Tom 7 Radar:
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You can play malformed levels by loading them via the editor (which doesn't mind showing ones that don't pass validation). But it still sanitizes them when it loads them, which usually makes them unwinnable. Being able to load insane levels would mean having to keep old bugs around in the rules, which would be pretty much untenable because I'd need to keep every old released version of the rules still maintained. (And some of the older bugs can actually crash the game!) So I can't do this, sorry... |
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Aha, there it is, thanks. To me it seems to fit in pretty well - if I'm not paying close attention it just passes me by, probably partially because the rhythm is quite a bit different from the original song (ie, no swing). |
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Also, I would like it if there was an option in-game to play any 'corrupted' level as if it was a regular level, (however they are still sanitized by the editor, and will be rejected by the server if uploaded, just like insane levels are now) by first clicking on it, giving a message along the lines of "Notice: This level is corrupted and does not meet the requirements to pass the level sanity check. This means that this level may have strange gameplay and possibly other strange features. Keep in mind that the server classifies this level as insane." It will then have the choice of the Esc key for "Return to level selection" and the L button for "Load anyways".
That way they can actually be played, as I would like to try and solve radiant's malformed levels as I was unable to do so before they became completely forbidden. |
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Thanks! Super Brain Damage!! :)
Nope, heartle$$ is at 1:14. "No need to be heartless...." I actually thought it was so obvious it was like a painful medley. 1:34 is from Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar, the part "If you tear a gory hole it comes with the territory, so quit actin' so smart..." Lots of parts are original though.
Graham seems to think the compilation will happen, but you never know. Having more tunes at the ready probably increases the chances, though. :) |
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Awesome!! Trying to reconcile the crazy rhythms of this with the beat-context-less intro of the original is breaking my brain, in a good way.
I'm having trouble the HEARTLE$$ bit though, which is kind of frustrating since I've listened to both of these songs tons of times. Is it the part at 1:34? It sounds kinda familiar but I can't identify it with anything.
Also if this KGW covers thing is actually going to come together I suppose I should start mine at some point. |
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idea: Scared/Baby Bots
Both are the same thing, they are like hug-bots, but they try to hug other bots. |
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I noticed that using the scroll wheel on my mouse (not using middle click and drag), it took approx. 23-25 seconds to get from thread top to thread bottom. however, scroll on touch-pad and middle click & drag can be much faster.
Also, although I've not been playing much, I try to check on escape every day to see if there is anything new, so I consider myself an active player. |
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Thanks djoel! I feel good about I have a DRAM too because I think it's pretty damn weird but likable.
Almost everything is made with Cakewalk (I just click on the piano roll) and the Roland SC-880, which is a hardware midi synth (but I only use like 4 primitive waveform patches on it). I've been wanting to make my own software for a while, but so many things to do. :) More fun to write music anyway...! |
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LURVE IT man! I HAVE A DRAM is defs my favourite!
Just wondering what you use to get such a wicked true 8-bit sound? Is it hardware/VST? Really inspiring stuff, i'll be checkin in for more!! =D |
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Umm, I have an Idea:
Maybe a category along the lines of "Begginner - these levels are a good way to get more used to the game"
then A "Moderate - these are average, good levels"
a "Hard - These are the levels that will make your brain hurt!"
In each category could be a "Stylish levels" folder.
there could also be a "What not to make if you want a good level"
And a "Ratings tutorial", which teaches what ratings mean to those who don't know. |
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Hi Tom,
I really like the idea of a collaborative "offical" collection of best levels which I suppose would be the Escape equivalent of a CCLP and therefore the default directory / filter setting for the level browser. The danger is that the collection could get overloaded with levels of difficulty 8 and 9 which would be an instant turn-off for new players and thus be self-defeating. I would love to know how you quantify "a trusted player" though. I suppose you could qualify by having completed a certain percentage of triage, but what? 90%, 95%, 99%? It is a way of filtering out all but the active regular players but could also unfairly exclude some too. Or, should I send you a resume? :-)
... this harks back to John Lewis' request for some kind of scoreboard.
As a matter of pure curiosity, do you have any idea how many active players there are? Would any of the silent ones come out of the woodwork if there was a forum system? I suspect not that many, unless you could link into it directly from the game. However, even if the actual format remains unchanged, a link called Forum or Discussion Board seems more likely to attract traffic than the word Feedback because the current moniker could be seen to imply that it is primarily a place for bug reporting rather than open discussion. N7DOT's idea of just two separate threads seems a pretty good quick fix.
As for the ratings problem, I don't have a perfect solution. I was thinking more along the lines of having filter categories in the rating dialog. So, aside from the Difficulty and Style (and Rigidity?) sliders, you select one or more categories you think the level should be classified as using checkboxes. I know this is a tad fuzzy and would require a bit of a cumbersome formula to assess the voting outcome, that is assuming that in the proposed browser a level can have multiple filter flags. There would then be set criteria for how long a level stays flagged as triage. Existing Minor Leagues levels could be reincluded in the main collection but with a Very Easy (or in some cases, Well Cooked!) flag set and not be visible in default mode. The Very Funny classification should definitely stay and actually become active again (Modern Art Gallery has to have somewhere to live). Most importantly the system is dynamic so that a level's categorisation can change as more ratings come in.
The main problems I see are:
1. What should those categories be? Suggestions welcome...
2. How do you go about classifying all the old levels that have already been rated? Volunteers welcome... ;-)
PS. As for my bug: don't worry about it, the fix continues to work fine, so, unless anybody else complains about it, it can safely gather dust at the bottom of the 'stuff to do' pile. |
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Hi N7,
If there are still residual bits of that old user account left on the machine you should be able to find the .esp file in:
c:\users\(defunct user name)\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\ProgramFiles\Escape\ |
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10363. Anonymous (24.154.114.150) –
04 Jul 2011 17:55:18
[ BAD SAT SCORES ]
I got a 2020 (740 reading, 670 writing, and 610 in math) the first time, and a 1940 (670 reading, 670 again in writing, and 600 in math) the second time. I was EXTREMELY disappointed that my score dropped 80 points, since I hadn't taken the SAT too seriously the first time, but I had studied the second time.
I have a 4.1 weighted, 3.9 unweighted, and as of my junior year I have taken two AP Euro, APUSH, Adv. geometry, and 3 Adv. English classes, the rest of my classes being standard, though I think our school's regular bio, chem, and physics are the equivalent of honors science classes at other school in my area. I am just barely in the top 10%.
If I try to take the SAT one more time (aiming to get over a 2100), and take the English, World History, and Chemistry subject tests, do you think I would have a chance to get into Columbia?
The only reason I still want to get accepted at Columbia is because I sent them my National Merit Scholarship finalist paper-thingy back before I got the results of my second SAT. I was SO SURE I would get higher. . . D,:
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Nice! I find both the original and cover quite enjoyable. |
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Don't you find it ironic that so many have this problem and there STILL has been no solution identified. But someone wants to criticize a landlord for not knowing what to do, when those of us who actually own and live in our houses have no clue how to fix it! "Stop the moisture" is easier said than done sometimes.
Basements are damp because they are below ground level. Period. There doesn't have to be an obvious leak.
I just found the little effers downstairs in my basement. I'm upset because both of my daughters have stayed down there with my grandchildren. I feel awful just thinking about them sleeping down there.
We're tearing up our carpet now to see what we can find. |
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I think I recall at one point stumbling over some of my old level and old player files I had lost when I tried to update on Vista, but I don't recall where. Funny thing is, it would have made more sense if it had been my second player file and that set of levels was what I had found, as I lost those files due to the following story:
In a Time-crunch, somebody I knew wanted to log-on to check something, but the computer decided that it was going to be unable to load the user account (windows; This seems to happen only when the computer has been sleeping and only one user is logged in, and so when you open the user that isn't logged in, it does this. It hasn't happened in a while though) and so said 'Preparing your desktop', which on the vista computer can be translated as it setting up a temporary account. Not having enough time for this, they restarted the computer while it was 'preparing the desktop', and doing this corrupted the account. Actually, It could have been that player file... I'm not sure. |
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That was me, i DID type my name however...
I got that uncaught exception bug again. Tom, please look into it. |
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The game may have many tiles to use, the number of New levels to be uploaded has gone down.
On the forum subject - Yes, but help q's and item ideas need separate places to be posted. Many of my item ideas die so fast, some seem to be entirely ignored, like gel and rough blocks, NESW and NWSE, negative, smoke bots, and cliffs. |
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:)
The level browser rewrite is not intended to be monumental, just:
- Use filters and tags instead of "directories"
- Read comments as well as post them
- Make everything fast with indexing and threads
- Don't require levels to reside in individual files, since that has a lot of overhead when you have 3000 of them
- Make it possible for trusted users to curate collections of the best levels
I did already start but man, one sad thing about life is that there just isn't time to do everything you wanna do. I still love escape though. If you guys have ideas about concrete improvements to the level browser, or specifically ideas about how to improve the first-play experience, I'd love to hear them. I agree it's a higher priority than new tiles; those are fun but there are plenty of those to play with already.
Dave: I actually agonized over the name "minor leagues" for a while because I didn't want it to sound like those levels were unwelcome, and I wanted to give the sense that there was a "major leagues" to aspire to. It might sound mean to people that don't understand the provenance. Do you have a suggestion?
It seems to me that with the current message volume, a level-specific thread and a single global thread are plenty? I'd be happy to fire up a message board (it's trivial to add them) but it seems to only make sense if there's a larger community. I think doing simple-ish things like making it possible to read comments in-game would probably help more.
There are actually known MD5 collisions (as of about 2005?) and I think it's not even that expensive to generate them any more. Both will be nonsense data, but I think the escape file format actually would allow for a contrived collision. Please don't do this. :)
Dave: I can't quite follow the specifics of your "bug", but for sure Escape reads every file in directories where it thinks it might find levels, and does so in a way that makes you wait. That's fixed in the level browser rewrite, but having fewer files in those directories is another way to make sure it stays fast. |
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Tom has mentioned a rewrite of the level browser, which presumably would cut back on scrolling time by offering more ways to find the level you want. Asking for a Tom 7 mockup sounds like a silly idea because they can span anywhere on the usefulness spectrum and you never know which one you're going to get, but has he presented a concrete idea of how it's going to be different than what we have?
Of course MD5 collisions are possible in theory, but the point of MD5 and other such algorithms is to offer a large enough hash space that each file has plenty of room to scamper without running into the others. Other algorithms like SHA-* offer an even larger space, but they're all slower to compute, and the MD5 code was already there for the taking. A bigger, but still laughably remote worry (forging malware to have a hash collision with a level file? No one would go to those lengths since there's no money in it) is that a level has the same MD5sum as another _level_, which would render the second such level inaccessible since the game would just think it's a copy of the first level. Fortunately, even such a minor change as adding a space to the end of the level name will change its MD5 and get it off the collision, so that's not really a problem.
If the Radar thread format is workable, but you'd like a way around the inability for anyone except Tom to start new threads, there's already a solution to that: snoot.org and the boards there. We could either co-opt the general board (4), or ask for an Escape-specific board to be created in slot 13 or something.
As for why CC came to have a bigger player base than Escape, simple. CC was included on Windows installations at the height of Microsoft's power, while Escape is included by default on...a lot fewer systems, to say the least, and on many of those systems the users don't even suspect it's there, let alone give it a fair shake. |
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10303. Anonymous (69.121.173.92) –
23 Jun 2011 13:38:24
[ BAD SAT SCORES ]
got a freaking 998 how bad is that? -.- |
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Just Remembered an idea I had for the escape site: Forums.
Basically they don't need to be all that complicated. Maybe just like a 'Help' category for troubleshooting and problem solving difficulties, and a 'Prototyping Ideas' category for coming up with Ideas for new or improving escape features before they become serious suggestions. I figure this might help make it easier for players to get the word of what they need and would like for escape, as things suggested in the feedback thread here die fast, unless they are posted at the right time, with some solid pluses without too many problems. I think that the thread format for your 'Tom 7 Radar' is perfect for my forum idea, but we would need to have it that the forums still are like normal forums.
I Hope this won't be too hard, considering you already have a thread layout.
I think that as far as simplistic bots go, Nervous bots and Lazy bots are good ideas, and I would like to know what anyone thinks about my gel block & rough block ideas. The rough blocks are 'rough' since they have sandpaper-like sides that scape against the 'rough' floor tile, basically sanding it down enough to make the "rough' floor tile become a normal floor. The gel blocks basically are large chunks of gel that are very good at filling in gaps and holes, and also push easily, allowing it to fill in rough and holes.
Simple Idea: Cliffs. Cliffs are basically like floor, but suddenly drops off halfway between one side and another, so you can stand on it, lasers and transponders can beam over it, but anything pushed onto a cliff falls off, disappearing.
Sorry for how long my posts are and how there are 3. I keep thinking of things. |
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Sorry, that last post was me. I did type in my name, but i think the adjusting thing at the bottom of the comment box messed it up? I'm not sure.
My current level that I am making is going to be an implementation of something not implemented in this game so far. I hope you will enjoy it. |
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