CG&CC-gaming

Eric Tressler

04:47

@ConorO'Brien if you want to try it out, just add me on steam ( steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197971070435 )

Conor O'Brien

@EricTressler did, my username is "sock"

Martin Ender

10:20

@EricTressler If Buttons is tied for hardest, what's the other one? One of the knots?

Martin Ender

11:58

Finally managed Shadowbox without mistakes. Flotation and Ripples turned out to be not too bad, but I actually found Flotation easier than Ripples. I probably overlooked something simple the latter though.

That leaves only the two knots.

Eric Tressler

15:03

@MartinEnder for me, 93 is the other hardest level, I think. It's a pretty subjective ranking, though

The objective metric from the solver doesn't correlate all that well with the level's actual difficulty

Martin Ender

15:45

huh interesting, I found that fairly straightforward (well, relatively straightforward in relation to the rest of the last 15 or so levels)

it probably depends on which kind of deductions you tend to try first or which ones come more naturally to you

Eric Tressler

Yeah, and also the time of day and caffeine content of my blood

@MartinEnder The solver can't actually do Gridlock 3 as it stands, either, so technically that one has the highest difficulty score

Martin Ender

hah interesting. does it fail the first step?

Eric Tressler

Yeah

I built the level with the first step pre-completed

It's only allowed to consider inequalities with at most 9 tiles involved to begin with (or arbitrarily many tiles if there are <= 3 mines involved)

Martin Ender

16:03

ah yeah, I was wondering if the solver had any hard limits on this or whether it would just factor it into the difficulty score

Eric Tressler

it's just a parameter, so there's nothing stopping me from turning it up except for the heat death of the universe etc.

Anonymous

@EricTressler Not sure if it's my computer or the game, but the Steam overlay notification didn't play nice with changing the tabs on the initial screen:

Anonymous

Eric Tressler

@Mego no, it doesn't. I don't know how to fix that, either :( Steam is wrapping the executable on its own in some way

You're the first person who's mentioned it, but surely not the first person to notice

Anonymous

Also: windowed mode resolution seems to be a bit off. My monitor is 1360x768, so theoretically 1280x720 should fit within the screen bounds easily, but it goes off the bottom of the screen.

Anonymous

16:08

Being able to resize the window would be much nicer :)

Eric Tressler

@Mego when you drag the 1280x720 window, does it fit and seem to be the correct size?

I.e. can you tell whether it's a placement issue or actually the wrong size?

I think I may be defaulting to 768 as a minimum vertical size somewhere

Anonymous

It does appear to be 768

Anonymous

Well, not quite...

Eric Tressler

768 minus your taskbar?

Anonymous

With it at the top of my screen, the bottom is about halfway behind the taskbar

Anonymous

16:11

Anonymous

And without a smaller vertical resolution, I can't fix it :(

Eric Tressler

well, hang on; this is the kind of problem I will fix immediately. I dealt with similar things already and have some idea what's going on

Anonymous

Also also: I have no idea if blue = on or green = on for the music icon in the bottom corner. In fact, I'm not even confident that it's blue or green (thanks colorblindness). I like that you included a colorblind mode, though :)

Eric Tressler

it defaults to off; it's yellow (green?) when on

there's no music, though, that's just "sound"

But let's return to the resolution issue

Anonymous

If dynamic resolution via resizing the window isn't an option, how about adding 800x600?

Eric Tressler

16:16

800 x 600 used to be in there, but it's slightly broken. (things begin to overlap). I see now that 1280 x 720 is not actually 1280x720, I'm just going to fix that and push a steam update

Anonymous

Ok, thanks!

Eric Tressler

Oh, no, the interior window is 720. This won't be as easy as I thought. Hm

1) You used to be able to put in an arbitrary resolution if you went to the config file; right now it "fixes" it if you put in an unlisted resolution. I could make that possible again.

Anonymous

Oh, you're measuring the interior window's size for the resolution? That is quite a problem :P

Anonymous

Is dynamic resolution an option?

Eric Tressler

2) I could add a new 1280 x 700/640/600 resolution (trivial)

or 3) I could find a way to launch the game without showing the window controls (I don't know how to do this)

of those 3, do you have a strong preference? I could do 2 immediately and 1 probably within an hour

Dynamic resolution would have been an option at some stage of development, but it's probably a bad idea right now. I'm not even sure what it might break, or how to effectively set a minimum aspect ratio. And it wouldn't save your changes as it stands, either.

@Mego I'm adding a 1280x690 resolution for now. I'll look into the other things too.

Anonymous

16:36

@EricTressler What technology are you using for the game?

Eric Tressler

just Java + Swing

I'm uploading the update right now, it'll go live in a few minutes

Anonymous

24

Q: Setting minimum size limit for a window in java swing

I have a JFrame which has 3 JPanels in GridBagLayout.. Now, when I minimize a windows, after a certain limit, the third JPanel tends to disappear. I tried setting minimizing size of JFrame using setMinimumSize(new Dimension(int,int)) but no success. The windows can still be minimized. So, I...

Anonymous

Every problem has a question on SO :)

Eric Tressler

that's not really what I meant. If I allow resizing, I still need to also consider aspect ratio so that someone doesn't make the game (say) 800x1600. That means I need to define the behavior of the window when the user tries to resize it into the "unallowed region" narrower than 4:3

it's not clear if I should just internally keep resizing it to be fatter, or shorter, how frequently I should intervene (should I correct it every frame or just after the user releases the mouse?). Lots of issues I can think of

Anonymous

Why is 4:3 a hard requirement?

Eric Tressler

16:43

because UI elements start to overlap otherwise

Anonymous

Resize the UI elements?

Anonymous

Gonna disappear for a bit - feel free to talk at me, and I'll respond when I return

Eric Tressler

Letting the UI and playing field fill an arbitrary space is a lot more complicated than assuming it's roughly going to be a wide, short rectangle.

@Mego Well, the update just went live, so when you try it again you should have a usable resolution

Nathan Merrill

17:14

Just played the first level I'm not a fan of

34: blueprint

half the level disappears in the first 2 clicks

I think it should be placed way earlier IMO

Eric Tressler

Really? I don't think it's that easy for where it appears.

@NathanMerrill it's also possible that you solved it differently than I did, but I thought the blue hint was tricky.

Nathan Merrill

17:32

@EricTressler which blue? the light blue?

yeah, I saw that in a couple of seconds

the hardest part was easily counting up the number of "requirements" on the dark blue

Martin Ender

I thought Eric meant the dark blue. I thought figuring out the dark blue was appropriate for that point in the game.

Nathan Merrill

which, did take me a bit, but usually levels have 3 or 4 spots that I have to seriously think about

Eric Tressler

17:54

I did mean the dark blue. There's nothing close to a consensus on which levels are easier/harder or more fun, though. Which is good, I guess

The "0" hints aren't there to trick anyone; they just make some levels look nicer than the alternative.

quartata

@EricTressler You're using AWT, right?

Or Swing?

Eric Tressler

@quartata both? I'm using swing for the launcher and trivially as a container for the main panel in-game

For in-game drawing I'm using AWT. Btw, sorry that I forgot you already had the game, last night.

quartata

Hmm

Eric Tressler

I just spent some time looking into other graphics options. It's easy enough to make the window borderless, but then you lose the windows close button (not great). Making it resizable "works" on the surface, but it has all kinds of repercussions with positioning. I think I will probably never make it arbitrarily resizeable, it would require a rewrite of a lot of things.

quartata

I wonder what would happen if you disabled double buffering

Eric Tressler

18:02

@quartata to improve CPU use, you mean?

quartata

Oh no, for the Steam Overlay thing.

I'm guessing it's getting drawn over when it's trying to draw the little notification

idk

Eric Tressler

Oh, that. That's an interesting question. You're right, I don't really know what's going on at the basic level with drawing in the launcher.

quartata

You can do .setDoubleBuffered(<bool>) on any JComponent. It wouldn't be a big deal to disable it just for the launcher since we don't care about how it looks there

Maybe worth a try

Does the overlay work in the game proper?

I haven't tried

Eric Tressler

it looks like it does work. I'd never tried it either

I hate the steam overlay

quartata

It's not really that useful for this kind of game since it's windowed :P

Eric Tressler

18:08

@quartata I am able to disable double-buffering, but testing it on Steam is annoying. I think there are probably other things that are also triggering a redraw as well, so I kind of doubt it fixes everything.

quartata

hmm yeah

I'm sure there's ways to get more control but ehhh

Eric Tressler

This was my first time writing a swing UI, and I have to say I didn't enjoy it.

@quartata have you gotten far into the game?

quartata

Not really. I believe I'm on level 6

I like that even early on though you get some interesting tilings

like #4

I would note that I am notorious anti-completionist -- I will slowly and painstakingly get all the way to the very end of a game and then forget to finish it

Eric Tressler

If you stopped because it seemed too easy, that stops almost immediately. But, otherwise, fair. Me too, except I don't forget

Especially with RPGs, I typically get to the point where I know I could go and beat the game, and then I stop playing.

quartata

chrono trigger did that for me haha

Eric Tressler

18:24

I was supposed to spend my day cleaning, and instead I'm staring at Swing code. The Steam overlay breaks under lots of circumstances for lots of games, and I'd like to just chalk it up as Valve's problem and forget about it.

But since I can't do that, and I also can't fix it, it's just going to bother me.

Anonymous

18:50

@EricTressler I don't see an update on my end

Eric Tressler

@Mego You still see v1.202, and not 1.203 when you start up? Are you online on steam, etc.?

Martin Ender

I did get the update

Anonymous

@EricTressler I see 1.203, but no new resolution options

Eric Tressler

You don't see that (1280x690)?

Anonymous

I somehow missed it. My apologies for being blind :P

Eric Tressler

19:02

I hope that works as a solution for you

Anonymous

Disabling double-buffering made the overlay notification problem slightly different:

Anonymous

It's odd that the notification doesn't seem to go away

Eric Tressler

@Mego well, don't try pressing shift+tab while the launcher is running then, because you will be especially unhappy. You could just disable the steam overlay for Tametsi, it has nothing to offer.

It does behave more or less as expected in the actual game, though (but it's still pointless)

Anonymous

@EricTressler Lol :P I never use the steam overlay anyway, so no harm here

Eric Tressler

19:07

I only noticed that it freaks out if you shift+tab in the launcher 10 minutes ago, but I'm just going to forget that I saw it.

quartata

@Mego that definitely fixed the flickering parts, but now the trouble is that the components are heavyweight so they go on top of it....

Eric Tressler

how are either of you even doing that?

Anonymous

I just launched the game and changed tabs in the launcher while the notification was still up

Anonymous

Which wasn't hard, because the notification never seemed to go away for me

Eric Tressler

No, I mean, how are you disabling double-buffering? I know how to do it with the source code, but not otherwise.

Anonymous

19:11

I didn't do anything differently

Anonymous

I thought you did it in 1.203

Eric Tressler

No, I tested it locally, but I'd have to set up a whole new dev branch to test the double-buffering versus steam overlay issue. I'm not going to push something like that to the live branch if I have no idea what it will do

The only change is the new resolution

Anonymous

Oh, weird

Anonymous

I guess it did that versus what it did the last time because it was going down when I changed tabs last time

Anonymous

19:26

@EricTressler So far the puzzles have been increasing in difficulty at a satisfying pace. I'm really enjoying the game :)

Eric Tressler

Thanks, @Mego. I'm glad to hear it. I'm going to go for a while, but I'll be back in an hour or two; let me know if you run into any issues.

Anonymous

I'm taking a break for a while

Anonymous

I looked at Asterisk and my brain hurt

Nathan Merrill

19:55

oooh a new tiling

38: Wicker Wall

Martin Ender

20:06

sort of ;)

Nathan Merrill

yeah. It's sort-of a tiling (as the edge breaks it), and its sort-of new (as it can be reduced to Von Neumann :)

Martin Ender

20:20

the topology is actually the same as the hex grid

Nathan Merrill

like, in terms of the graph?

I was talking about the rules of the edges

but you may be right

Eric Tressler

quartata

oh hey that's pretty cool

is there a way to turn that on in game?

Eric Tressler

Nope, it's a debug flag (that I only used at the very beginning to debug the tilings)

Nathan Merrill

btw, I'm almost finished with Wicker Wall

I was pleasantly surprised by how many difficult parts there were

I thought that it was going to a breeze, but the multiple paths and the purple color made it interesting

ok...say you have a regular tiling of concave shapes, where each shape touches N other shapes

if you take all possible tilings given an N, do they all have the same graph?

Eric Tressler

20:36

I assume you mean convex?

Nathan Merrill

I think the answer is "Yes" because lines can't cross each other

er, yeah

in fact, the tiling doesn't even have to be regular

Eric Tressler

And it really depends on what you mean by "regular", and what the rules for corners are.

Pentagonal tiling

In geometry, a pentagonal tiling is a tiling of the plane where each individual piece is in the shape of a pentagon. A regular pentagonal tiling on the Euclidean plane is impossible because the internal angle of a regular pentagon, 108°, is not a divisor of 360°, the angle measure of a whole turn. However, they can tile the hyperbolic plane and the sphere. == Monohedral convex pentagonal tilings == Fifteen types of convex pentagons are known to tile the plane monohedrally (i.e. with one type of tile). The most recent one was discovered in 2015. This list has been shown to be complete by Rao (2017...

The connectivity graphs for all of those might be the same, but I wouldn't want to say that too quickly.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/… is a big reference for this sort of thing, too

All of the regular tilings in the game are also on that second page, and some of them use the Schafli symbol internally as named (T488 or T3636)

Nathan Merrill

ok...I actually think this works: If you have a irregular tiling with concave or convex shapes in any arrangement, where every shape touches 6 other shapes, the connectivity is equivalent to a hexagonal tiling

Eric Tressler

You have to rule out at least some kinds of pathological examples.

Let A be a circle with smaller circles B_1, ..., B_6 inside of it

Each B_1 contains 5 smaller circles, and each of those contains 5 smaller circles, etc.

that's an infinite "tiling" where each tile has 6 neighbors, and the connectivity graph is a tree

Nathan Merrill

true

I don't know how to distinguish between that "infinite" and normal infinite tiling though

I mean, you could say that the "size is getting infinitely small", but that's hard to pin down

Eric Tressler

20:44

The normal hex tiling has triangles (A<->B<->C<->A)

Nathan Merrill

correct. It's a bunch of 3-cliques

Eric Tressler

So one way to construct a counterexample (supposing one exists) would be to build a tiling where each tile has 6 neighbors, but there are no triangles. That might be possible to do without having tiles contained in each other like in my example above; I don't know.

Nathan Merrill

@MartinEnder ^ ?

Eric Tressler

"No triangles" is really too strong, though. You can probably find a way to make it fail at slightly longer range

It's certainly not true for quadrilaterals, because the penrose tiling is a clear counterexample (among others)

So I don't see why it should be true for hexagons

Nathan Merrill

@EricTressler sorry, what's the contradictory tiling to penrose?

Eric Tressler

20:55

the square grid and the penrose tiling clearly have different connectivity graphs; the square grid (with 4 neighbors) is bipartite

the penrose tiling has odd cycles

Nathan Merrill

oooh, fair engouh

@EricTressler lol, I was looking at that exact one

Eric Tressler

You can 2-color a square grid (c.f. chess), but clearly can't do it there, etc.

Riker

@EricTressler isn't that the point? isn't penrose tiling supposed to be irregular?

Eric Tressler

So I don't have an example ready for hexagons, but I would be really surprised if they all have the same connectivity graph for some reason.

Nathan Merrill

yeah, I agree

I wasn't super attached to hexagons, I was just using it as a test case

Eric Tressler

20:58

@Riker I was just using it as an example of something that uses quadrilaterals but is obviously different from a regular grid in terms of connectivity

Riker

ah, ok

Nathan Merrill

on an unrelated note, I made it so that the squares and the columns count down

the game is way easier

Eric Tressler

I'm too used to the default rules, the counting down misleads me

Nathan Merrill

I don't make counting mistakes anymore

@EricTressler I was too for a bit, but it was worth getting over the hump

40: Sunset is tough

just made it past the difficult part (I think)

I used a new piece of logic I'd never used before

and then it required a bit more beyond that

Eric Tressler

Yeah, it's tricky. It's at a bit of a turning point in difficulty, too

Nathan Merrill

21:39

Ok just finished 40

there were 2 big leaps in difficulty. On the second "leap", I found myself testing variations by marking flags and following paths

DJMcMayhem

23:44

@EricTressler I prefer counting down too, but I've noticed that occasionally it'll get stuck and stop counting down. I don't know if you've ever encountered that

Eric Tressler

What? That should never happen, that's a bug. If you can reproduce it, please show me where.

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