anvilsign in

collin/mahjong

RenderedSource

1# 台灣麻將 — four-player mahjong, on one touchscreen or over the wire
2
3Sixteen-tile Taiwanese mahjong for four people sitting around a single laptop.
4All four hands are on screen at once, each rotated to face its own edge and
5each face down until its player taps it — the piece of card everybody used to
6lay over their strip, done by the table itself. Every label is Chinese with
7English underneath; the tiles themselves stay Chinese, because that is what the
8tiles say.
9
10**四人同桌** on the lobby is that table, and it is one mode rather than two:
11four people at one screen, and any of them free to take their own hand onto
12their phone from the QR in their gear — the tiles leave the screen and the
13throw comes back over the wire. Nobody has to, and nothing has to be decided up
14front. See [one table](#one-table).
15
16Nobody else around? **單人對局 Single player** gives you the bottom seat and
17hands the other three to the computer — same rules, same table, same scoring.
18See [computer players](#computer-players).
19
20Everybody somewhere else? **線上對戰 Online game** puts the four of you at the
21same table from four devices, each turned so your own seat is the near edge —
22see [playing online](#playing-online).
23
24```
25npm install
26npm run dev # then open the browser full-screen (F11)
27npm test # rules engine, the bots, and 200 randomly-played hands
28```
29
30## Screen layout
31
32```
33 ┌──── 對家 (rotated 180°) ────┐
34 上家 (rotated 90°) │ wall, and the discard pool │ 下家 (rotated −90°)
35 └──── 自家 (upright, near you) ┘
36```
37
38Seat 0 is the bottom edge, and play runs 0 → 1 (right) → 2 (top) → 3 (left),
39which is the normal counter-clockwise 東南西北 order.
40
41Each strip shows, from the player's edge inwards: nameplate (seat wind, 莊
42marker, 聽 badge, chip count) → concealed hand → action buttons → melds and
43flowers. Discards are not in the strips: they are thrown into the middle and
44stay there for the hand, the way they would be on a table. (A phone has no
45middle to throw into, so the compact layout keeps a discard row per seat — see
46[on a phone](#on-a-phone).)
47
48## Playing
49
50- **Your hand is face down** at a shared screen, and a tap turns it over. It
51 covers itself again when the hand is dealt and when your turn ends — the two
52 moments the tiles stop being needed, and without them a hand turned over once
53 stays turned over all evening, which is the same as never having covered it.
54 蓋牌 beside 理牌 puts it back sooner. While it is covered the only button the
55 strip has is 看牌: every other one names a tile — 打出 五萬, 吃 with these two
56 — and would say through the card what is under it. The 看牌 of whoever the
57 table is waiting on wears a gold ring, since whose go it is was never a
58 secret. Nothing is covered where the screen belongs to one player: solo, and
59 online, where everybody has a device of their own.
60- **The tile you just drew** is held apart from the sorted hand with a gold ring
61 and a 摸 label, instead of being sorted invisibly into it. It merges into the
62 hand once you discard. 補花 replacements and kong replacements are marked the
63 same way.
64- **The wall** is drawn in the centre as a square of four staggered sides, laid
65 out like a `#` the way it is built on a real table — every corner covered by
66 one wall carrying past the end of the next. All 144 tiles, at the size of the
67 tiles in your hand, because they are the same tiles. The gold stack is the
68 break point you draw from, and where that is depends on what the dealer threw:
69 stacks shrink to a single tile and then vanish as they are used, so the gap
70 opens wherever the dice opened the wall and grows from there. The 16-tile 底牌
71 tail at the other end is where kong and flower replacements come from, so the
72 square is eaten from both directions at once. See
73 [擲骰](#擲骰--where-the-wall-is-broken).
74- **Discard** — drag a tile out of your row and it comes up out of your hand and
75 follows your finger anywhere on the table; let go and it goes in, from where
76 you let go and at the speed you let go at. Dragging *along* the row is still
77 arranging your hand — which of the two you meant is decided once, from whether
78 the movement is mostly along the row or out of it, and then it sticks. Let go
79 back over your own hand and the tile goes back. Tapping a tile twice, or the
80 打出 button, still works and lobs it in for you.
81- **The discard pool** — every tile thrown lands in the middle and stays there
82 until the hand ends, with real weight: it skids, turns, knocks the tiles
83 already there out of its way, and comes to rest against them. Nothing is ever
84 stacked on anything — tiles are solved as rectangles, so two lying at an angle
85 lean on each other rather than overlapping. The tile still to be claimed is
86 the lit one.
87- **Over the wall or across the table** — which of the two ways a tile goes in is
88 not a setting, it is whatever the wall allows. At the start of a hand the
89 square is a solid barrier and a discard has to be *lobbed* over it, so the
90 flick's speed decides how far across the pool it lands. As the wall is eaten
91 away, gaps open in front of one seat and then another, and from then on that
92 seat can *slide* a tile in instead — flat across the cloth at exactly the speed
93 it was flicked. Which it will be is a ray cast at the stacks actually standing
94 there, so a gap off to one side counts, and a stack worn down to a single tile
95 is low enough to go over. A seat whose wall is still up says 牆未開 on its
96 nameplate, so a lob is never a mystery.
97- **Throw it badly** and it ends up in somebody's tiles — the middle stops
98 exactly where their hand starts, so a tile that comes off the pool arrives in
99 their lap, and one that falls short lands out by their seat. Either way their
100 row takes the knock and rocks back, and with 報牌 on they tell you about it —
101 喂,小心點 if you are lucky, 是在哈囉 or 你牌品很差欸 if you are not, and
102 never the same line twice running. How hard it got there only decides how
103 loudly. Never your own edge: you cannot be barged by your own discard.
104- **Arranging** — drag any tile in your hand to reorder it; 理牌 sorts it back
105 into suit order. Hands are never auto-sorted after the deal, so an arrangement
106 you set up survives draws, claims and kongs.
107- **Rules** — the `?` on your nameplate opens a bilingual rules panel anchored to
108 your own edge of the table and rotated to face you.
109- **Claiming** — after a discard, every seat that *can* claim gets 胡 / 槓 / 碰 /
110 吃 / 過 buttons on their own strip, and they resolve by priority (胡 > 槓/碰 >
111 吃; ties go to the player nearest the discarder in turn order).
112 **The table never blocks on a claim.** The next player gets a 摸牌 button and
113 may draw whenever they like, which shuts the window on anyone who hasn't
114 called — exactly like shouting 碰 before the next player picks up. A claim
115 already declared still stands, so calling in time always wins the tile. If
116 everyone answers first, play advances on its own without the extra tap.
117 The seat that draws next gets no separate 過 button, because for them the two
118 are the same move: picking up *is* how you decline. Their button says 摸牌
119 either way; what they would be giving up by pressing it is the 碰 or the 吃
120 sitting next to it on the bar, so it does not have to be spelled out on the
121 tile as well. Wanting to decline but leave the window open for everyone else
122 is just waiting, which is what not pressing anything already does. (On a
123 phone the button still reads 過.摸牌 — a phone's bar is a row with room to
124 write on, and the hand it belongs to is not on the same screen as the table.)
125- **On your turn** — 自摸, 暗槓 and 加槓 appear automatically when legal.
126 加槓 offers everyone else a 搶槓 chance.
127- **Where the buttons go** — on the same row as your tiles, at the right-hand end
128 of it, where the tile you are about to throw already is. The bar is out of the
129 strip's flow, so a button arriving moves nothing: 打出 appearing when you
130 lift a tile used to shove the melds and flowers above it up the strip. Every
131 button on the bar is given one height for the same reason. A bar with more on
132 it than the room beside the hand stacks up the strip in tile-wide lines, most
133 urgent call at the bottom, rather than running off the end of it. And the room
134 for the first line is in the tile size itself: a strip is sized to hold sixteen
135 tiles, the slot it keeps for the tile it is about to draw, and one button —
136 which is why the tiles down the sides of a short window are the size they are.
137- **What the buttons say** — the call is written down the tile the way the
138 character on a tile's face is, one on top of the next in the middle of the
139 face, with the English along the bottom edge. Two characters stacked are the
140 size a tile's own character is; two side by side had to be shrunk to fit
141 across it. A call too long for the height (電腦代打) takes a second column to
142 the left of the first, which is where the next column of vertical Chinese
143 goes. 打出 names no tile: the one it would throw is lifted out of the row
144 beside it wearing a gold ring, so saying 五萬 on the button as well only
145 crowds the face.
146- **Whose go it is** — a screen with four people round it is the one place a
147 game can go quiet without anybody noticing: three of them are watching the
148 table and the fourth is looking at their phone. So the table says it loudly.
149 The strip of the seat being waited on lights from its inner edge, their name
150 goes gold at the far end of it, and seven seconds of gold drain along the
151 edge that faces the middle — from both ends towards the centre, because two
152 of the four strips are upside down from wherever you are sitting. **Nothing
153 happens when it reaches zero.** No tile is thrown for you and no seat is
154 skipped; the line the bar leaves behind breathes, and the table goes on
155 waiting. It is a nudge, not a rule. Said on a covered hand too — whose turn
156 it is was never one of the things the card is hiding — and only where the
157 screen is shared: solo has nobody to tell, and online everybody is already
158 looking at their own device. A phone at the table gets the same seven seconds
159 across its top, a gold rim edge to edge (red for a claim window), and one
160 short buzz as the game comes round to it.
161- **On the keys** — ← and → walk the selection along your hand and space throws
162 the tile that is lifted. How long you *hold* space is how hard it goes: the
163 tile draws back out of the hand while the key is down and leaves when you let
164 go, so a tap slides it in and a long hold sends it across the square. Escape
165 puts it back. The wall still decides whether it can be slid or has to be
166 lobbed, exactly as with a finger.
167- **When a hand ends** — a big arrow drops onto the winner's edge of the table.
168 It lives inside their strip, so it turns with the seat and lands on the right
169 person wherever they are sitting, and 一炮多響 lights up every seat that
170 called. A 流局 has no winner to point at, so it turns the hands over instead:
171 who was 聽牌 and the tiles they were waiting on, the same reveal as at a real
172 table.
173- **The gear** — beside the `?` on every nameplate, and it opens that player's
174 own copy of the table's controls: undo, sound, full screen, 設定. Anchored in
175 their strip and turned to face their edge, like the rules panel, so what you
176 open reads the right way up to you and to nobody else. These used to be a bar
177 in the middle of the table, which is the one place that belongs to everybody
178 — the pile lands there and it is upside down to two of the four.
179- **Undo** — 復原 in that panel takes back the last action, naming what it will
180 undo (`復原 玩家 2 打 五萬`). It is in all four panels rather than only the
181 seat that made the mistake, because whoever *spots* the mis-tap should be able
182 to reach it. Twenty actions deep, cleared when the next hand is dealt.
183 Snapshots live outside the saved state, so an undo does not survive a
184 refresh: what you can take back is what happened while everyone was still
185 watching it happen.
186- **Sound** — on by default, muted from the 🔊 button behind any seat's gear, or
187 from settings. A dry clack as a tile goes down, and a distinct
188 two-note chime when a claim window opens, which is how a slow player notices
189 their 碰 is available before the next player draws it shut. Everything is
190 synthesised with a few oscillators (`src/game/sound.ts`) rather than sampled,
191 so there is nothing to load and the cue lands on the same frame as the tile.
192 Browsers refuse to start audio before the page has been clicked, so the first
193 sound anyone hears is the deal — triggered by the button that starts it.
194- **報牌 (voice)** — a second switch under sound calls the game out loud: 碰,
195 吃, 槓, 胡了, 自摸, and the name of every tile as it is discarded — 三條,
196 五萬, 東風. A flower says 補花 and then which one. A new call cuts off one
197 still being spoken; at table pace the newest is the only one that matters.
198 See [the voice pack](#the-voice-pack) for where the audio comes from.
199- **方位音 (sound by seat)** — a third switch, on by default. Every noise comes
200 out of the edge its seat is sitting at: 上家 to your left, 下家 to your right,
201 and 對家 across the table, where it is quieter and has the top taken off it —
202 a metre of air and three people's arms do not carry 12 kHz. So you can tell
203 whose 碰 that was without looking up, which is the whole point of hearing it.
204 Tiles out in the middle are placed properly rather than by edge: the physics
205 knows to the pixel where a tile landed, and that is where the knock comes
206 from. Online the table is turned so your own seat is at the bottom, and the
207 sound turns with it. See [audio, by seat](#audio-by-seat).
208- **Settings** — 設定 from the lobby, or from the game-over panel: player names,
209 底 / 台 / starting chips, the house-rule switches below, and sound. Kept in
210 `localStorage` separately from the save, so they carry over to the next game.
211 Stakes are locked once a game is under way — they'd otherwise rewrite chips
212 already won.
213
214## One table
215
216四人同桌 and 手機派對 were two buttons on the lobby, and they were never two
217games: one was the other with the phones left in people's pockets. Every party
218table played its unclaimed seats hotseat-style at the screen already, and every
219hotseat table would have taken a phone if it had had a room to put it in. So
220there is one button now, and picking up your phone is not a mode — it is
221something one player does, mid-hand, without asking the other three.
222
223What that costs is a decision about when to open the room, and the answer is:
224not while anybody is waiting. **The tiles are dealt at once**, on this screen,
225before a websocket has been opened — a laptop with no server behind it is still
226four people at a table, and nobody should watch a spinner to start playing. The
227room is opened behind the game, and when it lands it *inherits* the hand in
228progress (`startParty(names, rules, from)` restores rather than deals) instead
229of dealing over the top of it. The only thing that changes on screen is that
230the QRs start working. If it never lands, nothing does.
231
232**Each seat's QR is its own**, and lives in that seat's gear beside the sound
233and the undo, carrying `?room=…&seat=N`. Scanning it lands on that chair
234without anybody having to say which one they are in: the hand leaves the shared
235screen for good — face down there, not under a card that lifts — and the phone
236gets it face up with the claim buttons and the throw. There is a QR for the
237whole table in the middle of the felt as well, but only while the table is
238still being sat down at; the moment the first tile is thrown it steps aside,
239because from then on the middle is where the tiles go.
240
241**The save follows the screen.** A table that has opened a room keeps writing
242`localStorage` (`engine.persist` on the screen's engine, off on every phone —
243they mirror, and have no business writing it), so 繼續對局 still works and
244resumes the same way the mode starts: restore here, open the room behind it,
245publish the hand as it stood.
246
247## Playing online
248
249Both networked shapes — a shared screen with phones on it, and four devices in
250four places — are one room relay of our own: `server/rooms.ts`,
251a couple hundred lines of Node on `ws`. The relay knows nothing about mahjong:
252rooms with codes, host election by join order, one bag of shared state only the
253host may write, and events fanned out to everyone else. One client — the
254*host* — runs the engine, publishes the whole `GameState` as room state after
255every move, and plays intents the other devices send as events. The engine was
256already a pure JSON state machine, so nothing in `src/game/` knows the network
257exists — the same trick `autoplay.ts` plays, stretched over a wire. The client
258end of the wire is `src/net/room.ts`; the rest of `src/net/` is the game
259riding it.
260
261- **線上對戰 Online game** — everyone on their own device. Whoever opens the
262 room picks 線上對戰 and gets a seat lobby; friends who open the same link
263 land in it, sit down, and the host deals. Empty seats go to the computer,
264 which runs on the host client — that is what stands in for a server on the
265 classic (free) tier. Each screen draws the same full table, turned so your
266 own seat is the bottom edge; other people's tiles are face down. Joining
267 mid-game takes over a vacant or computer seat, so a dropped friend can
268 reload and carry on.
269- **四人同桌 at one screen, with phones** — the mode above, and on the wire
270 still `mode: 'party'`: the laptop is the table and a phone holds one hand.
271 Scanning a seat's QR loads a controller: just that hand, face up, with the
272 claim buttons — and the throw. Flick a tile up off the top of the phone and
273 it sails in from your edge of the common screen, at the speed and angle you
274 let go of it (`NetThrow`, mapped into table coordinates by
275 `TablePool.throwFromNet`). The seat's tiles go face down on the shared screen
276 and stay there; hold the 📱 tag on its nameplate to show the table's QR again
277 for a player who lost theirs. A phone that leaves hands the seat back to the
278 laptop, where it is covered-with-a-tap like the rest. Seats never lock: a
279 second phone scanning the same QR joins the same hand — two people playing
280 one hand, whoever acts first acts. And with sound on, the phone in your hand
281 is what says your calls — see [audio, by seat](#audio-by-seat).
282
283Design notes, in the order they bit:
284
285- **Seats are claims on a shared map**, `seats: {ids, name}[]` in room state,
286 arbitrated by the host. Your own hand's arrangement never goes over the wire
287 — the state carries a multiset and each device keeps its own order
288 (`src/net/handOrder.ts`), because a round-trip inside a drag gesture is lag
289 you can feel.
290- **The host can change.** The relay re-elects — the earliest joiner still
291 connected — when the host leaves; every other client already mirrors the
292 full state, so the new host starts its engine from what it was just watching
293 and the game carries on.
294- **A hidden host must keep hosting.** Browsers suspend requestAnimationFrame
295 and throttle timers in background tabs, so nothing in `src/net/` runs on a
296 loop: state writes flush on a microtask, everything inbound arrives over the
297 WebSocket (whose delivery is not throttled), and dead connections are the
298 server's ping loop's problem. A party screen somebody tabbed away from
299 keeps answering.
300- **Identity is a UUID in sessionStorage**, chosen by the device and taken at
301 its word by the relay. The seat map is keyed on it, so a reload or a wifi
302 blip walks back into its own seat. No auth — this is a home server for one
303 table of friends.
304- **Fairness is social, not cryptographic.** Room state carries the whole
305 game, wall and hands included — a friend with devtools open can cheat.
306 Moving the engine into the relay would fix that; the server is ours now, so
307 only the work stands in the way (TODO).
308
309### Running it
310
311```
312npm run dev # vite, with the relay on /ws of the same origin
313npm run build && npm run serve # production: dist/ + relay, one process
314```
315
316The relay always lives at `/ws` on the page's own origin. In development
317`vite.config.ts` attaches it to vite's server, so `npm run dev` is the whole
318stack; in production `server/index.ts` serves the built `dist/` and the relay
319from one port (`PORT`, default 8080), listening on the LAN by default so
320phones on the same wifi can scan straight in. Anything further away wants TLS
321in front — a reverse proxy with a certificate — since phones only get camera
322and fullscreen on https.
323
324Rooms live in memory. A restart drops them; the next visitor on an old link
325recreates the room empty, and a host mid-game republishes its state on the
326next move. Joining a room writes `?room=` back into the address bar, so the
327page URL — the host's included — is the invite link.
328
329A QR pointing at `localhost` is a QR only the host's machine can scan, so the
330server always gives the invite links a public face: `PUBLIC_URL` if set, else
331it runs its own rsgrok tunnel (the house ngrok replacement) — spawned
332the moment the server knows its port, the https URL read off the tunnel-up
333line, no `:4040` inspection API (another agent may own that port). Every QR
334and invite link wears that origin instead of the page's. If the tunnel dies,
335or `rsgrok` is not on the PATH (`RSGROK_BIN` points elsewhere), links fall
336back to the page's own address and the tunnel is retried on later joins.
337
338The tunnel always asks for the same subdomain — `mahjong-table`, or whatever
339`TUNNEL_NAME` says — so restarts land back on the URL people already have
340instead of burning a fresh name each run. A name someone else already holds
341kills that first attempt before it prints a URL; the retry then goes out
342nameless and takes whatever it is given.
343
344## On a phone
345
346The table assumes four people sitting around a screen lying flat, and about
347770px in both directions before the middle is worth looking at. A phone has
348neither, so under `(max-height: 620px), (max-width: 820px)` it switches to the
349compact layout: nothing is rotated, everything reads upright for the one person
350holding it, the other three seats shrink to cards showing what is public about
351them, and the depth that frees up goes to your hand, which is allowed to wrap.
352
353There is no centre square there — the middle collapses to a one-line bar showing
354what the wall square was telling you anyway — so there is nowhere to throw a tile
355*to*. The compact layout therefore keeps a discard row per seat, and discarding
356is tap-twice or 打出, exactly as it was. The pool and the throw are a full-size
357feature.
358
359The breakpoint is written down once, in `COMPACT_QUERY` in `src/ui/compact.ts`,
360which sets a `compact` class on `<html>` for the CSS to key off.
361
362## Computer players
363
364Single player seats you at the bottom and gives seats 1-3 to the computer.
365Their tiles go face down and their 聽 / 過水 badges come off, since both would
366give the hand away; everything public — the pool, melds, flowers, chips — stays
367exactly as it is, and everyone turns their hand over when the hand ends. They
368throw their tiles in like anyone else, and under the same rule: a computer seat
369whose wall is open slides them across, and one still walled in lobs them over.
370
371**The engine does not know the bots exist.** `AutoPlay` (`src/game/autoplay.ts`)
372watches the same state the screen does, and when the seat being waited on
373belongs to the computer it calls the identical method the button would have
374called — `discard`, `respond`, `declareConcealedKong`. So scoring, sound,
375saving, 過水 and 包牌 all work without a special case, and a bot cannot make a
376move a person could not. It never acts for you and never closes your claim
377window: if the table is waiting on you, it waits.
378
379**How they play** (`src/game/bot.ts`) is one idea applied everywhere. A hand is
380judged at its *resting* size — the (5 − melds) × 3 + 1 tiles you hold between a
381discard and your next draw — by its 向聽 first and by its 進張 count second.
382
383- **Discard** — try every distinct tile, keep the one that leaves the best
384 resting hand. Ties go to whatever is hardest to build on: a lone honour with
385 most of its copies already gone, before a lone 五萬 that still has neighbours
386 to meet.
387- **碰 / 吃** — only when the hand that comes out the other side is *strictly*
388 closer to home. Melding costs concealment and flexibility, so a claim that
389 merely holds the 向聽 steady is declined — which is why the bots pass on
390 pungs that would narrow a two-sided wait to a single tile.
391- **槓** — judged more kindly: it pays 台 and fetches a replacement, so standing
392 still is good enough.
393- **胡** — always taken.
394
395**What they watch you do** (`src/game/danger.ts`) is the other half. Efficiency
396alone throws whatever is fastest and pays for it; these bots read the table
397first, off the face-up table only — discard rows, exposed melds, the 過水 locks
398the nameplates already show. Two separate questions:
399
400- **How close does each seat look?** Turns taken (a hand is usually settled
401 inside ten goes each, long before the wall looks finished, so counting the
402 wall is the wrong clock), melds exposed, and what they have been throwing
403 lately. Nobody discards 五條 out of a hand that still needs shaping — it comes
404 out once the shape is done, so late middle tiles are the tell. A 過水 lock is
405 a confession: to be locked out of a tile you had to have been able to win on
406 it.
407- **How likely is this tile the one they want?** An honour can only be caught by
408 a pair or a triplet; a 五萬 sits in the middle of every run through it. A tile
409 they discarded themselves was not their tile when it went down — not proof
410 now, but the best evidence there is. A tile with no copies left unseen cannot
411 be a pair or triplet wait at all. Two melds in one suit means stay out of that
412 suit. And two dragon pungs down means the third dragon is not going anywhere
413 near the table, because 包牌 bills the feeder for the entire hand.
414
415Whether any of that changes the discard depends on the bot's own hand. At 聽牌
416it pushes — nothing short of 包牌 is worth breaking a ready hand for. Two or
417three away with somebody live across the table and it will give up a whole 向聽
418step to throw something safe, which is what folding is.
419
420The estimate is checked against ground truth in the tests rather than assumed:
421over the tiles bots actually considered, the ones the model rated below 0.2 deal
422in 0% of the time and the ones above 0.8 deal in 10.5%, cleanly monotonic in
423between. Switching the read on cuts deal-ins by about 13% over a few hundred
424hands, takes hands from ~30 discards to ~38, and moves the draw rate from
425almost nothing to about one hand in ten — which is what a table where people
426stop feeding each other actually looks like.
427
428What they know is still only what they can see. `unseenFor` counts the four
429copies of each tile and subtracts the bot's own hand plus every discard and
430exposed meld on the table. Neither module ever reads an opponent's concealed
431tiles or looks at the wall.
432
433There is no difficulty setting, and the reading stops at the discard: claims are
434still judged purely on speed, and a bot will take a 碰 that walks it into
435trouble.
436
437向聽 lives in `src/game/shanten.ts`, apart from `hu.ts`, because the two want
438different things: the win check has to be exact, and this one has to be fast —
439it runs a few hundred times for every discard a bot considers. The tests hold
440them against each other over random hands, since they work in completely
441different ways and any disagreement is a bug in the fast one.
442
443Undo behaves differently against the computer: rewinding into the middle of its
444turn would only hand the move straight back to it, so one press goes back to
445the last point *you* had a decision to make, computer replies and all.
446
447## Saving
448
449The game state is plain data, so a save is just its JSON in `localStorage`,
450rewritten after every move. Close the lid, refresh, or run the battery flat and
451nothing is lost — the lobby offers **繼續對局 Resume** above the ways to start a
452fresh one, showing whether it was a solo game or a table, the round, hand
453number, chip counts and when it was saved. Which seats the computer holds is
454part of the state, so a save resumes as the kind of game it was — a solo game
455here, a table with its room opened again behind it, so the phones that were on
456it can come back. A
457save is validated before it is offered (four players, 144 tiles accounted for),
458so a truncated or hand-edited one is ignored rather than loaded into a broken
459table. `VERSION` in `save.ts` retires old saves if the state shape changes.
460
461## Rules implemented
462
463- 144 tiles (four of each suit/honour, eight flowers), 16-tile hands, dealer
464 draws the 17th.
465- 補花 at the deal and on every drawn flower, replacements from the back of the
466 wall.
467- 吃 only from 上家; 碰/槓/胡 from anyone. 明槓, 暗槓, 加槓, 搶槓, 槓上開花.
468- 流局 when 16 tiles remain (`Rules.wallReserve`); the dealer keeps the deal on a
469 draw or on a dealer win (連莊), otherwise the deal passes and the round wind
470 advances every four passes. A full 四圈 game is 16 dealer passes.
471
472### House rules (switches in `Rules`, all on the settings screen)
473
474- **過水 `sacredDiscard`** (on) — pass on a tile you could have won with and it
475 is dead to you until your own next draw; the seat shows a 過水 badge listing
476 what it is locked out of, so the missing 胡 button is never a mystery. A draw
477 from either end of the wall lifts it. **`sacredClearedByClaim`** (off) decides
478 whether taking a 吃 / 碰 / 槓 lifts it too — tables genuinely differ.
479- **一炮多響 `multipleWinners`** (off) — one discard pays out to every seat that
480 calls on it, each settled separately against the discarder. With it off the
481 tile goes to the caller nearest the discarder. Either way the table now waits
482 for other seats that *can* win before settling, so the nearest seat wins the
483 tile rather than the quickest hand — and the 摸牌 button still closes the
484 window on anyone dithering.
485- **包牌 `liability`** (on) — feeding the pung that completes a visible 大三元
486 or 大四喜 makes the feeder answer for the whole hand, in place of all three
487 payers. Only the seat that fed the *last* of those sets is on the hook, and
488 only if it came off a discard: a hand that assembled them itself, or closed
489 the set with a 暗槓, has nobody to blame.
490
491### 台 scoring (`src/game/tai.ts`)
492
493自摸 1 · 門清 1 · 門清自摸 +1 · 全求人 2 · 平胡 2 · 五門齊 2 · 正花 1 each ·
494花槓 2 · 八仙過海 8 · 圈風 / 門風 1 each · 三元牌 1 each · 小三元 4 · 大三元 8 ·
495小四喜 8 · 大四喜 16 · 碰碰胡 4 · 混一色 4 · 清一色 8 · 字一色 16 ·
496三暗刻 2 / 四暗刻 5 / 五暗刻 8 · 獨聽 · 單釣 1 · 搶槓 1 · 槓上開花 1 ·
497海底撈月 1 · 河底撈魚 1 · 天胡 16 · 地胡 16 · 人胡 8 · 莊家 1 (連N拉N → 2N+1)
498
499Ambiguous hands are decomposed every legal way and scored at the best reading.
500
501**Payment** (`Game.settle`): one unit is `底 + 台 × 台值`
502(`DEFAULT_RULES` = 底 3, 台 1, 100 chips each).
503放槍一家付 — the discarder alone pays one unit; on 自摸 all three pay one unit
504each. 拉莊 is billed to the dealer alone when the dealer is a payer, and added
505to the whole hand when the dealer wins.
506
507House rules vary a lot; the tai table and payments are plain data/functions in
508`tai.ts` and `types.ts` if yours differ.
509
510## Audio, by seat
511
512A sound at a mahjong table comes from somewhere. You know whose 碰 that was
513because it came from your left, and you know a tile has been thrown hard at the
514far corner without watching it go. Both of those are cheap to keep, and both
515are gone the moment everything comes out of the middle of one screen.
516
517**Every cue is a seat's.** `SoundCue` carries a `seat` alongside the kind and
518the tile — the seat that threw, called, or won — and leaves it off the things
519that belong to the table rather than to anybody: the deal, a 流局, an undo. The
520engine says whose only because a sound has to come from somewhere; what that
521means in the room is entirely the UI's business, as it always was.
522
523**A seat becomes a place.** `App.tsx` turns a seat into a *position round this
524screen* — 0 the near edge, 1 the right, 2 across, 3 the left — because that is
525what the ear wants and the seat number is not: online the table is turned so
526you are always at the bottom, and the sound has to turn with it.
527`game/sound.ts` gives each position a bus of its own: a pan, a gain, and a
528lowpass that opens all the way for the near edge and closes to 5 kHz for the
529far one. Distance is two things at once — quieter, and with the top taken off
530— because between you and 對家 there is a metre of air, a wall of tiles, and
531three people's arms, none of which carry treble. Tiles out in the middle skip
532the edges entirely and are placed continuously, panned by where on the felt
533they actually landed; the physics knows that to the pixel. Buses are built once
534per spot and quantised, so a pool full of skidding tiles reuses a handful
535rather than building one per contact. Old Safari has no `StereoPannerNode`; it
536plays where it always did.
537
538**At a shared table, the words come out of the player.** Five devices in one
539room, and the split the sound should take is the one the room already has: the
540table makes the noise, because the tiles are on the table, and the phone in
541somebody's hand says their calls, because the calls are theirs. So the table's
542screen drops the *voice* for a seat while keeping the clack, and the phone
543holding that seat says 碰 and names its own discards and makes no table noise
544at all.
545
546That only works if the phone really is going to say it, so it is asked rather
547than assumed. `sound.voiceLive()` is the honest answer — sound on, 報牌 on, the
548audio hardware awake, the pack decoded — and every device reports it to the
549host whenever it changes (`EV_VOICE`). The host works out, seat by seat, which
550hands have a device that will speak for them and publishes that as `voices` in
551room state; a nameplate wearing 🔊 next to its 📱 is a seat the table has gone
552quiet for on purpose. Mute the phone, put it to sleep, hand the seat back —
553the flag drops and the table takes the calls back mid-hand. The host's own
554device never counts, even when it holds seats: it is the table, and a table
555that fell silent on the grounds that it was about to speak would say nothing at
556all.
557
558A browser will not start audio before the page has been touched, and a phone
559that arrived by QR may never touch anything that asks for it by name — so the
560first touch anywhere unlocks it, which is also the moment it can start
561claiming the job.
562
563## The voice pack
564
565A mahjong table only ever says about fifty things — 42 tile names and a handful
566of calls — so the whole vocabulary is rendered ahead of time into
567`public/voice/` (~330 kB of mp3) rather than left to whatever speech synthesis
568the browser happens to have. On Linux that is usually espeak-ng, which is
569intelligible but sounds like a modem; and on a machine with no Chinese voice at
570all the feature would silently do nothing. Shipping the audio makes playback
571instant, identical everywhere, and lets a call be cut off mid-word when the
572next one lands, all through the same Web Audio graph as the chimes.
573
574`scripts/voice.mjs` is the authoring step, not part of `npm run build`. It needs
575[piper](https://github.com/OHF-Voice/piper1-gpl) and ffmpeg on PATH:
576
577```
578node scripts/voice.mjs # → public/voice/*.mp3 + manifest.json
579PIPER_MODEL=/path/to/voice.onnx node scripts/voice.mjs # a different voice
580```
581
582The wording lives in that script, and some of it is deliberately not the bare
583tile character: 東 alone is a direction where 東風 is the tile, and the dragons
584are 紅中 / 發財 / 白板 the way they are actually called — which also gives the
585phonemiser enough context to get the tone right, since 中 on its own is as
586likely to come out zhòng.
587
588The clips here were rendered with piper's `zh_CN-huayan-medium`. If you
589redistribute this app, check that voice's model card in
590[piper-voices](https://huggingface.co/rhasspy/piper-voices) for the terms
591attached to it, the same way you would the tile art below — or re-render the
592pack with a voice whose terms suit you, which is a single command.
593
594## Tile art
595
596`public/tiles/tiles.svg` is the **postmodern** tileset from
597[gnome-mahjongg](https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gnome-mahjongg), extracted from
598the installed binary's GResource — a 43×2 sprite sheet (second row is the
599highlighted variant, used for a lifted tile). `public/tiles/back.png` is the
600blank tile from its **smooth** theme, tinted jade, since a solitaire game has no
601face-down art of its own.
602
603How a tile is drawn on the canvas — the outline round it and the shadow under
604it — lives in `src/ui/tileArt.ts`, and `npm run dev` serves **`/tiles.html`**, a
605page of every face at every angle over the felt with a slider on each of those
606numbers and the finished block ready to paste back. None of it can be judged
607from the values: it is 246 white against a dark green at 35 pixels across, and
608the only way to know is to look at it and move something. (`tiles.html` is not
609one of the build's entry points, so it does not ship.)
610
611The sheet is not a picture of a tile's *face*. It is a picture of a whole tile,
612drawn in an oblique projection, with its own sides painted down the left and
613along the bottom and its own light coming from the top right — a 16px bevel on a
614128px cell. That is fine while every tile stands the same way up, and wrong the
615moment they are scattered: rotating the sprite rotates a pre-rendered solid, so
616a pool of discards ends up with a different sun on each tile.
617
618So the art is cropped back to the flat face, and the solid is worked out
619instead. A tile is a box lying on cloth: take the four corners of the rotated
620rectangle, offset them by the projection (`depthAngle`, down and to the left,
621the same direction the art used), and fill the two or three quads whose edges
622the base falls away from — each shaded from the direction that edge faces *on
623screen*. Turn the tile and the same physical side comes round to face a
624different way and its shading changes with it, which is the whole point. No 3D
625engine, no z-buffer: one projection vector and a dot product per edge.
626
627Each cell of the sheet is cut out into its own canvas the first time it is
628wanted. `drawImage` with a source rectangle is allowed to sample past that
629rectangle when it resamples, and the row under every face is the highlighted
630variant, whose border is bright blue — so a tile at any angle other than a right
631one wore a blue fringe along one edge. Square on it never showed, which is why
632it looked like a rotation bug rather than a spritesheet one.
633
634A tile used to be drawn as two passes — a slab of ivory offset down the screen
635with the face on top, so a sliver of the tile's own side showed along the bottom
636edge. At the size a discard is actually drawn that never read as thickness; it
637read as a second, paler shape stuck to the bottom of every tile. Shading it
638better did not help, because the problem was that it was there. What gives a
639tile its weight now is the shadow and the outline, both of which are true at
640any size.
641
642That art is **GPL-2.0-or-later**. Fine for playing at home; if you ever
643distribute this app, either honour the GPL or swap the two files for art of your
644own — `SPRITE_COL` in `tiles.ts` is the only mapping that would need updating.
645
646Known gaps and house rules that aren't implemented yet are listed in
647[TODO.md](TODO.md).
648
649## Layout
650
651```
652public/tiles/ sprite sheet + tile back
653src/game/tiles.ts tile codes, wall, shuffle, sprite mapping
654src/game/hu.ts hand decomposition, 聽 detection, wait shapes
655src/game/shanten.ts 向聽 / 進張 counting, for the computer players
656src/game/bot.ts what a computer player discards and claims (pure)
657src/game/danger.ts reading the table: who looks ready, which tiles are hot
658src/game/autoplay.ts when it does it, and how long it appears to think
659src/game/tai.ts 台 scoring
660src/game/engine.ts state machine: deal, turns, claim resolution, settlement
661src/game/ctl.ts TableCtl — the surface the UI drives, local or networked
662src/game/wall.ts what is left of the square, and what still blocks a throw
663src/net/room.ts the wire itself: join, reconnect, state, events
664src/net/session.ts the room: host duties, seats, intents, migration
665src/net/table.ts TableCtl over the wire: mirror + intents + hand overlay
666src/net/protocol.ts what crosses the wire, in one place
667src/net/handOrder.ts your own arrangement, kept on your own device
668src/ui/Controller.tsx the phone at the shared table: your tiles and the throw
669src/ui/OnlineLobby.tsx seats and the deal button, before an online game
670server/rooms.ts the relay: rooms, host election, state fan-out
671server/index.ts production: dist/ and the relay from one port
672src/table/physics.ts the discard pool: rectangles with weight, pure and testable
673src/table/geometry.ts the table measured — colliders, launch points, throw gate
674src/table/pool.ts game state ⇄ tiles in the middle, by diffing the discards
675src/ui/ TileView, Hand (drag and throw), Seat, Center, Pool, Help
676```
677
678## The tiles in the middle
679
680The pool is a small rigid-body solver (`src/table/physics.ts`) that knows nothing
681about mahjong, the DOM, or the clock: fixed 1/120s steps, no randomness of its
682own, and everything in table pixels. Given the same throws it produces the same
683pile every time, which is what lets a refresh mid-hand come back to the pile you
684had rather than a freshly scattered one — positions are derived from the hand
685number and each tile's place in its thrower's discards, never saved.
686
687The pile is handled directly. Press on a discard and it comes up out of the
688pile, carried over the top of the others rather than ploughing through them;
689let go slowly and it is set down there, flick and it goes off across the felt at
690the speed it left your fingers — the same throw a tile gets out of a hand, made
691from the middle of the table instead. Pressing on bare felt does nothing, and
692the press passes through to whatever was really under it: the tiles are drawn on
693a canvas with no elements to hit, so the hit test is against the physics and the
694listener is a capturing one on the table itself.
695
696A flick is the whole of a throw: the direction and the speed it leaves at are
697the hand's, and nothing between the fingers and the felt changes either. The one
698thing the table decides is *height* — with a standing wall in front of the
699throw a flat tile would only skid into it, so it is lofted over instead, exactly
700as far as it was thrown and simply in the air for the first part of the way. A
701tile that carries past the square and out into the open stays there. (It used to
702be re-aimed at the middle of the square when the flick's line missed it, which
703put the tile on a line nobody had thrown and read, fairly, as a bounce off
704nothing.)
705
706What stops a tile is other tiles. There is no fence: the standing stacks of the
707wall, the sets people have laid down and the sixteen each of them is holding are
708all measured as colliders, so the pile is held in by the ring of tiles round it
709exactly as it is on a real table, and spills through whatever gaps the wall has
710been eaten into. The table's own edge is a backstop at the screen edge, there
711only so a tile that got past all of that isn't lost.
712
713It is drawn on a canvas that spans the **whole table**, not just the centre.
714That is deliberate: `.slot` and `.seat` both clip their own contents, which is
715why a tile can't be animated out of a strip as an element. On the canvas there is
716nothing to clip it, so a tile lifted out of a hand crosses the table in one
717piece.
718
719The square is the whole wall: eighteen stacks of two a side, four sides, 144
720tiles, the way it is built on a table. It used to be rebuilt to what was *left*
721after a hand had been dealt — barely half of it — because eighteen full-size
722stacks a side wants about 560px and no ordinary window has that between the top
723and bottom strips. That bought a square at the price of it not being the wall:
724a side ran out of stacks before it reached its corner, so the four of them never
725met.
726
727Nothing gives now, and in particular the tile does not. Every tile on the table
728is one size — `--tile-w` in styles.css, in a hand, in the wall, and lying in the
729middle — because they are the same tiles, and a tile that changed size between
730the wall and your hand read as a different, smaller set sitting in the middle.
731The square is built from that tile and is however big that comes to:
732`wallSquare()` in `game/wall.ts` takes the tile and hands back the lengths, and
733`WallRing` measures one rendered cell to find out what CSS made it. The wall
734being bigger than the room between the strips is a fact about a 144-tile wall,
735not a thing to solve by shrinking it.
736
737The four walls are placed by CSS alone: each is pinned to its own edge of the
738opening with `left`/`top`, runs its whole length from the corner it is built
739from, and so carries one wall-depth past the far corner and over the end of the
740next wall along. Every corner of the square is covered by exactly one wall and
741no two overlap — that is the pinwheel. Nothing is rotated; a square wants no
742rotation to describe it.
743
744The overhang is exactly one wall-depth, which is what it takes to close a right
745angle: two bands of thickness `t` meeting at an interior angle ψ overlap by
746`t / tan(ψ/2)`, and at ninety degrees that is `t`. So the whole square measures a
747wall's length plus one depth across, and leaves that length *less* one depth in
748the middle — which is the opening, and which is what `.wall-ring` itself is.
749
750The CSS only places what it is told: `.wall-side` is a row of stacks, laid across
751on the two flat walls and down on the two upright ones, and `--wall-len` from
752`WallRing` is the only length it is given. Every place in the wall is rendered
753whether or not there is still a stack standing on it, because with the break
754anywhere but a corner a wall is eaten from its *middle* — a row that closed the
755gap up would drag the whole tail of the wall along the table behind it.
756
757Where the four walls **stand** is found at the table itself rather than on a page
758of sliders: take hold of a wall in a real game and push it. It goes where the
759finger goes, and lets go saying where it landed — `[wall] top pushed to 0.5,-4.9
760— top 0.5,-4.9 · right 0,0 · …` in the console, in tiles, which is the form
761`WALL_PLACED` in `game/wall.ts` is written in, so what a push finds pastes
762straight back in. Nothing about the hand moves: the wall is the same wall in the
763same order and the next draw is still the next draw. There used to be a
764`/wall.html` for this; the table is the honest place to do it, so that page is
765gone.
766
767## 擲骰 — where the wall is broken
768
769The dealer throws three dice to open a hand, and the total does two jobs. It
770counts round the seats — the dealer being one, and the count going the way the
771turn goes — to pick whose wall is opened. Then the same number counts stacks in
772from the right-hand end of *that* wall, and the break is behind them: the first
773tile drawn is the next one along, and the drawing runs away to the left from
774there, on round the square.
775
776The square makes that cheap to say. Every wall is laid down from the corner its
777own player's right hand falls on — that is what the pinwheel is — so the run of
77872 places already starts at each seat's right, and the break is simply so many
779places into the side the dice picked. `breakAt()` is those two lines.
780
781Nothing about the *tiles* turns on it: the wall was shuffled before it was built,
782so which stack is drawn first is decided either way. What it moves is where in
783the middle of the table the gap opens and who has to reach furthest for the next
784draw — which is the whole of what it does at a table too. The throw is made from
785the same seeded rng that shuffled, so a seed replays a hand's gap as well as its
786tiles.
787
788In a dev build a panel in the corner of the table steps the total through every
789one three dice can make, 3 to 18, and redraws the square on each; **整牆 144**
790puts every tile back, which is what the square is built to and what it only ever
791is for the moment before the deal. `game.reroll(6, 6, 6)` does the same from the
792console.
793Nothing about the square is calculated twice. Its size lives entirely in CSS
794(`--ws`, `--wd`), so `geometry.ts` **measures** it instead of restating that
795arithmetic: `WallRing` already renders every stack as a real element tagged with
796its index, and the colliders are those elements' bounding rects. That one
797mapping is what makes the wall a physical object — the thing a thrown tile
798bounces off, and the thing the throw gate casts its ray at.
799
800### Seeing the colliders
801
802Because every boundary is measured off the DOM rather than written down, the
803only honest way to check a bounce is to draw the boxes in the coordinate space
804the tiles are drawn in. Add `?colliders` to the address, or call `colliders()`
805from the console while a hand is running:
806
807| drawn | is |
808| --- | --- |
809| solid rectangle at the screen edge | the table itself. Nothing meets this in play — it is only there so a tile that got past everybody's tiles is still on the table afterwards |
810| solid box on every tile | a collider. Every tile on the table is one: the stacks still standing, the sets people have laid down, and the sixteen each of them is holding. Half stacks aren't drawn because they aren't colliders — a tile goes over them |
811| dashed rectangle | the wall square's opening — where a throw is *aimed*. It stops nothing, which is why the pile spills out of it |
812| dotted rectangle, inset | where the moving tile's own centre may be against the table's edge, which is its half width in from it |
813| box hugging each pool tile | the rotated rectangle it really collides with |
814| dotted box round the moving tile | the upright box the straight edges use instead. It comes apart from the rotated one as the tile turns |
815
816| blue rays from a throw | faint: the flick, as the tile was let go of. Bright: the line it was actually **sent** along, labelled `slide` or `lob`. These should lie on top of each other — the flick is the throw, and a tile leaving on a line nobody threw reads exactly like a bounce off something invisible |
817| yellow cross | where contact was *actually* made, fading over a second or so. One of these sitting in open felt with no box under it is a bounce off something that isn't a collider at all — a different bug from a box in the wrong place |
818
819Colliders mode is also a **throwing sandbox**: a flick throws for real but is not a
820discard, so the tile stays in your hand, the turn never passes and the computer
821players hold still. Throw the same tile at the same corner as many times as you
822like. Sixty stay on the table before the oldest is swept off; `pool.clearLoose()`
823sweeps them all. Tapping a tile to discard does nothing in this mode — throwing
824is the thing being tested.
825
826Add `pause=1` (`?colliders&pause=1`, or `pause()` from the console) to **stop
827dead on contact**. The physics halts on the fixed step that resolved it and
828drops the rest of the frame, so what's on screen is where the tile touched
829rather than where it had got to by the end of the frame. Space carries on, →
830takes one step, ↑ takes ten; the console says what it stopped on.
831
832`colliders(false)` turns it off again. It repaints on toggle, so a settled table
833doesn't have to be poked first. In a dev build `pool` is the live pool: the
834overlay draws `pool.world.walls`, the physics' own copy rather than a fresh
835measurement, so if what's drawn ever disagrees with the DOM it is the world that
836went stale — which `pool.measuredAt` will show, since the stamp carries every
837hand's shape.
838
839## What is left of the wall
840
841Four walls of eighteen full-size stacks want about 560px a side. No ordinary
842window has that between the top and bottom strips, and the tile is not allowed
843to shrink to make it fit — a tile in the wall is the same tile you play with, so
844drawing it smaller was a visible lie.
845
846What saves it is that nobody ever sees a whole wall: four hands come off the
847front before the table is on screen, so barely half of it is left by then. So
848only the stacks still standing are drawn, and they are laid out around a ring
849cut to the **middle** rather than to eighteen — `ringLayout` in `game/wall.ts`
850measures how many stacks a side can take (`WallRing` renders one hidden cell and
851asks CSS how big it came out) and shares what is left over the four sides in
852proportion. Every seat keeps a wall in front of it instead of the remainder
853piling into one corner, and the order runs all the way round, so the break point
854is still at the head of it and the 底牌 tail still at the end.
855
856Shuffling the wall along as it is eaten costs nothing to look at, because every
857stack shows the same green back — and it is what people do to a half-eaten wall
858anyway.
859
860`pool.ts` never listens for events. It **diffs** the discards against what it is
861already drawing, keyed by `seat:index` — and those keys never shift, because
862discards are only ever pushed and a claim only ever pops the one on top. So a
863key that appeared is a tile to throw in and a key that went is a tile to take
864off, which makes undo, 下一局, a claim and resuming a saved game all the same
865code path. The engine has no idea any of it exists, and the save format did not
866change.