eternaldensity
commented
9 years ago Sounding pretty good so far.
Open charmsRace opened 9 years ago
eternaldensity
commented
9 years ago Sounding pretty good so far.
LuminousLeopards
commented
9 years ago TaT can be found here: http://xkcd.mscha.org/timeaftertime.html#frame1. We would probably want to ask the site owner if it's OK to link to the images.
When would this phase of the game begin?
charmsRace
commented
9 years ago That's a great question! I don't know, but right now, Signpost unlocks upon ONGing into Catpix with all discoveries. Seems like the best time to me. However, it's been a looong time since I reached that point, so I don't have a great handle on how much to expect the player to have.
When someone says TaT, is that referring to that specific comic? I was under the impression that TaTPix was any fan-comic following Time.
EDIT: Also, can anyone point me to where the source code for the stats panel is? I can't find it or the text in the codex.
eternaldensity
commented
9 years ago eternaldensity
commented
9 years ago Oh, mscha says 'absolutely' to point 1, so that's good. I mean, molpish.
eternaldensity
commented
9 years ago BlitzGirl pointed me at the wiki page, produce by svenman:
http://xkcd-time.wikia.com/wiki/TimeAfterTime
Not sure why it didn't show up when I searched the wiki.
copypasting for convenience:
So far there are seven TimeAfterTime stories:
An eighth series does not play in the Time universe, but it is highly related to Time and uses the same format:
pickten
commented
9 years ago I think it makes the most sense to start with t1i, since it's far and away the longest one, and it's the only one that has a real plot. I don't know that we need the others, or really have much use for them since they're so short (except bftf but I don't know if we can use that).
EDIT: I also think the dimensional shard part of this should probably fit in shortly after inf crystals/prints, because there's a long period where very little happens if you don't have Ninja Ritual/This Sucks/CDSP high enough going in. I arrived there recently, and was disappointed to see that it looks like I'll need to wait 40-ish days before doing much of anything besides vacuums, which were designed to be suck (410 hours; Ritual 367; I play about 1/2 of the time). Besides, there would be a certain way in which it would be saying "oh time - that's a dimension, right? We ignored it a lot, so clearly we've been ignoring higher dimensions! Let's get working on that."
Either way, we'll probably need discoveries for these.
For t1i, I came up with the following discoveries:
charmsRace
commented
9 years ago That's a great suggestion and seems reasonable to me, pickten.
ED, would you mind telling me A) what NP you're on and B) how much of each stuff you have? It seems okay to use your numbers as a soft upper bound, since you (presumably) know what you're doing. I'd also really appreciate the same info from pickten, since you're in that phase right now and I also remember it being disappointingly slow.
As far as my end goes, Signpost, 3D Lens, Kitty Catalogue, Portable Signpost, and another boost Glass Ceiling Cat are completely coded. GCC is a sizable boost to shard gathering; it shouldn't be the first shard boost unlocked, but I'm not sure what should be without knowing fully knowing what stage of the game it'll be happening in. It fits the flavor of the ceilings by being a large boost but somewhat annoying to utilize.
Choosing what NP0 should look like, drawing it, and replacing the picture are all beyond me at the moment. So is separating discovery lists, I think. And, of course, so is actually coding t1i. I think I will be pushing what I have fairly soon (as long as I figure out how github works! =p).
charmsRace
commented
9 years ago Also, could I get your Molpy.Boosts['Locked Vault'].power?
pickten
commented
9 years ago My stats: NP 1596 (I know I'm way behind, but it's not a big deal), 10G bonemeal (saving up for PR), 1096 PR, 382 CDSP, 382 ritual, 11M vacuums with 377 TS (I maintain a buffer of 7M for blackprint purposes), ~100 goats, LV power 143K (there really needs to be something to do with vault power besides blackprint income). 50 maps (dragon site/queen built), 187T logicats, a little over 1G AC, and about 12k mustard.
There are some problems with NP0 in general. First off, what do we do with the minus world? What is NP -0? Should we just give up and make NP0 a pic of the sea, or even blank?
As to the question of coding, I think the easiest thing would be making t1i's nth NP be NP n+X (for some fixed X under 1, maybe 0.5), since we wouldn't need to change too much of the code (maybe the cats could just appear as "errorpix") and it makes the discovery system easy to follow. It would also allow players to bounce back and forth between the OTCpix and TaTpix. Plus, it would allow for easier addition of OTTer stories.
charmsRace
commented
9 years ago Thanks for the data!
Regarding NP0, the existing code handled it pretty well. I can't figure out a way to get to NP -0 after what I've coded. Negator on 0 naturally goes to 0, since nothing fancy is going on in its code. I've blocked TT to and from 0. I don't know whether there should be a discovery there (requires special monument treatment), so if one is added TTT will need to be blocked. Rifts won't take you to 0, since they wouldn't before and Molly.LowestNP isn't a thing. I have blocked fledging dragons there (for the time being) , so no wooly jumping. In short, as far as I know, there's no way to get to -0 and no way to get to 0 except by signpost.
I don't really know what the picture but I imagine something not quite blank but very minimal.
Storing TaTPix on half-integers is a great idea!
pickten
commented
9 years ago Oh, I thought you would remove the block for this, that makes sense. Otherwise, it would have been a little weird.
LuminousLeopards
commented
9 years ago I think NP0 should be Great Lord Randall sitting down at his drawing table.
eternaldensity
commented
9 years ago I'm running Beachball Autoclicker (so my numbers aren't really a good indication of reality), and I haven't really touched it in the past few weeks. I think I'm up to most of the level 2 prizes. Haven't even started on maps.
charmsRace
commented
9 years ago It occurs to me I have no idea what Randall Munroe looks like, and I'm not sure I want to ruin the magic =P
At this point, I am wondering who does not use Beachball; I have used it extensively in the past, but right now only for digging clicking (because everything else it does is irrelevant). But that's beside the point, I guess.
Almost everything I've written works and passes every test I can think of (working on the last bit), but I still need to ask some questions about github: Even though none of this is actually ready to go into the game (since NP0 needs artwork), it's okay to push, right? Also, I'm realizing I have basically no idea how to price any of this stuff, so I'm going to say it's smartest for me to leave that to someone else with a more active hand in development. But is it alright for me to push it with poor price choices?
charmsRace
commented
9 years ago I should clarify what I mean: The prices are (I think) well-calibrated with respect to dimension shards and progression in CatPix. The problem is that this should probably be integrated with some other stuffs (vacuum? bonemeal?), and I don't feel confident in deciding those levels myself.
Also: There need to be a bunch more pictures of cats to choose from. =p
I am imagining that once you drain a CatPix, the picture changes to either just the sea, or just a plain black floor with minimal variation, but I dunno.
eternaldensity
commented
9 years ago I pull the catpix from a site which generates pictures of cats of provided dimensions. I don't have control over the actual pix.
Stuff we do on github doesn't affect the live game until I merge changes onto the gh-pages branch.
charmsRace
commented
9 years ago Aww, okay. The CatPix will suffice, then!
I have sent a pull request (#1341) with ten boosts along the Shards/Pane track.
I've been thinking a lot about progression after OTCPix, and I've started coding a little bit, but I want to make sure I don't get ahead of myself. The only info I can find for TaTPix plans is from #921. I've coded a simple version of Signpost that, when activated, will cause the next ONG to take you to NP0. I have my doubts about the "quiz" Waveney mentioned; I'm not really sure it's a good idea, but either way it's beyond my ability to code anyway so I'm leaving Signpost as-is for the time being. Below are my thoughts on progression after that.
Visiting NP0 unlocks a boost ("3D lens") which allows the camera to take pictures of CatPix, extracting dimension shards (a new stuff). Eventually you unlock Kitty Catalogue, which is similar to the Discovery Detector. It will tell you the lowest CatPix you haven't yet extracted a shard from. Also, there's a boost called Portable Goalpost, which lets you "bookmark" a NP and travel there later. This is useful because sapping a shard takes infinite Goats, so there is a natural (small) timer between shards. If the player doesn't want to sift through all their accumulated CatPix at once, this will let them return later. This is better than Loopin Louie (speaking of which, this is a terrible name, can I rename it?) because it doesn't prevent you from progressing further into CatPix while still keeping your place. All of these boosts fall under a new category, Dimension Tech (is there a more suitable name?).
Dimension shard collection will at first be 1/CatPix, but will of course be boosted later on. I'm thinking a boost that causes Catpix N to give N^power shards (starting at 0 so that N^power = 1). Eventually, you unlock Glass Ceiling Cat, which heavily boosts collection in some undecided way.
Another idea: Since Tangled Tesseract is already dimensionally themed, it could be boosted by feeding it dimension crystals. Each one increases the "dimension" of the logicat cage by one, and the reward increases as the volume of the expanding N-cube. So, for example, when it's first bought, the dimension is increased from 3 to 4; there are 8 normal cubes in a 4-cube, so it will increase the rewards by a factor of 8. The number of K-cubes in an N-cube is (n choose k) * 2^(n-k), so the number of 3-cubes in an N-cube is (2^(N-4)) * N * (N-1) * (N-2) / 3, which increases exponentially. Tesseract would still stall QQ production, I guess. However, LuminousLeopard has stated they have plans for Logicat/QQs, so I wanted to run this by them before doing any work.
Dimension shards can be refined into dimension crystals, which will be used to actually embark into TaTPix. However, this is where I'm stuck, because I haven't actually read any TaTPix, because I don't know where to find them. How many are there that are considered up to snuff for the game? The player should eventually have choice of which to do next, but I think the first TaTPix should be decided in advance; what's a good first? And also, unfortunately I think actually coding TaTPix is beyond my ability at the moment; any code relating to GUI is so far completely impenetrable to me.
There's a lot of stalling involved in advancing TaTPix (collecting shards and refining them) because, I assume, there are far fewer TaTPix that OCTPix, and advancing at 1/hour is a way to quickly exhaust the content. However, again, since I don't know of any TaTPix, that could be a wrong assumption.
Some of these boosts are mostly coded, and I think I can handle most of the rest, but I think I should ask whether this seems like a good direction to go in before I continue. Any thoughts? Am I taking this in a completely incorrect direction?