The chain shot challenge

[RobbeK]

Hi Mike,

Yes, a sphere (curved in all (human) dimensions) can not be unfolded -- but I was thinking to use hexagons then  (somewhat the way a leather football is made ) & only "playing" on the surface of course there are 6 neighbours / cell
(the incredible way would be, instead of moving cells towards one of the poles or the equator , making a collapese when enough cells are gone !!!   goint to a lower level  --    what'd you think   )
The cylinder is challenging too - Lisp can not set up cyclic data structures     -- really challenging !  I mean like for a square, rect .. I define the border inside the array (like zero's or whatever ) , this has the advantage any recursive algorithm can run on any size of such figure whitout the code has to know the width or height (this is very Scheme-ish )  ,   but on a cylinder (?)  -- I have to think about this -- it's very interesting !!   

best ,  Rob

[Mike Lobanovsky]

(the incredible way would be, instead of moving cells towards one of the poles of the equator , making a collapese when enough cells are gone !!!   goint to a lower level  --    what'd you think   )

Hehe, that would essentially introduce yet another shape into the game; this time, a cone!

[Charles Pegge]

Another possibility is to go into the fourth dimension, having two or more cubes, representing adjacent volumes

[RobbeK]

 into the fourth dimension,    cool,

how should we call the two new directions       --   beam up and beam down  (but up and down may be confusing ) ... 

[Charles Pegge]

Chain Shot 4D

A simple shallow (2 volume) implementation.

I have minimised the sphere polygons to lighten the GPU load


.

[Charles Pegge]

Happy New Year !

[Mike Lobanovsky]

Thanks Charles,

So far I've been able to play the 4D version down to 1 ball in 30 clicks twice but never managed to kill them all. It seems like playing 4D is easier than 3D.

[erosolmi]

grrr 2 spheres left in 23 clicks
 

[Charles Pegge]

The 4D version has 1024 cells, and potentially 8 neighbours instead of 6. It might benefit from some extra colors to make it more challenging

Hexagonal stacking in 3D would have 12 neighbours!

[Mike Lobanovsky]

On my PC, everything runs pretty smoothly with Spheric 1,1,5 and ay=.25. CPU load is less than 5%. Still no epic win though.


[UPD] Unremming %ColorCodedPick crashes the app!

[Charles Pegge]

Hi Mike,

I'm doing a little more work on ColorCodedPick to get the cleanest semantics, but the crash was most likely caused by indexing the array of cells on a non-flat color. The index must be checked against an upper limit. Unlike conventional picking, color-coded picking cannot be entirely hidden.



There is an alternative game objective: To leave the maximum stable number of spheres, and the highest columns.



.

[Mike Lobanovsky]

There is an alternative game objective

Hi Charles,

Hehe, looks like a giveaway alternative for losers.