Word Search Applet

Now for a (semi-) educational game. To play, just hit the 'New Game' button, then drag your mouse over the grid to select a word. Once found, words will remain circled. If you get stuck, hit 'Solve Game'.

The applet reads data from one or more plain text files located on the server. Given a list of such file URLs, it will load a new set of words for each game, looping back to the first file after the last.

The words in each list are stripped of non-alpha characters and converted to upper-case before being added to the letter grid, so 'New Mexico' shows on the grid as N E W M E X I C O. Words are listed in the order read.

Words that are too big for the grid or just can't be placed anywhere because no space is left, are dropped from the list (just for that particular game).

Name Format Description
screencolors
(optional)
color,color,color Sets the text, background and border colors used on the applet's main display. The defaults are black,white,black.
buttoncolors
(optional)
color,color Set the foreground and background colors used for buttons. The default is black,white,black.
gridcolors
(optional)
color,color,color,color For the letter grid, the first two set the text and background colors, the third is used to shade found words and the last is used to shade the current user selection. The defaults are black,white,lightGray,yellow.
listcolors
(optional)
color,color,color,color For the word list, the first two set the text and background colors while the third is used for words that have been found. The defaults are black,white,lightGray.
  For all color parameters, color may be one of the following: black, blue, cyan, darkgray, gray, green, lightgray, magenta, orange, pink, red, white or yellow. Or you can specify an RGB hex triplet, e.g. #ffcc99.
screenfont
(optional)
name,style,size Sets the font used for message text. Defaults to helvetica,bold,12.
buttonfont
(optional)
name,style,size Sets the font used for button text. Defaults to dialog,plain,10.
gridfont
(optional)
name,style,size Sets the font used in the letter grid. Defaults to courier,plain,14.
listfont
(optional)
name,style,size Sets the font used in the word list. Defaults to helvetica,plain,12.
  For all font parameters, name may be one of: courier, dialog, helvetica, symbol or timesroman and style may be one of: bold, bolditalic, italic or plain.
gridsize
(optional)
n,m,d Sets the number of rows and columns used in the letter grid and the size, in pixels, of each cell (this should be slightly bigger than the size of the grid font). The defaults are 15,15,20
files url1, url2,...,urln A list of URLs. Each should point to a text file containing a list of words to use.

Each line of a file should contain a single word. If a line begins with a '#' character, the text following it is used for the puzzle name. See the .txt files below for examples.

Files
Source: WordSearch.java Classes: WordSearch.class, WSButton.class, WSGrid.class, WSList.class and WSWord.class
Data files: animals.txt, countries.txt measures.txt movies.txt and nightsky.txt
All files in zip format: WordSearch.zip


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