Tom 7 Radar:
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9108. Anonymous (cpe00222d2efdc6-cm00222d2efdc2.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com) –
21 Oct 2009 10:58:01
[ Bathroom? Mushroom! ]
Apparently any mushroom is because of under rotting wood, so EVERYONE check the underlying problem not just the surface!! |
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9107. Anonymous (cpe00222d2efdc6-cm00222d2efdc2.cpe.net.cable.rogers.com) –
21 Oct 2009 10:55:15
[ Bathroom? Mushroom! ]
Yep, i was totally freaked out too and this is the second time i get the weird pasta looking ones. I've been cleaning with bleach (trying to do it once a week) I skipped one week recently and bam there back. I havent told me landlord yet, but now that its the second time, I'm definitly telling him. And maybe moving out... lol |
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9106. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-251.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) –
20 Oct 2009 23:59:04
[ Death Row Candyland ]
Thanks, they're great! I love remixes and I've never heard ones like yours before. Neat. Please send more if you end up making any. If you want MIDI files, I'm happy to share, just name that tune(s).
Alumna is my favorite. Is that Many Happy Returns? I can't even tell. I didn't hear Theme from Zurich anywhere, so maybe that's it.
Theme from Robots in General is definitely the most remixed T7es tune now; see also MAT64's cover (http://www.myspace.com/mat64music). |
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9105. Adam (bering.isr.cs.cmu.edu) –
20 Oct 2009 12:42:53
[ Eye poison ]
WTF is lumeta.com corrupting your database |
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9104. SeriousMF (s0106001cdf72f707.ed.shawcable.net) –
20 Oct 2009 07:23:15
[ Death Row Candyland ]
Good times. Update your blog, Tom! jk; I know doctors are busy. I long for your updates. Here's some remixes of a couple of your chiptunes and such and such.
http://www.archive.org/details/VariationsInChiptuneTechnology
Keep on rocking in the constitutional representative democracy world. |
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9103. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-251.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) –
18 Oct 2009 12:43:06
[ New! Escape 200704130 ]
Radiant: Thanks for spotting my bugs! I just removed the comment limit; it looked like I had intended to hook it up to "next >> " links but forgot to. I don't think there's any need for it, especially with this feedback thread like hundreds of posts long. Also, you're right, it makes sense to use 0--10 consistently, so now that's done. |
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9102. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-251.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) –
18 Oct 2009 12:12:37
[ New! Escape 200704130 ]
landon: Yeah, due to the way I'm using SDL if the game is busy it won't redraw. Hopefully this is not too annoying; the only things that should actually take significant CPU are things like ctrl-0 and maybe solution optimization, or advanced features of the editor. (Also unfortunately now, loading the level collection from disk, but at least there's a progress indicator for that. I have a partial rewrite of the level browser with threads, but it's a way's off, especially since I haven't actually made an escape release in over a year.) |
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I noticed that when browsing the level pages for levels with more than 25 comments (Rouge-Like-Like is the only one that comes to mind right now), the oldest comments are lost off the end, and there's no "get more" link like there is for the overall collection--even if you add "&start=25" to the URL manually, it doesn't respect that switch. This probably should be fixed.
(Looking through the relevant code for that page, it also made me question whether it's really intentional for the web interface to scale D/S/R scores to ten times what they are in the game.) |
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Yeah, the GUI freezes during long periods of activity. |
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9072. Alex (customer11770.pool1.unallocated-110-128.orangehomedsl.co.uk) –
14 Oct 2009 13:12:53
[ New! Escape 200704130 ]
Actually ignore that. It seems to be working now! |
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9071. Alex (customer11770.pool1.unallocated-110-128.orangehomedsl.co.uk) –
14 Oct 2009 13:10:51
[ New! Escape 200704130 ]
Hi, great game but...
Whenever I try to update Escape, the program comes up with "not responding" and then crashes. Any idea why? |
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Sidenote:And for how I got escape, the first "guy" that was offering it, was CHARGING for it. The page even had all info except the Escape homepage! I found a second site (still not the homepage) that was free.
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Haha, I love when that happens. |
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9068. fetjuel (pool-173-64-130-34.sttlwa.fios.verizon.net) –
13 Oct 2009 12:27:56
[ AAD-23: sk7 or die!!! ]
After 10 months of singing it, I just now finally got the "los primeros veinte" bit. The old Spanish-knowing part of my brain just never thought to wake up and decipher it. |
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Why does escape quit redrawing when it loses focus(looks normal), but refuses to redraw after regaining focus? I am recovering solutions. |
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No wonder why radiant created the levels in place, which he makes them impossible. He then modified the level code in the level files in his own directory. |
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9065. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-251.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) –
07 Oct 2009 22:29:35
[ New! Escape 200704130 ]
Thanks for pushing the envelope!
I knew that 1, 2, and 5 were possible, though the weird behavior in 2 is new to me. It actually makes sense given the Escape rules of physics but highlights an undesirable disparity between the way bots behave and the "guy". It's a good reason to not allow bots to move after bombs, though. In general I am trying to minimize the amount of hidden information (this even includes things you can see with keys like 'n' and 'y'; those are just less hidden!) that the player has to deal with. The bot numbering is already a bit much for my tastes but is seemingly unavoidable, and does admittedly lead to some interesting puzzles.
3 is a funny surprise but definitely a mess. It's obvious why this is possible but I didn't know about it, and is a bona fide bug. If there's a crashing bug that's even more serious. If you like, sending me (e-mail) a level that crashes will help me make sure I'm fixing the right bug.
I thought I hadn't thought of 4, but when I was just looking at the code I see an "XXX Flags" in sanitize that indicates I did but just didn't feel like doing it at the time. Like you say it's similar to the bizarro world and could be supported with some other info key. But I really think of flags as an implementation detail, not part of the level data. As a result the condition of having two different panels should really just be impossible; it's up to the code to maintain the invariants surrounding these correctly. It isn't, which makes this a real bug, but not a feature I'd want to support. (It's crazy complicated, that part of the code, anyway. I often regret doing it that way.)
I don't agree with you that 5 is unequivocal, but I am most sympathetic to this case. The main reason to reject it is that it's just too mean to the player to have these panels hidden under blocks with no way to know. I can think of some straightforward extremely annoying levels one could make that involve guessing the locations of panels, for example, and if it's possible to make extremely annoying levels, someone will do it. If there were a good way to visually indicate this to naive players (I think there are lots of possibilities, just none implemented) I wouldn't be against it. But as it stands there's no deficiency (broken bots allow you to get the same effect, or level setup phases) to solve if we don't, and some IQ Carriers to suffer if we do, so it seems a straightforward choice to keep the status quo (and fix the sanitizer).
BTW, I believe there are a few more amusing behaviors (some specific ones I can think of, though I don't have the time to easily test them right now). Let me say for fair warning that levels that can't be made in the editor are almost for sure gonna end up in Quarantine though. But don't think that means I don't get a kick out of 'em. :) |
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9064. Anonymous (97-83-126-36.dhcp.trcy.mi.charter.com) –
07 Oct 2009 21:27:36
[ Bathroom? Mushroom! ]
WOW! I just found a slew of them growing from the tile grout behind my toilet. They were light yellow rubbery looking things. I know they were not there the other day because I just cleaned the floor around the toilet. My toilet has been dripping back there for about a month. I plucked those suckers out and the tile is coming up tomorrow. I'm thinking the leak needs to be fixed, the wood replaced, and new tile put down. eeeewwww!!! |
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So people have been posting out here for 3 years and still no one can say whether or not they are really harmful? lovely |
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The Malformed Levels series got me thinking about which of those behaviors, if any, should be consciously accepted in future versions. Obviously, since the editor forces 1, 2, and 4 into an unsolvable state, refuses to create 3 (but runs it just fine), and makes 5 into a watered-down version of itself, every one of them can be said to cook the game itself. But just as obviously, the fact that they have solutions demonstrates that there is design space for these mechanics, and officially embracing them would give level makers (or at least the ones familiar with the inner workings of the file format) more tools with which to pull off level ideas.
As I've said in level comments, the solution in (1) behaves exactly as you'd expect--the only thing wrong with it is that it challenges one of the tenets of bot behavior listed in the readme. Indeed, given the demonstrated versatility gained from not taking that assumption for granted, it challenges the idea that it should even be a hard-and-fast tenet. In terms of (1), my thought is that the editor can go ahead and put bombs at the end of the numbering by default, but if the designer uses F to modify that behavior, the editor should allow it without secretly undoing the change at every opportunity.
As (1) asks for a reason why the game wants to force bombs to the end of the line, so too does (2) answer it. The key move required to solve (2) is the only scenario I can find where allowing a more liberal ordering of bots and bombs leads to clearly unwanted behavior. I would fix this by introducing a "mortally wounded" flag; once this is set, the rest of the move is allowed to play out, but then when it comes time to check for death, the guy sees the mortal wound and dies regardless of what ensued in the rest of the move. Thus (1) would be a well-defined, solvable level; (2) would also be well-defined in its current form but would have no solution.
(3) is just a huge mess. I haven't even gotten around to exploring the full ramifications of positions like this, but suffice it to say there's no clear, unambiguous, and sensical behavior for the bots. (If the existing level doesn't make that obvious enough, try adding a sixth bot.) I wouldn't be opposed to branding this type of level as corrupt, and refusing to list it, particularly since it doesn't open up very much design space. Even less, considering the 15-bot limit (sure you can modify the level file to try and place more than 15 bots, but the level is correctly rejected in this case, and if there's a mismatch between the number of expected bots and the number actually placed, Escape segfaults while attempting to load the list of level collections.)
(4) is likely to be the most contentious of the bunch. As my level choice indicates, I think it's a nice trick that allows many embeddings to take up less space than they would otherwise be able to, and it's no stranger than a lot of the things that Chips players routinely deal with (particularly in CCLP2). The biggest problem is that it's another piece of perfectly hidden information--a countermeasure to bots-on-wires is presumably already in the pipeline, and now that you know about this trick I doubt there could be another release without either excising it from the game or letting players get at the concealed information with _yet another_ secret shortcut key, possibly F. To me, the ideal implementation of F would draw alpha-blended tiles in the appropriate positions, and in particular the interaction with Y would need to be checked against. Probably a feasible improvement (which would also help out cases like (5)), but what do I know; this level and the trick behind might well end up canned for being "too tricksy".
And finally, positions such as (5) should be unequivocally accepted. Such positions arise completely naturally over the course of play; why shouldn't they be representable in the starting position? As an added bonus (although not much of one nowadays since this application has been largely superseded by strings of remotes), the use of Turing-Machine-esque rows of colored steel can go off much more smoothly this way (set off an entire row of panels from just a one-tile push, rather than setting off just one panel at a time--maybe four on the last step--and taking at least as many steps as there are steel blocks). |
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9061. OPOOPFOOK (cpe-24-160-183-204.columbus.res.rr.com) –
06 Oct 2009 18:59:23
[ BAD SAT SCORES ]
FOOK. Mi Name Is Bawb. Me r 2k00l4sk00l. Bai. |
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9060. Adhesion (cpe-74-74-185-170.rochester.res.rr.com) –
05 Oct 2009 22:43:18
[ Death Row Candyland ]
Yeah, this is pretty damn well composed, though I might disagree on the immediate tunefulness of stuff like the intro. The polyrhythm section in the middle, the material right after it, and the reuse of polyrhythm later, are definitely great though. I'm a sucker for "dramatic return", and I tend to (ab)use it a decent amount. Repeating a melody in a different harmonic context (like major instead of minor) can be really intense too - the first movement of Oubliées by Debussy is a great example of this.
To make a terribly lofty comparison: you know how someone (supposedly Brian Eno) said not very many people bought the first Velvet Underground record, but everyone who did started a band? This is the kind of song that makes me want to write music. |
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9058. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-149.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) –
03 Oct 2009 11:43:20
[ Death Row Candyland ]
Good day good sir! Please do send me your remixes, I love remixes to the max. Unfortunately I believe the AAD submission form goes into a black hole right now. Feel free to e-mail me if you want to make sure I know about your album; I've been meaning to fix the AAD page for so long, but sometimes I am a bad, bad man... |
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9057. Tom 7 (h-67-100-132-149.phlapafg.dynamic.covad.net) –
02 Oct 2009 09:31:52
[ New! Escape 200704130 ]
I can try to recover it manually for you, though the situation suggests that it's truncated so there's not much I'd be able to do. Take a look at it; it's text format. After the first section is the list of solutions, then ratings, then preferences. It's hard to say what a corrupted file would look like. If it's just got extra garbage you could delete that.
escape also keeps backups of the player file because it's so precious. If your main player file is called jl.esp, then the backups will be called something like jl.esp.~2890 where larger numbers are newer. Just replace jl.esp with one of those and at most you'll lose some of your most recent activity. You could even merge stuff from jl.esp if you can find it (programs like diff should be good at this format; I designed it so that I could keep my player file in CVS and synchronize it between computers). |
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