I'm embarrassed to admit it, but I have become quite attached to a web based game called Legends of Zork. It is slow, repetitive, and requires little skill. In other words it is just my game playing speed.

One of the puzzles in the game is to arrange your Double Fanucci cards to get the most points so that you can win more encounters. I found a very nice Java based calculator called Yet Another Double Fanucci Calculator. It works like a charm, but is it a bit slow, and the genetic algorithm doesn't always find an optimal solution.

I have profiled the program, and improved it in several ways.

• I made the calculation run in the background with a cancel button. This way, if the calculation takes a long time, and you change your mind, you can cancel it and do something else.
• I added a recursive calculator also. It always finds an optimal solution, but sometimes takes longer than the genetic algorithm.
• I sped up the genetic algorithm.
• I replaced several of the classes with optimized versions that take less memory, and run faster.
• Hands are precalculated and saved to a file. So the second time you calculate your cards, the software only needs to consider any new cards you have added.

Download a runnable jar: yadfc-v2.3B-deadbeef.jar
Checkout the source code from svn: http://svn.deadbeef.com/double-fanucci/trunk

I'll keep this page up to date as new versions are released, post any issues to the comments here.

Update 6/14/2010

• I added the ability to precalculate from the menu.
• Fixed some bugs that were making the precalculated hands not read back from the file.
• Fixed some bugs that prevented the recursive calc from working when you had a small number of cards.

I have created an extension for Google Chrome that makes playing Legends of Zork a little bit easier.

Features:

• Auto-Encounter: Just like clicking the "Continue Adventuring" button over and over again. When your health gets too low, or your encumberance gets too high, it returns to base.
• Arena helper: Shows the AR/DR, Attitude Stance, and Magic Stance of the opponents, color coded from Red (hard) to Green (easy) to Purple (really easy). Adds a "Fight!" button to each opponent that will wager the max amount of zorkmids and start the fight in one click. It also corrects the "Return to Battle" button in the arena to return to the same page that you started on.
• Auto battle: It picks a weak opponent, and fights them, then returns to the list of opponents to pick someone else. It will not choose an opponent until it has looked at 20 or more opponents.

Install Extension

Changes in Version 1.1

• Save the settings for each character.
• Fixed the 404 page not found error when visiting a sub-location for the first time.
• When the auto-encounter stops, the tab title changes to the reason for stopping.

Changes in Version 1.2

• Manual battle helper: When looking at the arena page, all opponents will be color coded by how hard they are to attack. If you visit the weapon store, then it will learn the stance of all the weapons on that page and use that data when visiting the arena.
• Auto-battle, in the arena the weakest opponents will be automatically selected and fought.
• When encountering, the auto-encounter will pause on quest messages.

Changes in Version 1.3

• Fixed the always return to base persistence.