| « home | Browsing all comments (spoilers: on | off) (info: on | off) | next 25 |
 |
<mark> (SPOILER) Ps i just went to a school 28 year reunion party last month,odd number i know. I would not have went but they held it my local club so me and my pals would have been there anyway. Dont recommend them its only the nosey people full of questions that turn up. Also you hardley recognise anyone and people just stare at you all night. Even if they had one for your school it would be a long way for a rubbish night. <mark> (SPOILER) By the slider i meant for Ctrl +0 to work i needed to push the horizontal one to the right. As it was not in 17 i called it invisible,when i did the level again i just pretended it was there Ctrl+0 worked.( Would have been quicker to just do 16 but i wanted to see what would happen) <Dave> I think the timing of the end of the stick was about the same for me. but then I think we went through the system within a year of each other (5th = 1985/6). What do you mean by 'invisible slider'? <mark> (SPOILER) Fially got time to catch up with 15, 16 & 17 actually skipped 16 as i only saw one change. Ctl + 0 did not solve 16, i never moved invisable slider out the way. Must say these are some of the most confusing levels ever even though i done all 3 now i still mess them up. I've had a look at 18 and i have a good idea but its just more going round in circles again,going to give my brain a rest for now. I think i've had my best week ever on escape well over 15 levels 7+ thats why i fell behind. Shame really as i did 15 so differently i could have made a mod,but 16 took care of it that i could not.(solution in back of mind for 18) Really hated block pushy levels but now i don't think there so bad, "extraction" being the latest one to be ticked off. They look so simple there's no tricks but until a week ago they were just to hard for me. Nice to see Carlin Js appear,who in the past has some really nice levels.(about 50% done)new level was a bit to easy though. Ps Dave i remember that stick you were talking about,not got many fond memories of it. I think it was in my last 1 or 2 years at school they got rid of it. <mm> (SPOILER) Right now, that new yellow floor seems very annoying to me! But I already like the way the bottom left compartment works, that's a great addition as it seems to make much more sense the way it is now. The level becomes more and more vicious and I hope I'll have time to try again later. <Dave> Thinking 18 was inspired by the way I solved 17. Could not force that solution and close out the existing one, so made some other changes instead. Whether this is a good idea or not remains to be seen... I only had a proper look at 17 earlier today. It took just shy of a couple of hours. Had I been forced to find Kirima's more elegant solution it would have taken a lot longer. <Dave> You'll be happy to know it is getting pretty stormy now. Solved 17 slightly differently. I have been toying with a mod but I can't get it to work properly and not entirely sure I can. I have other things I need to get on with so it'll have to wait for now. <mm> (SPOILER) I just love rainy and stormy weather, and 17 degrees Celsius sounds just perfect to me. Have fun with number 17, you've kind of forced this nod and I just couldn't help uploading it ;) Good night! <Dave> Temperatures are quite comfortable here (17C at the moment) but I'm not sure you'd like the persistent rain we seem to be stuck with this week. Roll on spring! Haven't speedrun 17 because I haven't solved it yet :) <mm> (SPOILER) Dave, it's getting very hot over here, I wish I could be at your place right now, I'm longing for cool weather! And I'm waiting for speedruns for number 17 as well! Wishing you all a hot and/or cool Sunday, GN MM. |
 |
<mm> (SPOILER) Added speedrun: 1383 moves (old: 1422). A little bit faster ;) |
 |
<Dave> School?... I vaguely remember that... big building where old men hit you with sticks... (You think I'm joking?) Anyway, have a good break :) PS. It's midwinter here :( <Dave> (SPOILER) Added speedrun: 467 moves (old: 585). Tidy little level. |
|
|
<mm> Dave, thank you so much for your explanation, I really appreciate it as I didn't get "it" at all! Thanks for ctrl-e as well, that's pretty interesting and you're right, it might be a better indicator for difficulty than actual rating seems to be. There had been a 2009 version for Mac, but it didn't work, I can't remember what exactly had been the problem? I also remember having had a bookmark problem as well, that had been very annoying, but that had been years ago and I thought it had been solved?! I know I'm missing the transporter animation, but I have no clue if there might be anything else that had changed? I don't care about animation, and I'm glad my bookmarks to work smoothly. <Dave> PS. At least I know how to parse an .esx file and create insane levels now! Four years too late, but never mind... <Dave> Have been looking at the source code over the last few days, that's how I discovered ctrl-e. Tried compiling in VS2008 and VS2012, but neither will recognise or convert the project file correctly. Got rid of all the code errors but can't get the linker settings right yet (work in progress). C++ is not my strong suit. I really want to try out noname's fix for the bookmark bug. Does anyone know which version this was originally written in? <Dave> I knew it wouldn't take you long :) I had no idea that there wasn't a new compiled version for MAC. Apart fron the sanity checks, I don't think your missing out anything! Not having to deal with the bookmark bug must be good! It definitely makes difficult levels harder to work with. To explain: Windows is different. The player and level files are not stored in the main program directory but in a hidden directory in the user's account. This is why some deleted levels which come with the download of the game get permanently stuck in triage unless you manually delete that triage directory. (The level is deleted from one Triage directory but not the other but it is moved to Graveyard, so the same level appears in both Triage and Deleted Levels - there are about 30 of these ghost levels). This is nothing to do with Tom's source code, as that is the same whatever the platform, but something to do with the way SDL handles file save operations in different versions of Windows (under normal circumstances this behaviour is correct and desirable, just not in this case). The up to date versions of the player file and level directories have not been saved to the main Escape directory since Windows XP, so just copying it onto another machine will not work (as Mark found out), but the game documentation has not been updated accordingly. Copying a player file into the game directory will still work, but backing up from the same location is pointless. I should really stick this lot on feedback and flag it as a bug report (...again). Manual installs of multiple versions of the game will not cause any problems (I have 3 on this machine: 2005, 2007, 2009), but running the setup utility will overwrite your menu and desktop links rather than add additional ones, not a major problem, just annoying. It does, however, seem to create new versions of level and player data for each version, but I'm not sure if this is 100% safe, so I have erred on the side of caution and avoided downloading level updates in the old versions. Hope this makes some kind of sense... DC <mm> Finally I've got the Modular Thinking levels all done, this feels great! As usual, I had been blind and just didn't see one possibility. The annoying thing is: this happens to me way too often... My solution for 16 is slightly different, but I think it's not worth adding another mod. I've been reading the recent comments here and I just don't get it?! I'm playing the old version (from 2007), as there is no new version for Mac, and I've got multiple copies of the game on my computers, I can open all those copies and play multiple escapes on my iMac without any screwing-up problems. I copy my "main-escape" whenever I think about it, just in case and as a back-up, and all my bookmarks and solutions and ratings will be copied as well. In my "Quarantine: Impossible Levels / Bugs"- folder there are 19 levels, I've solved 15 of those and don't know either if the rest is actually solvable or not? <Dave> Mark, I play on multiple machines. Only one copy of my player file has my personal ratings for a particular level. I ctrl-0 the solutions around and try to maintain one file as the master copy, but personal ratings and interim solutions still tend to get lost in the melee. PS. Of the Bob's levels, I think Bob 3 took me the longest. <mark> (SPOILER) Once again i thank you ,I'd got 6 of Bob's levels done and a few bookmarks halfway but they where getting a bit hard so i was leaving them. Did not spot at all Bob 14 was a chess board,a problem i was set a few years back. Much easier now with the internet, i think i must have set the slow run 323. I solved the first knights with the turks tour,but this did not seem to work for Bob14,unless it was just me. So i pulled up some random picture off google worked first go, and as they say "Bobs your uncle". You should not have to remember which levels you have rated there is 6 coloured squares after the author's name of a level,in directories. The 3 on the far right are global ratings ,and if theres 3 to the left of them they are the user ratings. |
 |
<mm> (SPOILER) Finally I've got this one, it's great and now I understand that its ancestors had been deleted! |
 |
<Dave> Looking forward to level004... :) |
|
|
<Dave> Actually in some ways ctrl-e (if you allow for upload date) is probably a more realistic difficulty sort than ctrl-d. It definitely highlights a few levels which I found harder than the ratings suggested: Three-quartered Arena, Almost nothing but hard, Compression 2, etc. Also nice to see Flows up there, never a d=9 level admittedly, but definitely in my all time favourites list. Slightly puzzled by Bob14 though! (or to put it another way Knight's Tour so deviously modded that it has exactly the same solution!) I'm going to have to try and remember which ones I haven't rated and do so (easier said than done). Been trying to work on some new level ideas but keep getting interrupted by work, rebuilding the bathroom, etc.. I had loads under development a couple of years back but lost them in a hard-drive crash, the prototype of Seven Bots was all that I recovered. PS. Utterly failed to find a version of escape older than version 200510120, and that's only thanks to radiant's link. Also, pieguy's site is still a no-go zone, only a few pages (e.g. pgpatch) are accessible, and I haven't been able to track down a copy of pi^2 anywhere else. PPS. Good night. |
|
|
<Jim> (SPOILER) Nice level Adriano. |
|
|
<Dave> It's Single file. I'm fairly confident Jumps is impossible. |
| « home | Browsing all comments (spoilers: on | off) (info: on | off) | next 25 |