wait.

this is still alive O_o

Yup!

oh wait it's less than a year old

i swear i remember this from ages ago

You do

like > 1 year ago

There's a reason I nominated it for a "best of pccg 2017" award

over a year? maybe you saw it in the sandbox? hmm, don't think it was on the sandbox much before last April...

yeah

@dzaima ARG, RANDOM 0s! Sigh, something broke Glider in a game in the official controller and I don't know what it was (I didn't see it). :<

Wrecking its long term performance when it happens in the first 4 games!

as much as I like the look of this, on another tournament I ran in the 1st 4 games it had 2 games of score 0

@ASCII-only it was in the sandbox for about 2 years before I learned JavaScript and finally wrote the controller

Most of my challenges are slow cooked

@dzaima with so many players and so many possible combinations of players per game, it take hundreds of games before the order becomes remotely meaningful now

@trichoplax mhm..

working on a 5 wide rail design now

Ooh...

24 fully repaired states doesn't sound nice though

\o/

Looks gorgeous!

..just took another look at my prolog for generating the pattern and found some old requirements meant for my Highway clone.. Seems to make the chance of outputting something way bigger ಠ_ಠ

and now it found a 5x4 pattern with only 4 colors..

just finished the code for shafts, the miners don't go out of the shaft yet for food, so only 1/4th of the food can be gotten, and this is the result

My hope is that it, and Highway, conflict and murder each other

also wildfire

@Draco18s the thing with it is that it'll be able to go around obstacles unlike the 3 wide rail

with food picking up finished, it got 1444 food (with 152 + 116 workers) on an empty map. Now to make it function on the hill..

Are the mine shafts still separated by an empty column to allow the 4-cycle repetition? Would making the ants move diagonally back and for allow viewing all the arena cells without losing any speed?

Or would that require losing the empty column in the middle of the mineshaft to avoid losing site of the other side?

@trichoplax yep, still 1/4th is lost, and diagonally moving is very dangerous and currently is left as a last escape as then you can easily get confused by bad new colors

Fair enough. I was imagining a double width coloured column with white columns either side of it, and the worker zigzagging within the coloured columns. Even if it would work it would be a significant rewrite for 33% more food

@trichoplax it wouldn't be a significant rewrite, I could probably get a working setup in a couple minutes, I just feel like it's way too error prone to move diagonally and moving orthogonally is very wasteful there

Hmm, I think I'm going to revisit orthogonal-only movement for Highway. Prompted by some... interesting observations in regards to how often workers actually misinterpret some colors when moving diagonally.

@dzaima How about this kind of zigzag?

Huh, that doesn't actually solve any problems.

Ooh that still covers all the cells of all 4 columns

But at this point we're introducing more states to be confused by :P

I think this idea is simply too unreliable...

there are a couple things a zig-zag would need to do very well to be useful too - not die with multiple ants in one shaft, have reliable ways to get back to the shaft after getting food & not being easily confused about being on the rail

What if the adjacent marked columns were just one colour each alternating every other cell with white?

@trichoplax one color + diagonal moving = any trail messes everything up

Maybe it would be easier to just go with the spare worker type checking between the columns...

@trichoplax and I'm not sure that would be worth the hassle