the piece you want to move and click on the new location of the grid.
To commit the level you just designed, click "Prev" or "Next". To save the level, click "Save". There is no undo option. If you mess up something, click "Exit" to quit without saving.
Creating Levels
You cannot make more than 70 levels. For every customized level you create, you have to sacrifice an existing level. You can name your level, but it is limited to 10 ANSI characters or 5 Unicode characters (in other words, 10 bytes in total).
There is an Easter Egg in this game. It is not hard to find out what it does, although it may take some time to find it. If you find it, please drop me an email and let me know.
Hint: It is all in the About Dialog
What are those gibberish characters on my screen?
Each of the 70 original levels has a Chinese name. I did not even attempt to translate them into English. Do not worry about them if your system is not capable of displaying GB character set. You should be able to read them if you have a Chinese version of Windows or if you have a Chinese encoder.
I do have a Chinese version of Windows (or a Chinese encoder), but I still see them as gibberish characters
I developed the game on my machine which runs an English version of Windows 98, and it works fine with the Chinese encoder there. But if you do experience difficulties in reading the level names in Chinese, try to refresh your screen.
I managed to finish a level, but it does not advance to the next level.
Right. Like I said, those are not really "levels," so it does not advance.
When I try to move a piece, it jumps back to its original position
You must have been trying to make the piece turn at a corner. This is not allowed.
Why does the level editor's color look odd on my system?
Because the level editor uses color coding, I have to make sure that colors stay the same from machine to machine. Therefore I hard coded the color values. If you are using a different color scheme, you may find that the buttons match the scheme (because I cannot hard code that) but the form does not.
I cannot see the skin clip map in this help file. It appears to be a huge block of blank.
As I found out, Netscape has trouble rendering background color for nested TD tags. But you can refer to DEVELOP.BMP for the clip map.
I accidentally deleted the level data file, but I don't want to download the entire package again. What do I do now?
Go to Hua Rong Dao Homepage and download the level data separately. The same applies to the default skin, the developer's skin, and this help file.
What is the license term on this application?
My goal is to populate this ancient puzzle game, therefore it is a freeware. Feel free to distribute it, as long as you give me credits.
Software Design
Jim the Standing Bear
Software Development
Jim the Standing Bear
Software Testing
Jim the Standing Bear
Graphic Design
Jim the Standing Bear
Help File
Jim the Standing Bear
Level Layout
http://www.comebuu.org.cn/game/hrd/hrd.htm
Software updates: http://www.geocities.com/laser_bear/hua/hua.html
Copyright © Jim the Standing Bear, 2000.