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PaperclipPerfector
5hr ago
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Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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Notes -
Video-Game Thread
, since people apparently like organizing things that wayEight years after its initial release, popular puzzle game Opus Magnum has just been updated with a surprise DLC—De Re Metallica (referencing a famous early-modern book), a fan-made campaign half as long as the base game's campaign.
Even if you are a filthy casul, Opus Magnum is quite fun, since, unlike some other puzzle games, it is reasonably easy at its base difficulty (with unlimited budget and board) but has built-in optimization goals with which you can challenge yourself if you choose to. Solutions to puzzles are evaluated on three statistics:
Cost (of all the mechanisms that you put on the board)
Cycles (time to deposit six copies of the required output, including startup time but excluding time to return to the starting position after completion)
Area (of all the mechanisms that you put on the board, including the area through which swing your manipulator arms and the atoms that they bear)
For each puzzle, an official in-game leaderboard compares your solution's statistics to those of all solutions found by players. Additionally, the official subreddit's leaderboard uses "sum of cost, cycles, and area" as a total metric—but, IMO, the product makes much more sense than the sum. And, of course, it's easy to think of even more statistics:
Cycles of the solution's actual period (excluding startup time but including time to return to the starting position after completion)
Convex area (with concave portions filled in)
Hexagonal area (with concave portions filled in and acute angles padded)
Footprint area (excluding arm swings)
Also, you can impose on yourself constraints, such as refraining from using the fancier tools to which you have access (multi-armed manipulators, extending manipulators, and tracks that carry manipulators around the board), or using only a single input in puzzles that let you use multiple copies of the same input.
As an example, here are three different solutions for a mid-game puzzle. (The game has a built-in function for exporting a solution as a looping GIF file. These particular examples are rather large, so I have converted them to WEBM files, though it looks like the conversion process cut off a few frames at the end of each file. In a desktop browser, you can right-click on a webm to enable looping in the context menu. It appears that mobile browsers do not have this option.)
In comparison to the four-input solution, the one-input solution cuts both cost and area by a factor of three, but also bloats cycles by a factor of four and is an absolute pain to set up in-game. (It's theoretically possible to curve the one-input solution all the way around to form an elegant circle. But, again, setting it up in-game would be quite a hassle, since the cycle count would be even more ridiculously high.) The two-input solution sneaks its way into winning in the sum category.
Even a simple puzzle has many possible solutions. Here are some (GIF, not WEBM) for the very first puzzle in the game.
Just as in the previous table, each of these solutions is better than the others in at least one of the listed statistics.
Bonus: Unicode alchemical symbols used in Opus Magnum (code charts: 1 2)
[1]Opus Magnum uses a masking empty triangle superimposed on another empty triangle, which looks a lot like a star of David (a non-masking empty triangle superimposed on another empty triangle). Unicode lists a different symbol for quintessence, 🜀.
[2]Opus Magnum uses a rotated life symbol, which Unicode does not have, but which CSS can imitate (though not through the filter of this website's Markdown). Unicode does have the similar symbol 🜞—listed as "crocus of iron", which apparently is calcined/anhydrous rust or ferrous sulfate.
[3]Unicode lists this symbol as signifying sulfur, not life.
[4]For some reason, Opus Magnum uses the plural, "vitae".
I liked Opus Magnum quite a bit!
But then I read a review that said, to paraphrase: "If you want to do programming, just damn well code properly instead of playing games that have you program through an impractical interface."
I wanted to disagree with it, but failed to. Since then I couldn't bring myself to pick Opus Magnum back up.
Approximately my experience with Exa-Punks. The coding interface is more practical, and you can just damn well code properly, but half way through I had the overwhelming sensation of "Wait, am I not normally getting paid for this? I won't even have a hobby project to show for it at the end of it all..."
Yeah, same here. And I barely even started before I quit. It made me remember writing assembler code and I had no desire to repeat that exercise.
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