The network code is mostly in working order now, which is great. I've been playing some multiplayer against my wife. I just win with no effort in a one-on-one game, but if we add in some AI allies it can make it fairly balanced - she gets a Hard AI on her team and I only get an Easy one.
But it sometimes gets out of sync. And I have no idea why. Sigh.
I can detect it when it happens, so I could just send the entire game state across to get it back in sync, but I want to try to fix it so it just doesn't happen at all.
Also, Mouse Maze 2. Tomf has been at it again! Now with achievements and thinner walls.
Showing posts with label tomf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tomf. Show all posts
Thursday, 24 December 2009
Tuesday, 22 December 2009
Christmas
I managed to get a couple of other PhD students at my university interested in Mouse Maze - they've been running variations on my genetic algorithm method and Andy's gotten his score up to 34,188, which is fairly impressive. My best is only 20,158. (Tomf did fix the 200 visits bug; first he just pushed the limit up to 1000, which we then proceeded to achieve, but I think he's fixed it properly now.)
Need to get around to beating Andy sometime, I think it's mostly just a matter of CPU time spent, but more important right now is Vertex Dispenser. I've been saying for a while that I only needed to spend a few days focused on it to get things like the multiplayer working properly, and now I am trying to do just that. So far I've managed to get the netcode back into the state it was a year or so ago - so it basically works, isn't jerking about wildly and constantly throwing error messages, but will probably get out of sync occasionally still. Plus there are going to be problems with sounds that get started, turn out not to have ever happened, and never end up being stopped. Still, progress!
Need to get around to beating Andy sometime, I think it's mostly just a matter of CPU time spent, but more important right now is Vertex Dispenser. I've been saying for a while that I only needed to spend a few days focused on it to get things like the multiplayer working properly, and now I am trying to do just that. So far I've managed to get the netcode back into the state it was a year or so ago - so it basically works, isn't jerking about wildly and constantly throwing error messages, but will probably get out of sync occasionally still. Plus there are going to be problems with sounds that get started, turn out not to have ever happened, and never end up being stopped. Still, progress!
Friday, 20 November 2009
Mouse Maze: Obsession
Have become obsessed with maximising my Mouse Maze score. I've improved my search algorithm, and I've found mazes with scores up to 9960 and 642. Haven't input this to Kongregate yet, just because the maze will take so long to run - Tomf really needs to add a fast-forward button (also more graduations of colour - he really wasn't expecting anyone to get scores this high; more on that later).
Nobody's competing with me for top scores, which is a little unfortunate - that would be more fun, but it's still interesting to compete with myself and see how high it's possible to go. Apparently Tomf's code uses 1000 as the visited value for walls (just picking an arbitrary big number he thought nobody would ever reach), so if I can get the mouse to visit a tile more than 1000 times, it will power up and start walking through walls. This is my goal: break his assumptions and break the game. I'm only in the 600s at the moment, but there's some vaguely exponential behaviour which causes it to sometimes increase in fairly large steps, so I may not be too far off:
##A##
#BCD#
#####
In this configuration, if the mouse is at C and has visited A N times, then it must visit each of B and D N times before it will return to A, and in the process it will visit C 2N times.
Edit: I ran a maze that should achieve 642 visits to the same tile, but at 201 the mouse levelled up and started crossing walls. So I'd gotten the value wrong; I've broken the game already. Awesome. I feel a sense of achievement - I now have the actual maximum possible score given the current implementation. Am now hoping Tomf will fix it so I can have a higher score.
Nobody's competing with me for top scores, which is a little unfortunate - that would be more fun, but it's still interesting to compete with myself and see how high it's possible to go. Apparently Tomf's code uses 1000 as the visited value for walls (just picking an arbitrary big number he thought nobody would ever reach), so if I can get the mouse to visit a tile more than 1000 times, it will power up and start walking through walls. This is my goal: break his assumptions and break the game. I'm only in the 600s at the moment, but there's some vaguely exponential behaviour which causes it to sometimes increase in fairly large steps, so I may not be too far off:
##A##
#BCD#
#####
In this configuration, if the mouse is at C and has visited A N times, then it must visit each of B and D N times before it will return to A, and in the process it will visit C 2N times.
Edit: I ran a maze that should achieve 642 visits to the same tile, but at 201 the mouse levelled up and started crossing walls. So I'd gotten the value wrong; I've broken the game already. Awesome. I feel a sense of achievement - I now have the actual maximum possible score given the current implementation. Am now hoping Tomf will fix it so I can have a higher score.
Wednesday, 18 November 2009
Mouse Maze
Tomf made a puzzle called Mouse Maze. The basic concept is that it solves mazes with a ridiculously inefficient algorithm, and you have to find input to maximise the inefficiency. It's quite easy to make a maze that takes a few hundred steps, but after that it gets difficult.
For a long time, this very elegant maze was the second highest scoring, at 1135 moves. As it was saved to the folder of shared mazes, lots of people ran it and got the same score, but there was one single person with a higher score of 1223, with an unknown maze. Then recently someone came up with this maze, giving 1364 moves, and saved it, so it was possible for anybody to reach the top of the score table.
When Tomf told me someone had found and shared a better maze I was a little disappointed - I'd liked the mystery of the top solution being unknown. I have now fixed this; see the high score table.
For a long time, this very elegant maze was the second highest scoring, at 1135 moves. As it was saved to the folder of shared mazes, lots of people ran it and got the same score, but there was one single person with a higher score of 1223, with an unknown maze. Then recently someone came up with this maze, giving 1364 moves, and saved it, so it was possible for anybody to reach the top of the score table.
When Tomf told me someone had found and shared a better maze I was a little disappointed - I'd liked the mystery of the top solution being unknown. I have now fixed this; see the high score table.
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