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[man-man]

Hm! Interesting. What would bridges look like?

The same I would think - one conveyor partially obscures the other. It should work visually as long as you can see about half of a chevron on each end of the lower conveyor.

Ah, I see! New version up. Let me know what you think!

Great improvement, it's something you don't realise you need until you've got it.

Actually I probably could have realised it before by the number of times I've rearranged things without changing the logic then failed testing (or created a loop) because of a conveyor being pointed the wrong way...

Meanwhile my optimisation attentions have turned to Police (Output with a yellow in the middle). I've gotten it down a fair way from what it was, but it feels like there's more trimming could be done if I could just get the little fiddly sticky-outy bits to tuck away neatly. What's the best people have done with that one?

[FishFace]

The arrows are definitely an improvement! I was actually thinking chevrons, so like the triangles but without the hypotenuse. Functionally it's the same; a lot easier to see what's what now. You might prefer one or the other visually.

I am using one of those... Magical... thingummies, but my problem is that I'm having to have three or four red/blue exhausters each loop so I can check what just happened to the number I was dealing with. I'm planning an alteration which could reduce this but I'm not sure how much...

P.S. my best for a police is a fairly bad 77 (latest optimisation was to stop using greens - I think you can often save a piece or two, in return for readability, by just knowing whether or not the next non-red/blue symbol you find is a positional marker or end-of-string.

[Wyrm]

Meanwhile my optimisation attentions have turned to Police (Output with a yellow in the middle). I've gotten it down a fair way from what it was, but it feels like there's more trimming could be done if I could just get the little fiddly sticky-outy bits to tuck away neatly. What's the best people have done with that one?

*optimises*
I optimised it down to 35!
*optimises*
Back up to 40 :@
*optimises*
33!
*backs away from the keyboard*

[duerig]

Wow. That is such an awesome solution to Police! My own strategy was much more cumbersome and left me no room to try to solve Judiciary with it as a sub-component.

My strategy:
I had two markers, a 'middle' marker and an end marker. First, I checked to see if the space before the middle marker was equal to the space afterwards by inserting greens as counters. If it wasn't equal, I cleared the greens then moved the middle marker to the next position.

This took up the entire arena and was extremely slow.

Hats off.

On the game itself, I've found it very fun. A few nits: Conveyer speed should be much slower or even stopped when editing since the chevrons show direction. Watching the moving conveyers makes my eyes water after a while.

You increase conveyer speed when I increase play speed, but you don't decrease it again when I slow it down.

Also, play speed shouldn't be a toggle. There should be three buttons. I don't want to move through 60x speed as an intermediate step to slowing things down.

Please make delete a tool and have the default be to drag around individual components. There have been a number of times when I thought I was selecting but ended up smearing deletes over my machine. Would be nice to more explicitly do that. And of course, dragging an individual component off the map could be a delete.

By the same token, it would be nice to be able to drag to pick up a component and then use hotkeys to reorient it.

Judiciary is strictly harder than Malakhim. Might want to swap them.

Also, the first bonus level doesn't unlock the second bonus level until reload.

[Wyrm]

Wow. That is such an awesome solution to Police! My own strategy was much more cumbersome and left me no room to try to solve Judiciary with it as a sub-component.
...
Hats off.

Thanks :D

On the game itself, I've found it very fun. A few nits: Conveyer speed should be much slower or even stopped when editing since the chevrons show direction. Watching the moving conveyers makes my eyes water after a while.

On the later levels there aren't enough conveyors for this to be an issue, and on the earlier levels you should be able to do them before "too long" passes!

Would it be possible to map the numpad to select tools? Combined with numlock to toggle to the rotate keys already available... no need to mouse select or move keyboard hand! \o/

[FishFace]

Ah that's a nice solution to Police, I didn't think of checking for done-ness in between the two yellow-move operations, so I have a whole 'nother area where I check that, which made fitting it into Judiciary a royal pain.

We had a conflab before we started working on our solutions to Police, and we all settled on the "move yellows towards each other" approach in so doing. Quite a nice way of doing it

And yes, it's odd that Judiciary is before Malakhim (M-1 used to be before Hydras, so at the time of the big update I just copied my M-1 for use as a subcomponent)

I think the final puzzle should be to interpret a string as a Turing machine and its input, then run it ;-)

[CrixOMix]

Soo I finally solved Officers, by myself... And I'm dang proud of it! Haha :D I'm sure it's quite cumbersome, but the basic idea is that it sets a green marker at the true end of the line, and then slowly moves the yellow marker to the left to find the first available spot to turn blue, and then it makes the rest red, also it checks if the ending bit is already a 0, then it just changes that to a blue and sends it on its way... It might not be amazing but I feel very achieved :D Oh and here's the code http://pleasingfungus.com/?lvl=13&code=y8:6f1;q8:7f0;p8:9f4;b8:10f3;c8:11f3;r8:12f2;b9:1f3;y9:2f3;g9:3f3;c9:4f3;c9:5f3;c9:6f3;p9:7f3;c9:8f3;q9:9f3;r9:11f3;p9:12f2;b9:13f1;c10:1f0;c10:6f0;c10:7f2;q10:12f3;c11:1f0;c11:2f1;c11:3f1;c11:4f1;c11:5f1;r11:6f0;q11:7f2;c11:12f2;b12:4f2;q12:5f1;c12:6f0;c12:7f1;c12:8f3;c12:9f2;c12:12f2;g13:2f3;c13:3f3;c13:4f3;p13:5f3;q13:6f5;c13:9f2;c13:12f3;r14:4f0;q14:5f5;b14:6f3;c14:7f2;r14:8f3;p14:9f6;r14:10f1;c14:13f0;g15:5f2;c15:7f2;q15:9f6;c15:10f3;c15:11f3;c15:12f3;c15:13f0;b16:4f3;p16:5f6;r16:6f1;c16:7f2;c16:13f0;q17:5f6;b17:6f3;c17:7f3;c17:8f3;c17:9f3;c17:10f3;c17:11f3;c17:12f3;c17:13f0;c12:2f2;b8:5f0;p7:5f0;r7:6f1;b7:4f3;c6:4f1;c6:3f2;c7:3f2;q8:3f3;c6:5f1;c6:7f1;c6:6f1;b7:7f0;c13:13f0;c8:4f2;b11:8f2;

Anyways, still have generals, police, and whatevers after police to try... THIS GAME ROCKS!!!

And to the creator, I have a suggestion. Make it so if it's testing, we can hold space to speed it up to 2x. This way when we are trying to pay attention, yet it's at a slow part or something, then we can momentarily speed it up. Having to click past 8x and 60x has many times made me accidentally skip the part I wanted to see!

[PleasingFungus]

Conveyer speed should be much slower or even stopped when editing since the chevrons show direction. Watching the moving conveyers makes my eyes water after a while.

But they're so pretty! (Yeah, the chevrons make them much more... aggressive towards the eyes. I'll think about reducing the visual noise a bit.)

You increase conveyer speed when I increase play speed, but you don't decrease it again when I slow it down.

Haha, I was wondering when someone would notice that! Your description of the bug isn't quite right - the conveyors slow down eventually, they just take their time about it - but it's been there for a while.

As far as I can tell, it's a bug in Flixel, not in my own code... not an excuse, mind, just makes it a bit tougher to track down...

Oh, hey. There it is.

Fixed.

Also, play speed shouldn't be a toggle. There should be three buttons. I don't want to move through 60x speed as an intermediate step to slowing things down.

Probably! The problem is finding space. I'll look into it.

Please make delete a tool and have the default be to drag around individual components. There have been a number of times when I thought I was selecting but ended up smearing deletes over my machine. Would be nice to more explicitly do that. And of course, dragging an individual component off the map could be a delete.

I've thought about this before (and discussed it in this thread; page 6 or 7, maybe?). I concluded that delete seems like a more useful default in general than selection. But I sympathize with your woes! (I've done that too.)

By the same token, it would be nice to be able to drag to pick up a component and then use hotkeys to reorient it.

I had a functionality for this, many many builds ago. Shift picked things up, and then you could re-orient them and put them back down again and so on. I ended up taking it out, because no-one used it. The thing is - why bother to pick up and reorient a component, when you can just hotkey-select, orient, and place a new one just as easily?

Judiciary is strictly harder than Malakhim. Might want to swap them.

Malakhim's a tutorial for the multicolor-levels. It's supposed to be easy.

Also, the first bonus level doesn't unlock the second bonus level until reload.

Still? ...heh, you're right. Fixed, hopefully for good this time.


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Gotta head off - will finish replies and so on when I get back. Thanks for all the suggestions / feedback! Brings warmth to this old, blackened heart of mine.

[PleasingFungus]

Would it be possible to map the numpad to select tools? Combined with numlock to toggle to the rotate keys already available... no need to mouse select or move keyboard hand! \o/

The infamous "JamSilver" requested the very same thing! The trouble is that I'm on a laptop, so I don't have a numpad to test on. I tried a few things, but according to him (and you!), they didn't work. I may borrow a friend's keyboard and try again...

And to the creator, I have a suggestion. Make it so if it's testing, we can hold space to speed it up to 2x. This way when we are trying to pay attention, yet it's at a slow part or something, then we can momentarily speed it up. Having to click past 8x and 60x has many times made me accidentally skip the part I wanted to see!

Nice idea, but I had a better one!

Game updated. Check it out!

[Draknek]

Some more stuff I noticed:

The link in the first post is still to the old SWF.

The mouse-over text for the select tool says "short".

When delete is selected, the icon should change like for all the other tools.

You should be able to click anywhere on the new speed selector, not have to click and drag the arrow.

IMO, main menu and re-run should be the other way round on the success screen.

[FishFace]

Malakhim's a tutorial for the multicolor-levels. It's supposed to be easy.

How d'you mean multicolor? I use green in Malakhim, but you already had to use green in other ones..

[PleasingFungus]

The link in the first post is still to the old SWF.

Yeah, you can tell I've been updating it carefully! Fixed.

The mouse-over text for the select tool says "short".

If you'd waited a moment longer, you'd have seen it say "long placeholder"! Fixed.

When delete is selected, the icon should change like for all the other tools.

Interesting idea! I thought of it more as a 'put away current tool' button.

You should be able to click anywhere on the new speed selector, not have to click and drag the arrow.

Done!

IMO, main menu and re-run should be the other way round on the success screen.

Now that I think about it, that was bothering me too. Done!

(Thanks for all the tips!)

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Malakhim's a tutorial for the multicolor-levels. It's supposed to be easy.

How d'you mean multicolor? I use green in Malakhim, but you already had to use green in other ones..

Sorry, I was abbreviating. "Multicolor input level." In most levels, only red and blue are part of the input strings. But in the bonus levels...

(I'm probably going to add a very short tutorial-video-type thing for those. You know the things I'm talking about. (Some day I should come up with a proper name for them.))

[Draknek]

Interesting idea! I thought of it more as a 'put away current tool' button.

The problem is that it behaves differently to all the other buttons: there's not enough visual feedback when you press it. I definitely think that if you're in delete mode that button should be selected as if it were any other tool.

[duerig]

A few more minor nits: You don't zero-pad seconds on your times. On the level-selection screen, the title and text of a level should disappear when you mouse-out from a node.

The only big feature which I think it could use at this point is the ability to submit your own robots for testing. It wouldn't even need to be checked against a 'correct' output. In addition to testing use, it would be cool to just be able to give it a tape and watch it run.

Anyone have any luck optimizing Metatron? I've got a working solution (114 parts, 13:13 time), but I wonder if anyone else has something simpler.

The basic idea is to have three pieces of tape separated by greens. First number, second number, total. The total tape has the carry bit at the front. The machine has three last-before-green readers which it uses to separate into the four cases of the least significant bit.

Then it compares with the carry bit and puts 00/01/10/11 depending on the result. which gives us the next carry bit at the front.

Link to my solution: http://pleasingfungus.com/?lvl=31&code=c6:5f1;c6:6f1;c6:7f1;c6:8f1;c6:9f1;c6:10f1;c6:11f1;c6:12f1;c7:6f2;c7:7f1;b7:10f3;b7:11f3;c7:12f0;q8:6f2;p8:7f4;q8:8f6;g8:9f3;p8:10f3;c8:12f0;c9:5f2;r9:6f3;c9:7f0;b9:8f1;b9:10f3;r9:11f3;c9:12f0;b10:4f3;p10:5f6;r10:6f1;g10:7f0;c10:8f1;c11:5f3;q11:6f5;b11:7f2;q11:8f1;g12:4f3;r12:5f3;g12:6f3;c12:7f3;p12:8f3;q12:9f3;c13:5f3;q13:6f1;r13:7f0;q13:8f5;q13:9f6;b14:4f3;p14:5f0;r14:6f1;g14:7f2;c14:8f1;c14:9f1;c15:4f3;c15:5f0;r15:6f3;c15:7f2;b15:8f1;b15:10f3;r15:11f3;c15:12f2;c16:4f0;g16:5f2;q16:6f4;p16:7f2;q16:8f0;g16:9f3;p16:10f3;c16:12f2;c17:4f0;r17:5f1;c17:6f0;c17:7f1;r17:10f3;b17:11f3;c17:12f2;c18:4f0;c18:5f1;c18:6f1;c18:7f1;c18:8f1;c18:9f1;c18:10f1;c18:11f1;c18:12f1;g8:5f1;i8:4f4;p8:2f1;c8:3f1;r7:2f1;r9:1f2;b9:2f1;b7:1f0;c6:1f3;c6:2f3;c6:3f3;c6:4f2;c7:4f2;c9:4f3;c10:1f3;c10:2f3;c10:3f0;c9:3f3;p13:10f3;b12:10f3;c14:10f3;c14:11f0;c12:11f2;c13:11f3;p13:12f3;r14:12f0;b12:12f2;q13:13f1;c12:2f3;c12:3f3;

[PleasingFungus]

Interesting idea! I thought of it more as a 'put away current tool' button.

The problem is that it behaves differently to all the other buttons: there's not enough visual feedback when you press it. I definitely think that if you're in delete mode that button should be selected as if it were any other tool.

Maybe. The different behavior is in part a clue that there's nothing special about the 'garbage button', you can actually dump parts pretty much anywhere to deselect... maybe that's not a very good clue, though.

I poked at the relevant code for a while, but it seems to have turned into an unholy snarl when I wasn't looking. Architectural issues. When and if I feel like reworking the whole thing, I'll have another shot at your suggestion change.

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A few more minor nits: You don't zero-pad seconds on your times.

It was easier than I remembered. Done.

On the level-selection screen, the title and text of a level should disappear when you mouse-out from a node.

I already had the code for that; turns out it was off by one character. Done.

The only big feature which I think it could use at this point is the ability to submit your own robots for testing. It wouldn't even need to be checked against a 'correct' output. In addition to testing use, it would be cool to just be able to give it a tape and watch it run.

You're at least the third person to suggest that, and I can't argue against three people at a time! It'll go in.


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I'm feeling pretty burned out on Manufactoria right now; might take a weekend-long break, week-long sabbatical, something like that. Just a heads-up.