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I'm horribly inefficient and use the big counters, with the decrement step coming from an AND gate enabled by the count being positive.
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Jul 14, 2022 20:26
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Green Wing posted:I'm horribly inefficient and use the big counters, with the decrement step coming from an AND gate enabled by the count being positive. Good thought! I just completed The Commissary, and I ended up only using a single counter, to control the Stacker. Everything else is run off Sequencers. There's juuuuust enough time in a single sequence to cook everything for any given order. I'm sure I could make it more efficient, but I'm proud of my initial solution. These are getting quite complex.
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Jul 14, 2022 20:44
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WhiteHowler posted:In Food Court, I hate the way the Fryer works. Green Wing posted:I'm horribly inefficient and use the big counters, with the decrement step coming from an AND gate enabled by the count being positive. You think you're inefficient? I just throw a sensor after the fryer and link it to a +1
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Jul 14, 2022 20:46
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WhiteHowler posted:In Food Court, I hate the way the Fryer works.
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Jul 14, 2022 20:51
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Smart Car posted:If you use one of the bigger counters, set one of its options to -4, one to -5 and one to +1. Set -4 at the start, link the positive on the counter to the -5, zero to the fryer's eject, and the fryer's sense to the +1. This will cause the fryer to reset itself to the proper time without anything except the fryer and the counter. Of course, I probably didn't HAVE to use five sequencers... 
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Jul 14, 2022 21:41
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Chipwizard down, now there's only Food Court between me and a secret envelope. I love how every level of Chipwizard was like "this is completely impossible, how on earth do I....oh wait, this is actually pretty easy". Sometimes after a little googling to remember how an SR latch works. Then it was just a matter of cramming it in the required space. It still would have been nice to have a little more room to play with, so you could optimize after solving it. I never liked Hackmatch very much on EXAPUNKS, so I was dreading having to do it here. The video below gave me the tips I needed to breeze through it. Lvl 4 boss took two tries to beat, and honestly is easier than Lvl 3. The tricks help a lot! (you have a small window to manually continue chains, and clear the screen on Lvl 4 before she attacks) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKiK9Ok1fEM
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Jul 15, 2022 06:59
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So, the solitaire games and chip wizard were probably worth the price of admission. Really enjoying going back to older designs and finding more optimal solutions, spurred on by the top percentile scores. Anyone have any ideas how to build a 15um dual oscillator?
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Jul 15, 2022 16:25
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Does the bbs part ever matter again after downloading all the games, and do you ever use the address book part of the little pda program? Not really big deals but it's weird that the framing sort of just drops off lol
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Jul 15, 2022 16:36
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RBA Starblade posted:Does the bbs part ever matter again after downloading all the games, and do you ever use the address book part of the little pda program? You can connect to it later to get a final screen and one last message in the notepad. The only things left for me now are Hack Match (which I hate) and the final level in Food Court, which I'm not sure is possible.
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Jul 15, 2022 16:37
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WhiteHowler posted:In Food Court, I hate the way the Fryer works. I just use sequencers instead of timers for all of my fryers. This makes it easier to run three fryers in parallel for all the levels where you cook a bunch of stuff!
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Jul 15, 2022 16:47
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Mystic Mongol posted:I just use sequencers instead of timers for all of my fryers. This makes it easier to run three fryers in parallel for all the levels where you cook a bunch of stuff! Hell yeah, at least on the levels where I can't synchronise everything going into the friers at once. Sequencers do feel a lot more powerful than anything else available. Timer, splitter, programmer, and some shenanigans you can pull off with the end input.
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Jul 15, 2022 17:27
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I've become quite a bit better with sequencers in Food Court and am able to match most of my friends' best times. I'm now struggling with waste disposal on Da Wings. Sensors are too slow to open gates when there's a line of products, and the timing isn't accurate enough for a sequencer to work in all scenarios. I'm sure there's a better way to do it, but everything I've tried so far feels really clunky.
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Jul 15, 2022 18:02
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WhiteHowler posted:I've become quite a bit better with sequencers in Food Court and am able to match most of my friends' best times. I managed this one with sequencers, but my 9 chicken feast did need to use two sequencers linked together to handle the whole thing. Everything moved in the exact same way every time, so I'm not sure how accuracy can be an issue. I thought Food Court was 100% deterministic.
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Jul 15, 2022 18:36
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Bug Squash posted:I managed this one with sequencers, but my 9 chicken feast did need to use two sequencers linked together to handle the whole thing. Everything moved in the exact same way every time, so I'm not sure how accuracy can be an issue. I thought Food Court was 100% deterministic. Not accuracy, but consistency between the three scenarios. Depending on whether you're discarding one, two, or three extra products, they'll enter with different timings that I don't think can be handled with a single sequencer. I feel like this is the first scenario where you can do it fast OR cheap, but going too far one way or the other will severely impact the other.
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Jul 15, 2022 18:45
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WhiteHowler posted:Not accuracy, but consistency between the three scenarios. Depending on whether you're discarding one, two, or three extra products, they'll enter with different timings that I don't think can be handled with a single sequencer. I used four sequencers, one for 3, one for 6, 2 for 9. Ugly as sin but effective. Plus you only need two disposals if you throw out the occasional half chicken. Friers can be operated from a single output if synchronised.
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Jul 15, 2022 19:24
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Bug Squash posted:Some very light spoilers about how I managed it: I got it, but all of the solutions I tried feel sloppy. Oh well, on to the next one! I took a break and tried ChipWizard, and I discovered that I'm somehow pretty good at it. But whoever managed to get a 12um solution on the Safety Interlock level must be a witch, and I need you to stay far away from me.
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Jul 15, 2022 21:43
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WhiteHowler posted:I'm now struggling with waste disposal on Da Wings. A little back at this point, but it sounds like you've got chicken bits bumping up against each other. Lemme show two chicken formations real quick.  First we have a very generic two fryer setup. The two chicken bits cook at the same speed, travel the same distance, and rejoin each other at the same time, so there's no space between them. Later, the chicken will bump up against itself. I'm assuming this is what your chicken layout looked like, WhiteHowler? The finished product belt is going to look like Chicken -> Chicken -> space -> space -> Chicken -> Chicken -> space -> space.  And here's the exact same format, except the merge between the two chicken streams is moved one space. Now the right chicken takes two more spaces to get cooked and moved to the merge. Even better, it takes four steps to feed the half chicken into the slicer. This makes your chicken stream Chicken -> space -> Chicken -> space -> Chicken -> space -> Chicken -> space, which should be easier to work with later.
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Jul 16, 2022 02:01
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I went the fast but expensive route: two slicers, and three products are routed for cooking (each with its own oven) and one is routed for disposal. Space the conveyor belts so all products enter their ovens on the same turn and you can use one sequencer for all three easily. As for disposal, I had one sequencer for that, that routed whether or not the product was actually there. 
Bobulus fucked around with this message at 02:31 on Jul 17, 2022 |
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Jul 16, 2022 22:37
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WhiteHowler posted:I took a break and tried ChipWizard, and I discovered that I'm somehow pretty good at it. But whoever managed to get a 12um solution on the Safety Interlock level must be a witch, and I need you to stay far away from me. Key to this was creating an interleaved NPN and PNP combo inside a 4x2 footprint
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Jul 16, 2022 22:48
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Mystic Mongol posted:First we have a very generic two fryer setup. The two chicken bits cook at the same speed, travel the same distance, and rejoin each other at the same time, so there's no space between them. Later, the chicken will bump up against itself. I'm assuming this is what your chicken layout looked like, WhiteHowler? The finished product belt is going to look like Chicken -> Chicken -> space -> space -> Chicken -> Chicken -> space -> space. But hey, I also finished Dungeons and Diagrams today! That last level made my head hurt, but I finally go it. I hopped back to ChipWizard, and now I'm stuck on the Motor Controller. I figured out how to get a circuit to keep itself on, but I haven't figured out how to toggle it off yet. The two solutions I've tried either only turn it off for a single tick while the Off button is pressed, or put it into oscillating mode until On is pressed again. I think I really don't get capacitors in this game. I mean, I get how they're supposed to work in theory, but the practical application keeps eluding me.
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Jul 19, 2022 01:49
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I know you're probably supposed to mix and match minigames, but I've mostly been taking them one at a time. Nearly done with Dungeons & Diagrams, but holy hungus, this last rung of puzzles is absolutely teeth-grinding. Cleared the whole seventh line in a single hour, half-asleep, only to spend exactly as much time on a single puzzle from the eighth (and I still haven't solved it). I need a break. Good thing my fake computer comes with stress-relieving model kits.
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Jul 19, 2022 01:58
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There are more than a couple of levels that break the unwritten "diagonal" rule near the end of D&D. It's an unfortunate difficulty jump.
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Jul 19, 2022 02:34
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The last level of D&D is a serious brainburner compared to everything before that, but if you've been watching lots of Cracking the Cryptic videos and can identify that things like how many walls are in the left two columns are going to be important then it becomes way more tractable.
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Jul 19, 2022 03:30
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The last D&D puzzles feel more like you're crawling through the designer's brain and anticipating the patterns rather than strictly following the number hints.
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Jul 19, 2022 03:52
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GuavaMoment posted:the unwritten "diagonal" rule On to the Food Court. EDIT: I feel like I'm missing something here. The cords threw me for a loop until I trained myself to view them as if/then statements (and realized I could buy more machines; I'd probably move that tab), but now I'm trying to program sorters and counters (Wine o' Clock) and nothing's working. This thread and the Steam forums are mostly people posting high-end solutions, so is there a trick to this I'm missing? I almost feel ashamed to ask. Bad Seafood fucked around with this message at 09:25 on Jul 19, 2022 |
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Jul 19, 2022 04:05
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Bad Seafood posted:EDIT: I feel like I'm missing something here. The cords threw me for a loop until I trained myself to view them as if/then statements (and realized I could buy more machines; I'd probably move that tab), but now I'm trying to program sorters and counters (Wine o' Clock) and nothing's working. This thread and the Steam forums are mostly people posting high-end solutions, so is there a trick to this I'm missing? I almost feel ashamed to ask. I'm happy to help, but I'm not 100% sure what you need help with. Here's some vague hints that might get you started, but if you describe your confusion in more detail, I'm sure we could help more. - New tools introduced in this chapter include the sorter and multimixer. - The sorter has two useful abilities, only one of which we'll be using here: a) Ability to choose three directions that an item leaves the sorter. The command to move in that direction must come while the item is on the sorter. If you send it earlier, it will just 'sort' nothing. b) Items will sit at the sorter until you send it a direction. <- This is the feature we're using. - If normal wires act as if/then, the regular multimixers act as OR gates (hook up multiple inputs and any of them can trigger the output), and the 'enable' multimixer acts as an AND gate (both Enable and one of the other black inputs must be 'on' for the output to fire). Both have four outputs, which lets you trigger multiple things off the same input. - All the lessons you learned before now (timing things with a counter, using the stacker, etc) will be used, plus using the two new tools. Here's a simple (but not optimized) solution to the problem: - Have system output a tray and a glass under all circumstances. Arrange them so the glass is stacked on the tray. So far, exactly like the previous problems. - Downstream of the stacker, place a sorter. Set up the wine dispenser so it fills the glass while the glass-and-tray is sitting on the sorter. - The instructions say you need to put two 'fills' of the wine of choice in the glass to get the order correct, so the sorter being at the dispenser allows it to sit there until the wine has been dispensed two times. - The 'white' and 'red' lights are only on for the first cycle of the run, so you won't be able to 'check' them when your glass reaches the dispenser. The system is too simple to retain that information for you. You have two options: (the first one is easier, but more expensive) a) have a scanner pointed at the sorter so that you can re-acquire the red/white choice every turn the glass-and-tray is sitting there. b) Use extra counters as a 'memory' for the initial red/white output. This is kind of a pain in the butt and I don't recommend it until you've solved the puzzle and want to optimize. - Okay, so how do you have the wine get exactly two fills? Use a counter. Hook things up so that sensing the glass-and-tray at the sorter (via the scanner) increments a counter. Have the counter start at a positive number (via the Start output, probably) and count down the fills applied. When the counter reaches zero, use that to eject it from the sorter, continuing along the conveyor to the end. - How do you get it to dispense the right wine? One option is to use the second multimixer that has the 'enable' input. So you can can have two multimixers, one that is 'glass is here AND wine is white' and the other is 'glass is here AND wine is red'. Does that help? Bobulus fucked around with this message at 22:29 on Jul 19, 2022 |
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Jul 19, 2022 22:12
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At least for me i'd like extra enlightenment on how to correctly reset the counter. All in all I'm finding Food Court to be the least enjoyable of the bunch. It just seems extremely fiddly interface-wise, I don't enjoy placing pieces like in other zachtronics games and some like the scanner are unintuitive as to what the right orientation is. As a result it's one of the two I haven't finished, along with Exapuzzle Bobble or whatever it's called (which is hell but enjoyable hell, I'm stuck on level 3). Chev fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Jul 19, 2022 |
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Jul 19, 2022 22:57
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Chev posted:At least for me i'd like extra enlightenment on how to correctly reset the counter.
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Jul 19, 2022 23:07
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Do I even have that at that stage? Seemed to me the counter, sorter and multimixer are the only new tools right now.
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Jul 19, 2022 23:33
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If you're not at that stage you don't even need to reset since the early levels just ask for one item.
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Jul 19, 2022 23:37
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No, at the wine level I definitely need to reset.
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Jul 19, 2022 23:50
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Try it without resetting
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Jul 20, 2022 00:03
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Chev posted:No, at the wine level I definitely need to reset. After you deliver an order, everything resets.
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Jul 20, 2022 00:39
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And between steps a fair amount resets. At first I tried plugging a multimixer into itself to act as a latch but that doesn’t work so apparently the electricity is sucked out of the wires between steps.
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Jul 20, 2022 01:00
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Sorry if this was already posted, but there are now 12 extra XBPGH puzzles from users, and Steed Force now lets you do multiple builds of models ( ).
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Jul 21, 2022 10:41
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Not to mention I can now delete my abomination from before I knew how painting worked
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Jul 21, 2022 23:10
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Chev posted:At least for me i'd like extra enlightenment on how to correctly reset the counter. It's funny because food court basically has the same interface as vcv rack which has always worked fine for musicians/producers. The one main difference from traditional vc is you can't plug more than one jumper into a jack, which fundamentally doesn't change anything but would allow for more elegant solutions E: put zero on start
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Jul 22, 2022 00:05
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I finally finished Exapunks last night. The last level had me stumped for months, but I finally found the time to sit down and hash it out. It required two stages: a tree traversal and a sort. I had the tree traversal sitting in a solution for a long time, and I knew how to do a sort (I just did a sort of inefficient bubble sort). Ultimately it was switching between the two stages that had me at a loss with the big question being: How will my code know that every register on the map has been returned to the root so that it can proceed with the sort. The solution ended up being embarrassingly simple: wait x number of cycles, if no more data has been returned in that time, the exas can move to the next stage.
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Jul 22, 2022 18:15
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I think I was 174/150 lines in terms of code size, so it wasn't an uploadable solution but I gave up on the code size restriction several levels ago. I can certainly make my code more efficient, but sorting out the redundancies without reworking the entire thing is just such a hassle. I'm happy with my solution. e: I have a gif but it's several minutes of exas doing a simple sort. Beartaco fucked around with this message at 18:25 on Jul 22, 2022 |
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Jul 22, 2022 18:19
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Beartaco posted:I finally finished Exapunks last night. The last level had me stumped for months, but I finally found the time to sit down and hash it out. It required two stages: a tree traversal and a sort. I had the tree traversal sitting in a solution for a long time, and I knew how to do a sort (I just did a sort of inefficient bubble sort). Ultimately it was switching between the two stages that had me at a loss with the big question being: How will my code know that every register on the map has been returned to the root so that it can proceed with the sort. The solution ended up being embarrassingly simple: wait x number of cycles, if no more data has been returned in that time, the exas can move to the next stage. Major flashbacks for me, that was exactly my solution as well. I originally had a system where breadcrumb exas got left being so terminal exas could find their way back. I was really proud of that solution since it looked really nice in progress, but I just couldn't handle getting the results into the bubble sorting exa so I fell back on the global registry solution.
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Jul 22, 2022 19:05
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