CG&CC-gaming

DJMcMayhem

5:30 AM

This game is interesting: alphabetagamer.com/elechead-alpha-demo

Pretty short though

Veskah

12:05 PM

Continued Grimrock 2ing. Hit a point of "Well now what"

Also, Fungus cave sucks, all the water spelunking sucks.

Veskah

12:18 PM

Also, trying to find the actual numbers behind Grimrock's firearm misfires is surprisingly hard to do

Martin Ender

12:55 PM

@NathanMerrill Is the vampire event a recent addition to StS? I've been seeing a lot, but I don't think I ever got it when I played the game a couple of months ago.

Veskah

The one that gives you bite? That one is ancient

Martin Ender

1:08 PM

huh okay

I'm pretty sure I've never seen it during my first bunch of runs (which was about 25 hours of play) and I've seen it in every run this week.

Veskah

Weird. And by ancient, I mean it came in version 0. You picked a weird thing to defy the odds in (granted, it is a floor 2 only event).

Eric Tressler

1:52 PM

@Pavel I spent a lot of time looking at the UI elements you were talking about, and I think I can scale many of them without much fuss -- but the palette in particular will take a complete rewrite if it's going to scale with resolution

@Pavel I also can't really test ultra-high resolutions, so it makes me wary of making changes that will only be apparent at those resolutions. I won't be able to tell if I've broken something

AdmBorkBork

Control from Remedy came out yesterday. Am I the only one in here interested in playing it?

(Remedy also made Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Quantum Break)

Veskah

Haven't heard of it but I do like me some Max Payne

Nathan Merrill

2:31 PM

@DJMcMayhem +1 from me as well.

DJMcMayhem

Is Alan Wake good? It's intrigued me for a while, but I haven't gotten around to it yet

But I think I got it through Epic

Veskah

Not sure if intentional typo

AdmBorkBork

@DJMcMayhem I've heard good things about it, but haven't played it myself.

Veskah

Heard original is good with a few questionable mechanics and plot points. AW: American Wasteland(I think is the sub-title) I heard is quite a bit poopier

American Nightmare*

DJMcMayhem

I don't like poopy games

Veskah

2:43 PM

I thought you liked Binding of Isaac :^)

AdmBorkBork

What about Who's Your Daddy?

DJMcMayhem

Barely played BoI, never played WyD

AdmBorkBork

I haven't played Who's Your Daddy?, but I watched a Let's Play of it. Pretty funny for a little while, but easily gets old.

DJMcMayhem

I'm pretty sure that was the goal

AdmBorkBork

Yeah

I just realized that given the large amount of games I play(ed), I've watched an awful lot of Let's Plays about others.

Like last night, I watched someone play through the first hour of Fez.

Never played it myself, probably won't, but I got enough of the gist of the game to understand when others talk about it, now.

I think I'm gatekeeping myself...

Pavel

3:17 PM

@AdmBorkBork I have no idea what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting SCP: The Game

Can confirm that it melted my GPU

Decent enough FPS mechanics with a way more interesting world and story than I thought I'd see from a glorified tech demo

DJMcMayhem

@AdmBorkBork How's that gatekeeping?

Speaking of GPU, I'm getting a pretty huge upgrade

Pavel

/me hovers between 50 and 70 FPS with an RTX 2080 at 1080p with only medium RTX on

DJMcMayhem

I'm going from an AMD R9 290 --> Nvidia GTX 1080

AdmBorkBork

@DJMcMayhem I'm obviously not A Real Gamer™, because I'm only watching Let's Plays rather than actually playing the games.

DJMcMayhem

Oh, I misread. I missed the "myself"

AdmBorkBork

3:24 PM

@Pavel Yeah, that's the comparison I was thinking but couldn't put into words because I couldn't remember the acronym.

Pavel

I'm considering just maxing out all the settings and settle for just at least >30 FPS

AdmBorkBork

@DJMcMayhem That's a chunky upgrade.

El'endia Starman

Chonky, even.

AdmBorkBork

I don't need a new laptop. I don't need a new laptop. I don't need a new laptop.

Eric Tressler

@AdmBorkBork obviously, you should go with a desktop

AdmBorkBork

3:38 PM

A friend has a mini-ITX build that he hauls around. I've considered something similar.

But no, I don't need a new computer.

DJMcMayhem

I wish I had emphasized small/quiet/cool when I was building my tower. I just thought "Woah, cool flashy tower! Make everything super powerful!" without thinking about how nice it would be to have a small portable desktop

Eric Tressler

I had a computer one time that sounded like it was filled with bees, and ever since then I've been careful about choosing fans

I spend more time looking at fan decibel ratings than the CPU or video card

AdmBorkBork

Jul 23 at 16:00, by Veskah

See, the problem is I want to flex on everyone but can currently only flex on some

DJMcMayhem

I've had my desktop for around 6 years now I think, and I've never felt like it's underpowered or needs an upgrade. ...Until I started playing Satisfactory with a friend and my CPU got over 70 C.

A water cooler would be nice

AdmBorkBork

Historically, I've been on a roughly two-year upgrade cycle. With my current laptop, I'm almost three years (just another month or so), so it's kinda wigging me out.

I'm trying very hard to be A Responsible Adult and only buy a new machine if there's a game I wanna play but can't play optimally.

Veskah

3:48 PM

I think I'm a new part a year

Like this year was a 1070TI (and I guess power supply), last year was harddrives, then RAM. Might be missing something

DJMcMayhem

The jump from DDR3 to DDR4 RAM is kinda unfortunate. If I wanted to upgrade my CPU, (currently I have an i7 4970k), I'd also have to upgrade my mobo and RAM too

AdmBorkBork

That's why I got out of the upgrade-a-component mindset

Veskah

@DJMcMayhem I'm in the exact same boat (Same CPU :D)

AdmBorkBork

It got too frustrating trying to juggle

DJMcMayhem

I'll probably need to upgrade my RAM sometime soon (8GB is kinda meh) but buying more DDR3 is a bad idea

Veskah

3:54 PM

DDR3 sales are all but extinct at this point

DJMcMayhem

Do you think anyone would buy a used r9 290 for like 50 bucks at this point?

AdmBorkBork

Especially with DDR5 on the cusp of shipping.

DJMcMayhem

:O I didn't know that

AdmBorkBork

Yeah. The spec is almost finalized and it's possible that products may arrive in time for holiday this fall/winter.

Veskah

Oh neat, the spec apparently is only 1.1v with voltage regulation on the module instead of the board, and has higher burst lengths.

Pavel

4:05 PM

@DJMcMayhem 70C is considered normal CPU temp

Anything below 90 is no cause for concern

DJMcMayhem

Really? That seems awfully high

Pavel

Most processors start throttling down at 100

I have watercooling and my computer reaches 70C when I'm gaming because I overclocked

Martin Ender

@NathanMerrill Tried a block/0-cost hybrid build with Defect but died to Donu and Deca. I keep focusing on the wrong enemy first though, otherwise I probably would have made it.

The build was kinda all over the place with barely any relics that really synergised well (except Kunai and the thing that lets you draw three cards if you play less than four).

Veskah

70c is the upper end of what I'd consider fine but they can go above 90c without too much concern (chip will probably die sooner due to thermal stress but won't actively melt)

Pavel

Pretty much

At around 80, I'd say that it might be worth considering a new cooling solution but it's fine if it takes a few months to get around to it

DJMcMayhem

4:10 PM

Story time: One day, my brother called me and asked "I think something's wrong with our internet, it's really slow". So I went over to take a look at it. fast.com said they had 80 Mbps, so I don't think the internet was an issue. I asked what exactly was going wrong, and they said that Overwatch would run slowly. Booted up OW to see, and it was getting 2-3 FPS in the character selection screen. Kinda fishy. I asked if any other games were doing that. They said most of them.

So we booted up Hollow Knight. 4-5 FPS.

I got a temp monitor, and all 4 cores were sitting at 99C, which explains why "The Internet was slow"

Pavel

Let me guess: Left an expandable foam insert inside the case from when the computer shipped

DJMcMayhem

Haha, no. This is a computer I helped them build

Veskah

Seems he clogged up his internet tubes. Gotta be careful when you do that

DJMcMayhem

Turns out some of the mobo pins on the stock cooler broke off, and the cooler was just dangling near the CPU

Pavel

Ah

DJMcMayhem

4:12 PM

@Veskah I hate it when that happens. Usually I just download more RAM and that helps

Pavel

Hey if you had one of the newer models of intel stock cooler you wouldn't even notice if it unplugs :D

AdmBorkBork

Oh, burn. (literally)

Veskah

@DJMcMayhem I've had more success deleting sys32. Gives the 0's and 1's more space to unload

DJMcMayhem

Yeah. I told them their CPU was boiling water

Pavel

Shoutout to AMD for providing usable air cooling

Veskah

4:13 PM

It was only 99c, the water is fine

DJMcMayhem

What is Jen doing with The Internet?!?!

Martin Ender

@Veskah everyone knows that the real problem is packets flying off the wire at a bend. Which is why you need to raise your Ethernet cable slightly where it bends to slow down the packets. It's particularly bad with WiFi cables.

Pavel

The only reason I have water cooling in the first place is because my mobo puts the RAM slots adjacent to the cpu socket

A water block was all that would fit, other than the stock cooler

DJMcMayhem

> WiFi cables

Bwahahaha

Pavel

And I have a 7700K so stock was not an optoin

Nathan Merrill

4:15 PM

@MartinEnder nice. What block cards did you have? IMO, the hard part is getting decent block on 0-cost decks

Pavel

@MartinEnder What game is this?

DJMcMayhem

Speaking of block, what do you think of Orichalcum? On one hand, it's super nice, but it also kinda discourages me from blocking, which screws me up

Veskah

@Pavel Obliterate the Obelisk

DJMcMayhem

@Pavel Slay the Spire. Recommended

Pavel

Ah

I need to stop buying new games ;-;

DJMcMayhem

4:17 PM

@Veskah Butcher the Belfry

It's on Humble Monthly...

Pavel

I unsubscribed from that when I got no game I wanted to play three months in a row

Veskah

$12 for StS and SQUAD plus whatever indie filler hasn't been announce

DJMcMayhem

I just buy one month whenever the announced game is something I want (like StS)

Veskah

^ It's been shit for most the year or I already have the big ticket items already

Nathan Merrill

@DJMcMayhem It's always a good relic. It's great in scenarios where you are weakened, synergizes great with orbs, and and if you have enough block, then it doesn't hurt you

Martin Ender

4:18 PM

@NathanMerrill two Genetic Algorithms (got one first floor and then a dupe mirror later). Stack, a bit of frost generation, Buffer+. There were probably one or two others.

DJMcMayhem

> Murder the Monolith

Nathan Merrill

That's a pretty decent set

DJMcMayhem

@NathanMerrill Do you mean frail?

Nathan Merrill

er, yeah, frail

Martin Ender

@DJMcMayhem Pummel the Pillar

DJMcMayhem

4:19 PM

I have definitely noticed that Orichalcum is way better with defect than say silent (who gets pretty good dex)

And also plated armor relic (forgot the name)

Veskah

It's nice when you draw 4x Slaps and 1 Defend.

DJMcMayhem

Clobber the Column

Nathan Merrill

Right. It's only 6 block, so at worst, the anti-synergy is 5 block

Martin Ender

Also, I noticed that the Time Eater also has a counter against poison, which I think kinda sucks design-wise. (Managed to win with my last poison build anyway though.)

Nathan Merrill

but that's super rare (a single point in plated armor)

DJMcMayhem

4:21 PM

@MartinEnder How's that?

I've only fought Time Eater once, so I don't remember them perfectly

Veskah

@MartinEnder It suits him because Time Eater sucks design-wise

Martin Ender

It clears all of its debuffs after a while

Nathan Merrill

the heal

Veskah

(It's actually a cool design but poops on a lot of deck types)

Nathan Merrill

yep. Once she goes below 50%, her next move is to heal back up to 50%, and then remove all debuffs

Martin Ender

4:22 PM

@Veskah I think that's fine, but by countering both shiv and poison quite directly it's basically just a fuck-you-for-playing-Silent

Nathan Merrill

So, for a poison deck, you have to wait until you can triple the poison to kill in 2 moves, or you have to have multiple strong poison sources

Martin Ender

Well, in my case I didn't pull a single catalyst the entire run, so at least I couldn't waste it :D

Veskah

@MartinEnder I just have strong feelings towards TE because it seems I always fight the bastard as Silent

DJMcMayhem

TE is obnoxious, but I do think it's a really interesting design

Nathan Merrill

I feel like TE has gotten easier as I've played more. HP is lower than the other bosses, and you can generally play around the heal easier (you get a free move to prepare). You obviously need strong cards, especially with Silent, but I do think that it isn't a 100% counter to a particular type of deck

Well, except for low-card decks

Well, actually, if you have incredible relics (ones that proc on playing cards), maybe you could win with a 3-card deck. That's really tough though

I do think that TE has a problem with being non-obvious that the 50% mark is important

It just feels like there's a random heal that removes all of your debuffs, which isn't fun to find out

Veskah

4:36 PM

I can't remember if the other threshold bosses tell you as much or if anything

DJMcMayhem

@MartinEnder Wait what do you mean? Donu and Deca are exactly the same I thought? I always focus Deca first (for no particular reason)

Martin Ender

I think Deca applies Shield on off-turns and Donu buffs

DJMcMayhem

Ooooh

So it's probably better to focus Donu?

I do really like the way they alternate attacking and buffing/shielding both of them. That's a great boss-pair desgin

Martin Ender

@NathanMerrill I've been wondering how you can possibly build these tiny decks unless you get turbo lucky with events that remove all your strikes and defends and then some.

Nathan Merrill

You need the relic that lets you remove cards at campfires

Martin Ender

4:40 PM

@DJMcMayhem unless the off-turns themselves alternate between shield and buff, but I don't think they do?

Nathan Merrill

That's realistically the only way

Martin Ender

Oh right, I actually had that on my last run, but I got it two campfires before the end and no reason to remove any further cards.

DJMcMayhem

@NathanMerrill What deck size do you usually end up at?

Nathan Merrill

I don't think there's a usually :)

DJMcMayhem

I think I typically get around 30, (which I'm sure isn't the best)

Nathan Merrill

4:44 PM

Actually, looking at spirelogs, I'm pretty consistently at 30

oh wait, that's for all players

spirelogs.com

And that's including A20 players

but looking at my personal statistics, I'm consistent with that. I get around 30 cards

DJMcMayhem

Wow, 30 is the magic number

AdmBorkBork

No, Four is the Magic Number.

DJMcMayhem

No, you're both wrong. It's three

El'endia Starman

5:01 PM

All numbers are magic. boom SOLVED

Veskah

But some numbers are more magic than others

AdmBorkBork

5:22 PM

@DJMcMayhem I like how you referred to yourself here.

DJMcMayhem

I was hoping someone would notice that :D

Eric Tressler

6:03 PM

I'm making a clone of a regex golf page, and I wrote a bunch of test cases (generally without considering how I would solve them first)

I was able to find nice solutions for some of them that surprised me a little; I'm pretty mediocre when it comes to using regexes

but I have one that's bothering me; I can't decide if there's a nontrivial solution or not:

I have a bunch of binary strings, and I want to match only those with more 0s than 1s

Any ideas, or a good reason why this is impossible to accomplish? Even if it's impossible in general, if there's a way to beat the trivial "^(word1|word2|word3|...)$" solution for a finite test set, I'm interested.

Nathan Merrill

@EricTressler IIRC, this is impossible with standard regex

I remember a class where this was a classic impossible problem with a certain type of computation

Eric Tressler

ah. well, it's pretty simple, so it doesn't surprise me that it's a classical result

Nathan Merrill

This might work with look-ahead and other magic stuff though, so it largely depends on your flavor

Eric Tressler

I do have a palindrome case in there, but nothing longer than "rotator", so it's solvable in fewer characters than the trivial solution

yeah, I have a lot of puzzles in here that require lookaheads; Chrome's JS engine supports basically everything now (ES2018).

Veskah

@NathanMerrill Think that's the classic example for DFAs and NFAs. The cliff notes is you need a tape as well to be able to backtrack and keep count

Nathan Merrill

6:10 PM

That sounds about right

if you are doing lookaheads, then we are no longer in DFA/NFA territory

Eric Tressler

I'm probably missing a whole lot of interesting potential test cases. I'm trying to avoid borrowing things from the existing (really nice) regex golf site at alf.nu, so I haven't looked at it since I started working on this

Cows quack

@NathanMerrill (I was reading about regexes and computability recently) according to cs.stackexchange.com/a/2560/108410 regular language + lookaheads are themselves still regular, but its the addition of backreferences to them that makes lookaheads more powerful (and out of DFA/NFA territory)

Nathan Merrill

it's been too long. That may be right

Cows quack

also interestingly, while regex+lookaheads < regex+backrefs, regex+backrefs < regex+backrefs+lookaheads

Martin Ender

@EricTressler it's fairly trivial with .NET regex, probably doable with recursion-based flavours

Cows quack

6:24 PM

@EricTressler maybe your site can include challenges for separate regex flavours, whats trivial in .net/pcre might be more interesting in ecma regex

Martin Ender

I think it might be possible using only Java's unlimited-lookbehind bug and backreferences, too

Nathan Merrill

I'm sure that Martin is the world's leading expert on Regex

Martin Ender

Haha, I'm sure that I'm not, but I could probably be doing worse ;)

in other news, I started another Defect run. Wanted to try out an orb build, but was very quickly pushed towards Powers again. Now I've got a completely bonkers deck whose only defence is 2 Buffer+ with an Amplify+ and a couple of Self Repairs.

DJMcMayhem

Powers are just so good

Nathan Merrill

I really don't know. I mean, people who wrote a flavor would definitely be the expert on their own, but I'd argue as far as breadth is concerned, I'd have a hard time finding somebody who knows so much about all of the different flavors.

@DJMcMayhem it's like a free card.

Martin Ender

6:32 PM

@NathanMerrill I know there are a couple of people on SE who know more, e.g. jimmy23013.

Regarding the run, I already have two keys for chapter 4 as well, but I don't think this build has any chance of defeating the heart.

Martin Ender

6:44 PM

I got the transient down to 318HP, I think that's a new record for me

(Thunder Storm+ after 38 lightning orbs)

Nathan Merrill

I got 7th Contintent yesterday. Spent last night unwrapping cards and organizing the box. It's really frustrating at how close I can get to fitting everything in a single box.

Veskah

Think I poisoned him down to like 400, maybe 500. He was having a bad day

@NathanMerrill I picked up Azul because it was like $18. Now I need to kick my currently defunct gaming group in the ass again

Nathan Merrill

@MartinEnder you own the game right? How do you package it up?

Martin Ender

I have both the base game and the big expansion and I actually have almost everything in the base box (all the cards, in fact).

Nathan Merrill

So do I. It's the player satchel? that I can't fit

I'm not sure what to call it yet: It's the brown wallet that you can put cards into

Martin Ender

6:50 PM

oh right, yeah that's one thing I've got in the second box

Nathan Merrill

I can't put it on top of the cards because of the dividers, and I can't put it on it's side because it is too tall for the box

Martin Ender

if I only had the base game, I'd probably just keep it outside (I do have the action and discard deck trays outside the boxes)

Nathan Merrill

I have both the base game and the big expansion. I can fit literally everything else

It's only the wallet that is so frustratingly close

Anonymous

I still need to learn how to not suck at StS

Nathan Merrill

Reconsider every card. It's too easy in StS to auto-pick cards

Anonymous

6:52 PM

The furthest I've gotten is A3 on a daily challenge, and A2 (once) on a standard run

Anonymous

I need to start figuring out good card synergy and get better at the deckbuilding aspect

Anonymous

Also I need to figure out when I should start removing cards

Anonymous

I also struggle with good pathing

Martin Ender

I just completely murdered the Time Eater with that deck. I almost regret not picking up the red key at the last campsite, but I really don't think I would have stood any chance against the heart, with the auto damage eating up the buffer.

DJMcMayhem

I generally go for paths that have the most elites and places where I can turn off to avoid an elite if I think it would kill me

Martin Ender

6:55 PM

@NathanMerrill oh okay. I have it in the mostly empty expansion box taking up one tray (with some small things underneath). I can take a photo when I'm back home next week.

interested StS players: spirelogs.com/viewrun.php?run=657809

AdmBorkBork

Wait, there's stuff beyond the heart? I've always "done damage" to it and then "fallen asleep."

DJMcMayhem

That's what happens on default difficulty

Martin Ender

It actually has nothing to do with difficulty. But you need to beat Act 3 once with each character to unlock more.

DJMcMayhem

After beating it once with each hero and then playing on an ascension level, you can get a key that unlocks act 4

@MartinEnder Oh, you can get act 4 on no ascension?

Martin Ender

yep

AdmBorkBork

7:01 PM

Ah. I've only ever really played Silent.

DJMcMayhem

@MartinEnder I almost never take Neows blessing. It just doesn't seem that useful to me (unless there will be an elite in the first 3 I guess)

Martin Ender

You basically need to pick up three keys along the way (you have several opportunities for each of them) to unlock a fourth act, which is mostly just the true final boss (and a unique elite).

DJMcMayhem

Oh wait, you did fight an elite in the 3rd round. Nice!

AdmBorkBork

Nifty. I'll have to give it another go.

DJMcMayhem

Ice cream is great

Martin Ender

7:02 PM

@DJMcMayhem I lost the previous run so the other option was meh, and I did indeed manage to get to the first elite with the blessing... it's usually possible unless a question mark drops you a surprise battle.

The elite would've been second battle if I didn't have a fight in a ? room :D

@DJMcMayhem Ice Cream + Pocket Watch was great

DJMcMayhem

Can you see the map before picking from Neow?

Martin Ender

I don't think so

Nathan Merrill

@DJMcMayhem I actually never did either...but it's proven to be more valuable over time

DJMcMayhem

@MartinEnder What was the relic on floor 43?

Martin Ender

the one that lets you give an attack of yours Innate

Nathan Merrill

7:04 PM

It means you have more HP for Act 1 to burn through, and you can progress faster through the game

Martin Ender

I didn't want any of them in my starting hand

Veskah

Bottled Fire?

Or is attack Lightning?

Martin Ender

yep

Veskah

Not important

Martin Ender

Bottled Fire

re Blessing: also I don't know how to play Defect until a build starts to crystallise, so skipping the first few battles to pick a few free cards is very welcome

Veskah

7:07 PM

I hate fighting Maws right out of the gate and I always seem to get one. Blessing is a blessing for that

DJMcMayhem

Is there a name for the game design pattern where the default difficulty is like a tutorial and then once beating the boss you unlock successively harder versions of the game until some final ultra hard difficulty?

It seems like a lot of rougelikes do that (And by "a lot" I mean dead cells and StS)

Martin Ender

New Game+(++++)?

Rogue Legacy also does this

it seems to have become a popular pattern for roguelites, but I'm not sure there's a name for it

DJMcMayhem

I think New Game+ sounds like something a campaign game would have

AdmBorkBork

I thought New Game+ was where you essentially keep your stuff but start the game over again?

Martin Ender

Risk of Rain has something similar where you can unlock artefacts that modify some game rules. Usually each one makes the game harder but gives you some reward in return, but in some cases they actually end up making the game completely cheesable (e.g. with the Glass Cannon artefact).

DJMcMayhem

7:14 PM

I really should give Possibility of Precipitation another shot

Martin Ender

@AdmBorkBork yeah, true. but with the permanent upgrades present in roguelites, you already have that, so the only component that's left for New Game+ is letting you up the difficulty.

DJMcMayhem

@DJMcMayhem Renaming games where the acronym is (.).\1 is my favorite running gag

It never gets old

AdmBorkBork

Perchance of Pouring

Martin Ender

Hazard of Hail

Danger of Drizzle

DJMcMayhem

Chance of Condensation

Martin Ender

7:18 PM

anyway, I think it's still the roguelite that I put the most hours into

AdmBorkBork

@MartinEnder That's why Snoop Dogg always carries an umbrella.

Martin Ender

and the only one I'd consider having 100%ed

DJMcMayhem

Feasibility of Fall

Nathan Merrill

@DJMcMayhem I was actually thinking about this: Typically games reward you by giving you bonuses. This is totally backwards to how StS works: It rewards you by making the game harder

DJMcMayhem

And I love that

Nathan Merrill

7:21 PM

And other similar games. It's a really weird progression curve: Each "unlock" (Ascension) makes the game harder, not easier

DJMcMayhem

But it's balanced by requiring skill to unlock them

Martin Ender

well, the first few playthroughs it also rewards you with better cards and relics

Nathan Merrill

What made me think of this was the One Deck Dungeon game.

As you fight the bosses, the game actually gets easier because you are upgrading the characters.

That's totally backwards.

DJMcMayhem

I don't know how many hours I've put into dead cells now since I have it for playstation, but I think I've done 160 runs because the difficulty curve is really addicting.

The second biome used to be stupidly hard for me, which is laughable to me now on 4BC

@NathanMerrill Agreed

You can manually change the difficulty though, but it's not quite the same

Nathan Merrill

yeah, and you can pick harder bosses

but still

DJMcMayhem

7:24 PM

I think the reason that unlocking higher difficulties works is because you take your knowledge and skill with you. That wouldn't work too well for ODD because no matter how skilled you are, it's still largely a game of chance

Not to say there isn't skill (there definitely is!) but there's still a ton of chance

Nathan Merrill

yeah. ODD is definitely a luck-mitigation game for me

Like, the skills that let you roll dice have gotten less and less valuable over time

Martin Ender

7:46 PM

I've been having a look at the StS achievements I'm missing. Ones I have no clue how to ever get: Beat the game in under 20 minutes; beat the game without Uncommons or Rares. And then there's a bunch that just require super specialised decks (defeat the Transient; 1-turn kill a boss; have 999 block; 5 cards or fewer in your deck; 3 cards or fewer in deck/hand/discard; channel 9 plasma in one turn; ...)

I feel like the speedrun achievement requires you to save scum for a very specific and minimal deck that you can basically play on autopilot.

AdmBorkBork

I never look at achievements for games. If I get one while playing, it's "Huh, that's neat" but I don't go out of my way to get any.

But some of those do sound ridiculously difficult.

Veskah

Hmm, wonder who the best boss would be for the OHKO

Martin Ender

I normally don't until I feel like I've seen most of the content. But for StS some of the achievements are actually interesting incentives to play outside my comfort zone and try things I never would have on my own (like building a 5-or-less-card deck).

@Veskah not Time Eater...

Veskah

Heh

Martin Ender

I feel like they all have enough health that you basically need a pretty much infinite combo?

Nathan Merrill

8:01 PM

I've gone out of my way to get the StS acheivements. I still have:

Kill Donu with a Feed
Beat game in 20 mins (this is really hard, I've tried several times)
9 plasma (I'm surprised I haven't gotten this. I know I've had plasma runs)
25 focus (This should be relatively easy, haven't tried yet)
< 5 cards (This is also really hard)

Martin Ender

I'm also missing 4 hidden ones that I haven't looked up yet. I imagine one of them is defeating the heart.

Nathan Merrill

No uncommons and rares wasn't too bad. I went with Ironclad who has quite a few decent common cards). I also did no ascensions

Martin Ender

I'm kinda surprised that I don't have Purity (3 cards in hand/discard/draw). I did an exhaust build the other day and I thought I burnt down to one card once.

Nathan Merrill

@MartinEnder that's actually all 4 of them. I didn't realize those were hidden

Martin Ender

oh

one for each character, plus one for all of the other three?

Nathan Merrill

8:03 PM

Right

Martin Ender

I see

Nathan Merrill

I think to do the speedrun, you need a STR build

STR is really fast

I had a decent STR deck, but I came in I think around 23 minutes

Martin Ender

strength? can you do those without having to wait for demon form to rack up the strength?

Nathan Merrill

there are lots of other strength cards, and you absolutely need to be doubling your strength

You can't double your focus, and high-damage silent means lots of cards, so it is too slow

Eric Tressler

another regex question about a problem I came up with:

match "01010|.b.d." and "11111|abcde" and "00111|..cde", etc.; the "don't match" column is well-formed, it just has the wrong letters

"11000|.bc..", for example

this is pretty easy, but is it possible to solve this (in a remotely nice way) if we remove the "."s?

Martin Ender

8:17 PM

again, what regex features are available? ;)

with lookaheads it's still fairly trivial: (0(?!.*a)|1(?=.*a))(0(?!.*b)|1(?=.*b))...

Eric Tressler

I don't really know? capture groups, lookahead and lookbehind; I'm not sure if there are other more advanced things missing from ES2018

Martin Ender

huh, did ES finally add lookbehinds?

Pavel

No

Either firefox or chrome supports them anyway though, don't remember which

Martin Ender

apparently yes, as of ES2018

Eric Tressler

yeah. oh, no; you're right. I just didn't come up with that solution, I was trying something much more verbose

Martin Ender

8:20 PM

it gets harder if you include stuff like 11000|ba in the dont-match-list

Eric Tressler

@MartinEnder Do you know of any problems that are interesting but that you wouldn't consider trivial, along these lines?

Martin Ender

I think that needs forward references

Eric Tressler

originally, my "don't match" list was a lot meaner, but I tamed it when I realized I couldn't find a nice solution

Martin Ender

@EricTressler I did a regex competition at HackerRank once that had some interesting problems, but the more complicated ones just boiled down to translating a DFA to a regex

it was this: hackerrank.com/contests/regular-expresso-2/challenges (I think you need an HR account to view those though)

Eric Tressler

I don't think I found that specific competition, but I see some good ideas in their public problems

I'll probably take some of them and cite the source

Martin Ender

8:26 PM

the space of possible problems gets a lot more interesting if you have forward references, but I doubt ES has added support for those

Eric Tressler

I think I have an account, so I'll track the credentials down or sign up again to look at that one later

I can test that right now, one second

no, there are no forward references

Martin Ender

easiest test is probably ^(\1b|a)+$ against aab

Eric Tressler

I have a test case with squares, and \1(.+) fails where (.+)\1 succeeds

~~I had to look this up, but I think that's a valid test?~~

Martin Ender

ah that's not how forward references work

they're not forward in the sense that they can actually match before the capturing group gets executed.

but in the sense that they can appear to the left of the capturing group's closing parenthesis and then have a value on further repetitions

Eric Tressler

that test succeeds on Chrome

Martin Ender

8:30 PM

oh cool

ECMAScript used to reset the capturing group's value at the beginning of its next iteration

in that case you can do a lot of fun things

like detecting squares, triangular numbers and Fibonacci number in unary.

Eric Tressler

okay, I'll try the fibonacci one in a bit after I shore up this site; I'll ping you about it if I can't figure it out

Martin Ender

sure

Eric Tressler

thanks!

Martin Ender

oh sweet, ES's lookbehinds are even variable-length

that plus forward refs is quite powerful

It might be possible to do the more-a-than-b problem with this

Eric Tressler

i have no idea how to approach that; if you think of a solution, i'd appreciate a hint before i see a solution, though

Martin Ender

8:41 PM

can't be bothered to set up a test script right now. let me know when you've got the basic site up, then I could try it through that if you make it publicly available.

I'll write up what I think should work though

Nathan Merrill

9:08 PM

There should be a regex-translation challenge

that seems quite tough and non-trivial

Eric Tressler

9:59 PM

@MartinEnder ok; I wasn't planning on making this public, but I can go ahead and put it on an unlisted page tomorrow. it's too big of a ripoff of alf.nu to share widely, but the original idea was to help some people learn regex basics. All of the stuff we're talking about now is probably only for my amusement

I can't match triangular or fibonacci numbers yet, either, but I feel like I should give it a couple of days

Martin Ender

ah, my test regex was wrong

forward references still don't work

but the reset just makes \1 match an empty string instead of the previous capture

this one is a more reliable test: ^(\1b|^a)+$

Eric Tressler

ah; that's too bad, i guess i'll have to go to java if i want to try to figure these out

Martin Ender

10:24 PM

yeah, or PCRE, or Python I think, probably also Ruby.

Eric Tressler

i looked around for a JS regex library that supports forward/nested references, but I couldn't find one. Maybe I misunderstand some language limitation or else the difficulty of implementing these things

that's ok, this was still good to learn; thanks for the help

Anonymous

11:10 PM

What is this, TNB? :P

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