Realizations about Zendo
Part 1: Different piece sets

I will write several posts about the tabletop game Zendo.

Background knowledge: Rules of Zendo, a game of inductive logic.

In Zendo, you build structures of pieces. Any source of pieces is eligible, but ideally you have many copies of each piece and can compose pieces in many different ways. The structures should be easy to grasp by looking.

Example piece sets



The 2017 Zendo release ("Zendo 2.0") has 3 shapes in 3 colors each. Everything is the same size, there are no pips on any piece.



Icehouse pieces. Everything is a pyramid. The 2001 Zendo boxed set has 4 colors of pyramids in 3 sizes each. Large pyramids had 3 pips, medium pyramids had 2 pips, small pyramids had 1 pip.



Digis, and structures are then natural numbers.



Letters from the alphabet. We played Zendo on Lemmings Forums where structures were finite-length strings over A-Z.

Good piece sets

Above, I've already sorted the piece sets according to how good the resulting game feels. The Zendo 2.0 pieces are the best. Geometric shapes and colors seem to fit the game much better than letters or numbers. Visual pattern recognition is a deep part of Zendo.

I have an irrational soft spot for the Icehouse pieces over the 2.0 pieces. The Icehouse pyramids come in green, the table looks more colorful with red/yellow/green/blue pieces, and still the number of colors is small enough.

I've always thought our Lemmings Forums A-Z game produced insidious problems with harder rules. That will warrant an extra post these days. Until then!

-- Simon

I'm fine with one stat (either physics updates used, or lemmings saved) as the main stat, and possibly one or two other stats as tiebreakers.

I discourage elaborate scoring methods that compound many stats. Those make the endeavor more complex than necessary. Or do you feel there's a problem with a simple stat to optimize?

-- Simon

More ideas, some from Forestidia in voicechat.

People optimize a replay, then send this replay privately to the host as in Family Feud forum game. How would one even be able to cheat then? You can't copy other people's solutions before scoring.

The host can design a level in private, then release it when the round begins. This gives everybody an even start except for the host; the host knows their own map already. Still, the host should be allowed to enter their own contest for fun. Maybe preclude the host from winning.

If one prefers discussing ideas over working alone: Can several people enter as a team?

I'm willing to extend Lix to display more stats, ingame or postgame. Replay-editing features would be even better but I'm busy these weeks, can't guarantee the time to develop a large feature. Still, I'm happy to discuss anything.

-- Simon

Lix 0.9.23 released.

Download for Windows 64-bit -- recommended
Download for Windows 32-bit -- only a fallback for ancient machines
Download for Linux 64-bit
Source code
Changelog
Issue tracker

• xmas2018: Fixed backroutes in Home Time for Santa, Snow Cat Love, Decorate the Tree, Past the Xmas Tree.
  
• ClamLix: Time is Running Out, decorated the steel with a steel hourglass.
  
• Fix #371: Miners throw a pickaxe again when they cancel on steel. Diggers won't throw pickaxes anymore by mistake when they cancel on steel.
  
• Windows downloads call the directory again lix, not lix-versionNumber, for easier quick-and-dirty updating (see "How to update" above).
  
• Linux: Added a manpage for Linux package maintainers, doc/lix.6, thanks to tarzeau.
  

-- Simon

Hi,

Double resolution

Lemmings 1 and Lemmings 2 were written for 320x200 VGA mode. The playing characters are 8 or 9 pixels high, walk ahead by 1 per frame, and builder bricks are 1 pixel high.

Lix is double-resolution: Characters are about 17 pixels high, walk ahead by 2 hi-res pixels, and builder bricks are 2 pixels high. More precisely, physics work with 2x1-pixel-chunks. All lix' x-coordinate is always divisible by 2. Only the y-coordinate may be any integer. A 2x1-chunk of land counts as solid as long as at least one of its two pixels is solid.

Where does this concocted rule come from?

In early 2003, I scripted levels for the freeware game Gravity Strike, this ran with hardcoded 640x480 fullscreen. In the early 2000s, CRT monitors were widespread and could display any resolution sharply -- up to a point. But every monitor could display 640x480, thus Gravity Strike's author decided to hardcode this size.

I wrote GS Lemmings, a Lua script that ran in Gravity Strike, removed everything that the game normally provides (spaceship, terrain, enemies, status panel) and instead loaded my own graphics and ran my own logic. This is the birth of double resolution: It was easiest to work with what I had.

In Lua, apart from numbers, everything is a reference type, everything is garbage collected. I had no idea what was happening under the hood. Would arguments be passed by value or by reference? What is the difference between calling functions object.func() or object:func()? No idea. Programming was magic. If it failed, I would guess and re-try. I would never search the web for help because I found the technical explanations hard to understand. (Solution: object:func() is equivalent to object.func(object)).

In 2006, I finished my civil service -- back then, it was mandatory for every male German to either serve in the military or work civil service for 9 months. I had some time before university started in fall 2006. What to do?

I learned C++ and began the work on L++, a Lemmings variant with hardcoded 640x480 fullscreen resolution. Why would I do that? It worked in Gravity Strike, and I still had a CRT monitor that could display any resolution well. I kept my rule that the tiles could be anything and need not stick to 2x2-blocks. I would not upscale. I would load the tiles as they came from disk. That was easiest.

The 2x1 physics instead of 1x1 come from the desired walker speed. It was simpler to move always by 2 horizontal pixels than to write a basic walk action for 1 pixel, then call that twice per frame. The walk cycle would look at two pixels and deduce from them together whether the 2x1 chunk was air or solid. I didn't expect any odd cases from the rule.
Of course, there are odd cases (I should link the example gifs).

L++ became Lix in 2010 and got ported to D in 2015. Like Theseus's ship, all code, graphics, etc., got replaced over the years, but really, 2006 L++ was the first version of Lix.

With my own game project at 640x480 fullscreen hardcoded, I spent considerable time on choosing my first laptop in 2007. I wanted 4:3 aspect ratio for my laptop screen, but that was getting unpopular. Laptop computers were booming, and widescreen displays had gotton common. I loved 4:3, why would anybody want 16:10? Documents, websites, code, etc., everything is vertical, but most importantly, 16:10 TFT displays would blur at 640x480 hardware fullscreen.

Lix/L++ is now 12.5 years old and programming been my longest-standing hobby. Now, Lix supports any screen resolution, windowed or fullscreen. The user interface scales smoothly, a major design goal during the 2015 rewrite.

Even with the user interface resolution decoupled from the physics resolution, Lix still has 2x1-hi-res-physics. I don't like how confusing the 2x1-block rule can be. But it has been so deeply ingrained since the beginning. It allows for more graphical details on tiles. On the other hand, it forces tiles to have more details to look good.

tl;dr: It was easiest because of the hardcoded 640x480 resolution in the early versions. And now too much depends on it to get rid of double resolution.

---

Passage of time

More rambling, because I'm in the mood.

I feel like time is passing much quicker now. In 2003, GS Lemmings was released with 20 levels after maybe 2 months of work, with some bugs of course, some crashes, some reliance on 60 FPS -- Yes, the game would skip some physics logic, but not all physics logic, when the machine was slow! Horrendous bug! -- but it worked well enough to play. The 2-3 regulars on the Gravity Strike forums loved it.

Where GS Lemmings took 2 months, L++ required 3 years before I felt ready to post it on Lemmings Forums including networking mode. A more complicated feature, sure, and I wrote the game engine from scratch instead of relying on a host game.

It's been nearly 4 years since I started the rewrite to D in early Feburary 2015. I'm very very happy with the rewrite, I've pushed the game further, and I'm supporting different operating systems better than ever before. But are there killer features in D Lix that weren't already there in C++ Lix? Did the fundamental game take 2-3 years to implement in 2006 to 2008, and the 10 years after it has been only polishing?

Sometimes, I miss the days where I would implement buggy crap with trial-and-error, but have something cool to show after minimal development time. The 15-year-old kid inside me wants to feature-bloat on some side project. And the 5-year-old inside me wants to play that and get even more wild ideas.

When time passes linearly, memories increase only logarithmically. You remember so much from when you start a new activity. But then you get proficient, and you don't remember as much when you're performing by routine.

Consider the time after my civil service. I learned a good chunk of C++ and wrote a prototype-ish game, L++ with some singleplayer, in half a year. Then, I had nearly no other hobbies, obligations, or girlfriends, and could focus fulltime on L++. Now, 12 years after, I had comparable time after finishing the PhD, but I haven't started a new hobby in that time. But I already have so many hobbies -- games, Lemmings Forums, speedruns, tech projects -- that I've enjoyed in that time. They merely generated less impactful memories than starting a new hobby typically generates. That's why time seems to fly quicker.

At least I've finished xmas2018 on time.

-- Simon

Session is over!

-- Simon

Lix 0.9.22 released.

• Include xmas2018: a new singleplayer pack with 24 holiday-themed levels.
  
• Fix #350: In singleplayer, the splat ruler button tooltip claimed falsely that this button also pings hatches and exits, but it does that only in multiplayer. Fixed this tooltip. (Issue #301 remains: In multiplayer, this button should be functionally split into two buttons.)
  
• Support 64-bit Windows builds with LDC >= 1.13.0-beta2. I encourage all Windows users to choose the 64-bit build over the 32-bit build, hoping to avoid the out-of-RAM crashes on large maps.
  
• Binary downloads are now hosted on github, not on Lix's homepage.
  
• Binary download archives carry a version number in their filename and unpacked Lix directory. With self-contained Lix (i.e., not installed system-wide via a Linux package manager), you should still update existing self-contained Lix as usual by copying your user files, custom levels, and replays from the old directory into the new.
  
• Fix #369: When you build from source and choose a debugging version instead of a release version, Lix will start windowed by default, not with software fullscreen. User options can override this as usual.
  
• Updated the DAllegro5 bindings to 4.0.4+5.2.0 and removed Lix's allegro-color dependency on all platforms.
  
• Many refactorings in the source code for physics updates. No physics changes. This will be useful in case I manage efficient skill blueprints a.k.a. skill shadows.
  

-- Simon

Very nice. Also bugs in programs behave like backroutes.

The word "Backroute" is so useful that I already consider the word too long. Chess problem composers call their backroutes "cooks".

The designer has a hard time finding their own backroutes. In the extreme form, Kory Heath (creator of Zendo) considers design itself purely an escape from inadvertent mental lock-ins. Full article: Monkey traps

-- Simon