geoo visits Simon, May 2024

[Simon]

Hi,

geoo will pay me a short visit next week. He'll arrive on Thursday, May 23, and leave on Saturday, May 25. With only two days, there isn't much time, but I'm looking forward to:

• Discussing Lix development. What is important? Which bugs are most nagging?
  
• Discussing Lix physics. We have some long-open small physics oddities. Let's fix at least some for 0.12, whenever that will release.
  
• Testing a top-secret work-in-progress feature. Well, it's only semi-secret because I'll give you a hint:
  

To get into the mood, here's our topic from the February 2023 visit.

-- Simon

[Simon]

The secret feature is neutral lix.

geoo has built Cage, a 2-player map inspired by Cage by Tom K. from Clones (clonesgame.com).

The 6 concrete cages (marked X) at the top contain one neutral lix each. Only neutral lix score points here. With 0 overtime, it's a race to save one of the neutral lix before your opponent saves one. Both players can easily reach all the floors of Cage. There are neither blockers, runners, nor batters.

Here's a gif of an ending where the frog eats lix left and right, but it's the neutral's lucky day and she sneaks by the busy frog. geoo has exactly one worker ready to mine for the win.

Animated .gif

Here's a gif of an ending where I have one chance to save a stray lix from the bottom. geoo is controlling the upper floors, and if I fail this, he'll win.

Animated .gif

-- Simon

[Simon]

Dish of the day, serves 4 people:

• 600 g noodles
  
• 1 celery (= Stangensellerie, not Celeriac = Knollensellerie)
  
• 2 onions
  
• 700 g minced pork (probably works with minced beef, too)
  
• 600 g crème fraîche
  
• 500 g spinach, deep-frozen creamed spinach
  
• 400 g lentils (drained net weight is 260 g)
  

It's a variant of one of my classic pasta sauces; the classic sauce is minced meat with cream and spinach. The upgrade here is the celery. It's knackig! It's curly!

Start by preparing the classic sauce. Fry onions with the minced meat. When both are well-done, extinguish them with the cream. Add spinach. Add lentils. Let this cook for as long as it likes. Stir occasionally. Rule of thumb with every pasta sauce: The sauce shall wait for the pasta, not the other way around.

Cut the celery into small curly pieces. Insert them into the sauce when you like: Either early, which makes them blend in well, or later, which keeps them knackig, but they'll run the entire show themselves. The bush (= the leaves of the celery) tastes well, cut it and put it in, too. Toss away only the wooden parts near the bottom.





After dinner, we played 2-color Igel Ärgern, see image: back of box. Then we played 6-color Igel Ärgern with:

• Both players run 3 colors each. You win as soon as one of your colors wins, i.e., as soon as you have 3 out of 4 same-colored hedgehogs in the goal.
  
• We added the doping rule: First hedgehog to reach the goal gets disqualified for blatant doping. Its color can still win if all 3 remaining hedgehogs reach the goal.
  

At first, with 24 hedgehogs in the running, this seemed to take ages, but it produced a close endgame with hard decisions.



Then we played Sneak heads-up, but we added geoo's beer-and-pretzels rule of Kontra. When you challenge a sneak, you may announce Kontra to make all revealed cards score 2 points instead of 1 point. Against a Kontra, the sneaker may reveal as usual, or he may fold to lose his cards unrevealed.

-- Simon

[Flopsy]

Nice that you two got to meetup again even if it was brief this time.

This neutral Lix feature looks well implemented so far, is there an option to have coloured Lixes score in addition to neutral Lixes as well?
I'm guessing overtime is set to zero in the above gifs but is there an option to not have the level end when a neutral exits also?

I am looking forward to seeing this feature in a Lix release build because there could be a groundbreaker for more level creation possibilities

[Simon]

option to have coloured Lixes score in addition to neutral Lixes as well?

This was a hacky development version with several features hard-wired:

If there are one or more pre-placed neutrals, scoring was hard-wired to score only neutrals. As you say, it would be nice to choose whether playable lix should count or not. On the other hand, it's bad to have different game modes; this forces players to remember what the winning conditions are. If we make such different modes, the modes need clear UI support, e.g., icons on the goals.

All hatches spawn playable lix. You can't have a neutral hatch. It would be nice to put neutral hatches, too.

There is a special gadget type, preplaced neutral lix. You can't pre-place playable lix. Given support for pre-placed neutrals, extending this to pre-placed playable lix sound desirable, more so than the neutral hatch.

I'm guessing overtime is set to zero in the above gifs but is there an option to not have the level end when a neutral exits also?

Yes, overtime is set to zero for Cage. If you give more overtime, you can score more than one neutral, and when you think you have enough, you can nuke as normal to trigger overtime.

I am looking forward to seeing this feature in a Lix release build because there could be a groundbreaker for more level creation possibilities

Lots of things still to do:

• In the level format, allow explicit distribution of hatches to players. I.e., find a replacement for our cheap-but-easy round-robin hatch/exit distribution in the level format. Reason: I don't want to repeat the mistake with the round-robin hatch distribution for playable pre-placed lix.
  
• Maintain backward compatibility: New engine must load old round-robin levels, not only explicit-distribution levels. Maybe save as round-robin if level allows?
  
• Decide on exact representation in the level format for pre-placed lix and for neutral hatches.
  
• Add sane editor UI. This will be a lot because it must address #1 and #3.
  
• Draw a neutral hatch.
  

-- Simon