SixCells

Level editor for Hexcells.

Logo


Contents


How to Use

Player

Open a level or paste one from clipboard and play it.
Loading multiple levels at once is supported. Use the tab bar to switch between them.

Left-click/right-click an orange cell to reveal it as blue/black. In case of a mistake the cell will not be revealed.
Press Z to undo.

Shift + left-click/right-click an orange cell to annotate it as blue/black. Repeat this to clear the annotation.
Annotations don't affect anything, they're just marks. Revealing a cell will clear the annotation regardless of its color.
Edit menu also contains options to clear all the annotations, confirm them (as if all of the annotated cells were clicked with a matching color) or deny them (...clicked with the opposite color).
See also: Text annotations

When you close a level, you will have an option to save the current progress. It will be loaded automatically next time. There is an option to clear progress.

If you use the Player to playtest right from Editor, it will save state between sessions.
Right click to revert a cell to yellow.

Full auto-solving capabilities are present.

Editor

Video demonstration

Creating and Deleting Items
Action Button
Create blue cell Left-click
Create black cell Right-click
Create column number Left-click on cell and drag outwards
Delete cell/column number Right-click
Modifying Items
Action Button
Cycle through information display Left-click on cell/column number
Mark/unmark cell as revealed Ctrl + left-click on cell
Selection
Action Button
Freehand selection Shift + drag on empty space
Select/deselect a cell Shift + left-click on cell
Deselect all Shift + left-click on empty space
Drag and drop selected Left-click and drag
Navigation
Action Button
Pan the view Press and drag mouse wheel
Zoom in/out Mouse wheel up/down
Play Test Mode
Action Button
Toggle playtest mode Tab
Play from start Shift + Tab

Annotations

Hover over a cell and press a number on the keyboard (or hold Shift and type any text) to add up to 3 characters of annotations.
Press Backspace or Tilde `~ to delete.

Additional color annotations are available in Player.

Alternative Controls

All mouse actions (except for pointer movement) can be replaced with keyboard presses:

Action Button
Left-click Q
Right-click W
Pan E
Zoom in +
Zoom out -

Installation

Windows

Download the newest -win32.zip release, extract the folder and you're ready to go!

Linux

Install git, python-pyqt5 or python-pyside, python-pulp (pip install pulp), optionally glpk:

Go to a folder where you would like SixCells to be and obtain the source code (a subdirectory "sixcells" will be created):

git clone https://github.com/oprypin/sixcells

Now you can start editor.py and player.py by opening them in a file explorer or from command line.

To update SixCells to the latest version without deleting and redownloading, execute git pull inside its directory.

Mac

Make sure you have installed command line developer tools.

Install Homebrew.

Use Homebrew and pip to install Python and the needed libraries:

brew install python3
pip3 install pyqt5 pulp

Go to a folder where you would like SixCells to be and obtain the source code (a subdirectory "sixcells" will be created):

git clone https://github.com/oprypin/sixcells
cd sixcells

Now you can run python3 editor.py and python3 player.py.

To update SixCells to the latest version without deleting and redownloading, execute git pull inside its directory.


Sharing Levels

To find levels to play and share your own, visit reddit.com/r/hexcellslevels.


Technical Details

SixCells is written using Python and Qt.
PuLP is used for solving.

It is guaranteed to work on Python 3.3 and later; Versions 2.7 and 3.* should also work.

SixCells supports Qt 4 and Qt 5, and can work with either PySide, PyQt4 or PyQt5.

License: GNU General Public License Version 3.0 (GPLv3)

Level File Structure

*.hexcells format

Encoding: UTF-8

A level is a sequence of 38 lines, separated with '\n' character: