New game by Zachtronics

If you like the other games you're going to enjoy this one too. It's pretty good.

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:67641D96DF707A7C45623DDD9D76A70BB6125D28&dn=SHENZHEN.IO.v08.10.2016.rar&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.opentrackr.org%3a1337%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fp4p.arenabg.ch%3a1337%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.aletorrenty.pl%3a2710%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2feddie4.nl%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.ilibr.org%3a80%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.ilibr.org%3a6969%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.zer0day.to%3a1337%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2fp4p.arenabg.com%3a1337%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2ftracker.internetwarriors.net%3a1337%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2f9.rarbg.me%3a2740%2fannounce&tr=udp%3a%2f%2f9.rarbg.to%3a2770%2fannounce
From igg-games, so it might have "igg-games" as a password.
Filename says it's from the 8th, last update according to Steam was on the 7th, so should be the latest version I guess.

Last update was this afternoon, but I think it was an update for the worse, I hope they revert one of the changes.

Yeah, probably the best new release of 2016

Played a bit so far, have to agree it seems pretty good. Some of the costs I've seen don't line up with the parts available though, do parts become retroactively available? Because that goes directly against a large part of what makes Zach's games so good.

Yeah, more parts become available incrementally which can then be used in previous puzzles. It's not new, Spacechem didn't give you everything from the word go either. I've also received one in-game message about a command that isn't listed in the manual and I think I've figured out another they hinted at.

Those completion statistics in all of the games are skewed by people using guides and conferring on forums anyway, the most common solution is always implausibly higher than the rest.

I remember Zach posting on Twitter about special edition packages of the game came with huge paper manuals for it.

If you liked having a paper manual for TIS-100, this one advises you to get a 0.5 inch three ring binder and folder tabs to organize the forty something page manual. I don't know what else the special edition could add there

Nigger have you ever played a Zachtronics game? They only put finished games on Early Access and then use it to update it.

Since the pirate version probably doesnt come with the required manual, Im gonna post it here puu.sh/rF2Dd/633a5d80ca.pdf

sage for doublepost

No, but if you went back to earlier missions you didn't suddenly have access to later stuff. Each mission gave you exactly what you needed, and you had to optimize with THAT and not later stuff.

Except it does come with the manual? At least the magnet link I posted does.

I just assumed it didn't, but then again its located in the files of the game so Im not suprised

They do give you what you need at the time and no more. If you've read the manual, you know most of the new chips are useful in specific situations that don't come up in the earlier puzzles. Do you really care that much about optimizing for your rank?

If you enjoy Zachtronics' games, it'll scratch that itch.

Don't think I'd recommend it to anyone who doesn't already like his stuff tho - the constraints you have to work within aren't particularly friendly to newcomers and folks who aren't already into some amount of coding. I'd send those folks to buy Infinifactory.

So how far did you guys get? I'm having quite a bit of trouble already with the A272 and CoolDad vape LED. Feel like I'm missing some kind of logic/trick.

The screenshots remind me of working in Reaktor.

I bought it, it's good. At least I confirmed it the moment I saw the "Design your own game" level.

I'm almost finished with the aquaponics maintenance robot one, about three puzzles down.

The CoolDad vape LED one had me stuck for a few days, it's tough. For the A272 you're missing the trick, it's pretty straightforward.

Already solved the A272, not all too efficiently but very logically. And just finished the game controller as well. Complete shit according to the statistics, but fuck it it works.

I'll give you a hint/cheat? for the Vape LED.
The interruptible ones are always 999
When I realized that it greatly simplified everything.

Yeah, didn't do too well there myself either, but like I said earlier, I'm convinced those are skewed

Why do they do this? It's like they just want the achievements to appear smart.

When I say inefficient, I do mean REALLY inefficient. Looks like statistics are different per version, too.
Also FUCK am I pissed at those hidden instructions. This game is too fucking accurate in it's representation of the "working with Chinks" experience.

Would this help me in real life?

Maybe people aren't actually using guides, but I don't think it's possible that five times as many people found the most efficient solution compared to everyone else. Might just be my bruised ego talking

Holy shit son, that's a lot of power

I actually bought the thing so I have the latest update, maybe the scale on Power Usage is one of the things they changed in a patch.

>Also FUCK am I pissed at those hidden instructions.
The gen command definitely would have been nice to have in the earlier puzzles. Where I am in the game they still haven't confirmed what they mean by "the @ conditional", but I think it's an enabled instruction on tcp when the two values are equal

It improves critical thinking skills and thus might help a little with programming, but it's not exactly accurate compared to any real life assembly languages. So maybe.
If you agree that having fun helps you in real life too, then definitely.

@ is explained in the same mail as gen, a line with @ in front of it is only ran once, ever.
Polite sage for doublepost.

why don't they just make a game with a real language instead.

I wanna kiss this guy, no homo. The looping gif capture in Infinifactory was so satisfying.

Find a guide for that level and see if it gives you the same statistics as everybody else.

I swear that was not there the first time I read that email

Yep, it does, top result on Youtube

What does the comment section look like

The + - thing is definitely inspired from ARM.

No comments yet, this is the one I was looking at. Bizarrely, the description mentions "Still works, though, with ¥1 extra cost", which explains why the most popular solution is ¥1 than this one, he must have another video somewhere

I guess it's encouraging that I'm not actually dumber than everyone else playing the game, but yeah, why the fuck would people be relying on guides for this

Fite me faggots

I don't understand why though, the controller one is one of the easiest puzzles. I did it with a big one and a smaller one. I'm trying to optimize it for two smaller ones but I can't get around the lack of connections.

BRB

"Pocket I Ching Oracle"? Haven't made it to that one yet, can't compare

Don't understand why people would be using guides? Yeah, the controller one is pretty easy. I think I used three small ones, one for the x/y, one for the a/b, and one to sort them. Not the most elegant solution.

Speaking of easiest puzzles they really need to rethink that one where they introduce the non-blocking radio transmitter, it's easier than the tutorial puzzles. The difficulty curve is weird.

Aww yiss, RTFM

Yeah that is the easiest one, it surprised me too.

...

Shit, another one already?

I haven't even finished SpaceChem yet.
Fuck Carbomega levels and the insane bastard that thought of those.

glad I'm not the only one

I'm enjoying it, but I dig programming gaems.

But I enjoy the challenge, I love how realistic the manuals are. One page entirely in Chinese, some mostly unhelpful except for one small table at the end or "oh whoops, shit is classified".
Or the military stuff. You think you program radios and clocks and suddenly your bosses go "Oh, btw the next project will be a targeting system."

Fuck off shill, you're only embarassing yourself.

Bought it, haven't played it because it told me to print the manual and I don't have 40 A4s lying around.

Seems to be taking a bit from Infinifactory. That game had a creepy atmosphere that totally caught me off guard.

Surprised there are so many engineers here

Some of the purposes of the puzzles seem to have sinister undertones, but your co-workers seem like an anime cast, I don't know if I'd call Shenzhen I/O creepy.

IDK, man. Subtlety works in stuff like this and chinese are pretty fucking creepy by default.

Does infifactory run on craptops? I need something for a trip. Otherwise I gotta just install spacechem and finish it, love that shit

Wew, went berserk, said fuck optimization and just kept slapping code bandaids onto it until it worked. Surprised that the power output rating was still relatively average even with my ludicrous production cost.

Don't click the spoiler unless you want to see a) spoilers and b) a very ugly solution to the aquaponics problem

I do like that the game seems fixed on immersing you in this job in a foreign country in a slightly dystopian future, but then that fat fuck in the e-mails starts spamming exclamation points at me and it feels like I'm watching chinese girl cartoons, not working in the midst of chinese smog

It's pretty low-requirement, yeah

Can I pick this game up while knowing nothing about programming?

Yeah but read the manual.

Im a sucker for this brand of post-spacechem puzzle games

besides TIS-100, infinifactory and Human resource machine, are any more games that play like this at all?

KOHCTPYKTOP is an older flashgame by the same guy who made all of these games except HRM, it's not the typing/code kind but physical silicon based logic gates that you make with two types of silicon. It may take a while before you figure out how it works but it's great once you do (aside from some shitty quirks due to it being made in flash).
At some point I got my dad to play it, he's an engineer. He was pissed at me for days because he kept thinking about it all the time.

You can, but I'd advise you download it first through the magnet link I provided above. The game is hard as fuck, as pointed out you're going to have to read the manual a lot and just try shit out until you figure out how it works.
I just bought it after playing it the entire day same happened to the previous Zachtronics games, every time and now that I figured out how stuff works I managed to blaze through the assignments I already did, save did not carry over it seems.

mov p0 accmov acc x1slp 1

What?

XBus inputs only work if they're being written to and read from at the same time. If you don't have something reading it from the other side, it will just sit and wait there until something reads it. RTFM

Yeah, it's been dominating my free time since it came out last week. Playtime says it's kept me busy for 24 hours so far and it seems like I'm a little less than halfway through the campaign.

Oh right shit there's an entire page on those, missed it among the ching chong stuff and ads.

Well that makes things a lot harder.

Or maybe not was real easy, this time.

Game keeps crashing for me at startup

I first came across it when I was about 15… obviously I couldn't get very far. But there was one comment which always stuck out for me:

"Some asshole sent this game around my dorm days before finals started. The ensuing mushroom cloud of fail ruined our classes grade averages."

It stuck with me because, damnit, that's what a zacktronic game can do.

I got the special edition. It came with a fancy binder with the contents of the manual pdf along with a business card of your in-game boss in both English and Chinese. It also has an envelope labelled "DO NOT OPEN UNTIL INSTRUCTED" that Zach is gonna tell us to open at some point.

Pretty cool, have pictures?

it just never ends does it

Fuck you vape pen, I never want to see your glassy hipster face again.

Every fucking time, I'm one instruction away to make the aquaponics one in 8¥

shoo shoo

How the fuck

My first solution had two MC6000s, one has 10 instructions and only uses acc.
*It's been hours, send help*

I don't even know what I'm doing anymore.

I guess two MC6000s (or two MC4000s) is the bare minimum since you need four I/O pins for the output, but when I wrote my solution out on paper it ended up having something like thirty lines, I couldn't figure out how to optimize the commands

I think I'm out of my league here

The aquaponics one has three outputs.

One that was bothering me was the lightup sign. It has 5 outputs so I need 5 outputs, but due to how they're set up I can at the least have 6, which wastes 1. Unless there is some magic way to get a different signal in a connection however, I don't see a way when I need 5 different signals.

Right, but a) there's no chip I have that has three I/O pins and b) I can't figure out how send the motor output on only one pin, without using a lot of lines of code

I completely misunderstood what you were trying to say, yeah my "potential" solution would have one MC6000 and one MC4000.

I swear, these threads might as well be speaking in chinese for as much as I understand it, but it makes so much sense when you play the fucking game
how does this dev do this for every game he fucking makes
I don't understand

...

Are you into engineering games?

You had to believe user

OH SHIT I DID IT.

There is no way

Let me make a video

What's the size limit for videos now? It used to be 8MiB. Won't let me post it.

12MB. webm or mp4?

12MB MPEG-4 h256 or vpx

4.7M webm

AAC, Vorbis or Opus audio

Vorbis

then I don't know what the problem might be
if you have FFMPEG you can reencode it with the .bat inside this image, just stick the bat and FFMPEG.exe in the same folder then drag and drop the video file onto the .bat

Let me try again

Holy shit

I kept trying to shorten it with gen commands too but I couldn't figure out how to keep it from swinging from 100 to 0 instead of 100 to 50, that is fucking impressive

Well that fucking took me the entire half of the day.
At first the one at the receiver was bigger, but then I realized I the main trick of the solution, communicating the current status between each other. This allowed to parallelize the solution and make up for the lack of dat registers sending messages back and forth.
The solution wouldn't be possible if it wasn't for the fact that negative or zero gen parameters do nothing at all, when the bottom one receives -999 the gen commands do nothing, the last gen command has a 1 sleep at the end though.
It's really pretty tight, I was very close the whole time but changing one instruction usually broke the entire fucking thing.

Yeah when I first saw your layout I assumed it would interrupt at that gen p1 x1 0 command, but I guess it's still reading x1 as -999. Maybe this is the reason that they made such a big deal about the non-interrupting radio transmitters when they introduced them, that's going to be a very useful thing to know

YOU ABSOLUTE WIZARD

Why do you do this to me, Zach?

Oh wait, it's early access. Duh.

You got a roster of flash games and infinifactory next up, fam.

Needless to say I haven't played since

I've not mastered these games yet but I am excited for this one, I got about halfway through TIS-100, apparently they made one of the puzzles easier but not in the version I have which may be why I got stumped. I hope to do better in this one.

Can we just enjoy the fact that Zachtronics is one of the best game developers out there? His games are very good, from start to finish and from Spacechem to Shenzen I/O. Even his early access is how it is supposed to be, games that are not complete yet but are very close to.

...

Well, it was precisely one of them. This one.

I could've sworn there was more, maybe I was thinking of workshop levels.

What do you mean?

You can make/download your own levels, user.

I mean what do you mean by

More levels with just one portal block you need to get shit through.

Oh, you misunderstood me. I mean the one level I was talking about was that one, yeah there are multiple of them, I think that is one of the hardest.

user I'm too sick for us to confuse each other like this, have pity.

I bought the last programming game since someone here said it was good and I felt like this is a dev I want to support. Didn't get past the 2nd level.

I'll add that because it had no music I lost interest in trying. SpaceChem's music kept me going even when I was at a complete loss, and this seems to have some tunes.

The point I was trying to get across is, Infinifactory being 3D and the fact you can move your own placed group of blocks, makes it pretty much Turing complete but in a gigantic space I have no proof but after seeing those monstrous creations I have no doubt. So the room for improvement in the levels is insane, you have those giant robotic arms turning and moving around at MACH 3, it felt like my solutions were from the prehistoric era.

TIS-100 you mean? If you didn't get past level 2 there I'm not sure this one will "click" for you. But this one does indeed have very catchy tunes again.
Did you know you can play your own music if there's none?

Defeats the purpose but I digress.

SpaceChem does indeed have a fantastic soundtraack. Still, I never got past, I think, 4th or 5th planet. I got to the boss that has to be killed by fissioning plutinum into hydrogen, I think, the giant pyramid. I might revisit the game later, though.

All the bosses are easy if you know how to abuse control switches and pause statements.

Definitely revisit, hell, if some level is impossible to you you could check some faq if it's just a difficulty spike one and the next one is less complex, it's full of that "five levels done in 20 minutes, stuck on one for 20 days" problemas.

But hell yes that soundtrack is god tier, I often listen to it at work and it calmes the nerves.

My cycle of experience with this game mimics that exactly: I do 3-4 missions with a breeze, those usually introduce and gradually expand upon a new mechanic (such as sensors or fission), and then I get to a level, where I look at requirements, grab my head and quietly leave the game for a few months.

Solved the haunted doll, not exactly an optimal solution but it's a nice example of some advanced routing methods to be able to cram the right amount of connections together in limited space. Do take a cursory glance at it if you didn't know you can route wires under processors or are really stuck and too lazy to google a better solution. Might help you find optimal solutions for something else, you guys are smarter than I am.

I walked into this thread and all I see is good taste.

Truly this is one of the few bastions of the greatness of 8ch left.
I'm really looking forward to playing more spacechem on this trip. As a guy getting into software, finding elegant solutions really tickles that tism.

I just realized I put a completely unnecessary "slx x1" when x1 is non blocking. Full retard, down to 15 instructions.

I never finished SpaceChem either, but I didn't hit a difficulty spike or anything, I had just been playing a while and the puzzles were starting to feel repetitive. I keep meaning to go back and finish it but the prospect of having to revisit and relearn a lot of the earlier puzzles is daunting. TIS-100 I didn't finish and that is because I did hit a brick wall. Got to the point where all puzzles are unlocked and did a few in the fourth and fifth rows, but the new sequence puzzles had me totally stumped.

This is the first of Zach's games I actually paid for and I'm determined to finish it this time, after this I think I'll go back and pay for the others to finish them too.

This is an unhealthy obsession, man

Finishing Spacechem is just worth it for the last boss alone. How can you get so fucking creative with boss fights.

FTFY.
Just finished the I Ching Oracle, that one was pretty easy. Ideal for those DX300s,, too. Might have been better off being a tutorial mission as soon as you unlocked those things.

The killswitch one is even more ideal than that, it pretty much gives you the input exactly like you need it.

Did you not use a DX300 in the sandwich one? That's the one I'm working on now and it seems like the best way to deal with all of the meat and cheese and mustard outputs.

Would have had this one solved last night if I had read the manual to realize I was overcomplicating reading the numbers from the RAM

Yes I have the sandwich one down to two MC6000 and one DX300.

I haven't really worked on the sandwhich one yet, currently open assignments are that one, the 3 kingdoms counter, control router and the kill switch. Currently looking into that last one, I give them all a cursory glance and pick the one that looks easiest at that time with my current mindset.
I also keep going back to playing the patience game, send help.

Same with the two MC6000 and the DX300, but are you not using RAM to store the number packets?

>I also keep going back to playing the patience game, send help.
I think at least one if not two hours of my playtime have been spent on that

No I don't use RAM. One MC6000 will only send the input to the other one whenever there is a sandwich to be made (3), only the later will execute the sandwich on its own. I save the sandwich parameters in the first MC6000 acc.

i saw that some people used only 2 MC4000 to make this but how is it possible if the MC would send the same to all outputs?
Whats the bridge used for?

BTW did anyone realize that Joe doesn't send emails anymore? I think he got fired after the dolls thing, considering the email he wrongly sent after the sandwich thing

You have different registers user, use p0 too. The bridge is to jump over a wire, so you can cross over without connecting them together.

user please.

We have literally the same code

Great minds and all that. I should really be working on the server code for my game instead of playing vidya.

for some reason i thought that p0 could only be used for input

The shitty thing is that after playing you mentally feel like you worked hard for hours.

Forgot to add it is possible they also use parts that are unlocked later in the game, since with two MC4000 you only have 4 simple ports.

You can use all of them for input/output

Spoiler code for that chip:
gen p0 1 0
gen p1 0 1

There's no part in the manual with 3 outputs, so that seems unlikely. My guess is one MC6000 and one DX300 so I'm looking into that now.

Shouldn't it be gen p1 1 0 on the second command?

Yeah, my bad. My second spoiler is right btw, just solved it for 6 yuan. Was actually really easy.

I don't see that in the manual, is there more documentation later?

You mean the gen command? Yes, after a few assignments it's explained that two other commands exist, they're just not in the translated documentation. I doubt they'd do that for entire parts though, just the gen and @ commands

@ is not a command, is a condition symbol like + or -. Nice trips

Didn't take a look at this until I just finished the haunted doll puzzle, what the fuck compelled you to try that kind of wiring? I mean it's impressive that this kind of thing is viable but it makes my eyes bleed

Just imagine how things could of turned out if infiniminer had become popular instead of minecraft…

What could of been…

Would you say these games might be handy for learning programming/circuit design, or are they just glorified puzzle games?

I'm interested either way but just curious.

I originally had cleaner wiring, but it always obstructed one of the two p-gates on the MC4000 in the middle. I had to keep re-arranging shit until I managed to fit everything in there, and this was the end result.
I only posted it so everyone knows that you can connect to a gate by going underneath the part and drawing out of the gate.

Could someone give me a tip for the smart grid controller router? I don't know how to keep reading from an x-port until it blocks without it, well, blocking and halting my program. slx doesn't work since that sleeps until then instead of doing something else, and it eats the ID.

Already answered in this thread, this game isn't for you if you don't like reading. But I'll humor you and link you to my earlier response

...

My friend, spacechem gets even worse. No matter how bad it seems the next planet is always worse. Physics graduate, and I bailed towards the end of the penultimate planet. It's telling that the rarest steam achievement for spacechem is the one for finishing the game.

fuck the boss levels. i love everything else about the game but those level are wank. I just want to win with high time low symbol count. I can't get into fewest cycles.

I say go for it, pirate first if you want. They give you the mentality you need for getting into programming in a fun way. It's not really a good introduction to electronics in general, but the logic part is very valuable.

You are given the amount of data in the second packet of each input.

disdainforplebs.jpg

Speaking of which, I need to go finish TIS-100

I know there's undoubtedly a better way, but felt good figuring this down to two controllers.

I needed to watch a video like that to get space Chen
I kind of want to try it out now.

I kinda liked the change of pace, but it never worked for me how sometimes the inputs and outputs wouldn't balance and there was no dumping area. Fuck that one where you have to fuse water into uranium in particular.

git gud, scrub

I finally did it. here's my probably quite inefficient solution.

It is probably necessary, but it still triggers my sync-hating autism. I love to design solutions that rely on as little syncing as possible (it wastes both cycles and symbol count in many cases).

peasant.jpg

Enjoy that planet, is the most fun one! JK, you will learn what real pain is all about

I know you can have cleaver little flipflop loops so instead of having a long line of syncs its a neet little square with fewer symbols. I don't know how to avoid using some kind of syncin' in that puzzle as I had to maintain a 3:1 ratio for the first reactor.

Your face when It's not another planet

I'm stuck there. Help.

mate….

google Bit Che

it's a nice software for tracking non private tracker stuff.

Also….

torrentz aint fukin dead

torrentz2.eu/

Well, pirating ShenZhen didn't work, so i'll just play my legal copy of spacechem and see if I can autism through it farther than my first run

...

Bit Che still around?

Honestly I just found out about it like a month a go and it's quite good.

Is there history behind this software?

Just spent all night playing Engineer of the People because of this thread. Got as far as the Dual Toggle latch, I can't seem to figure it out though. I tried to build some JK latches, SR latches and D latches and string them together but not having much luck, simply because I can't find a really good way to make a NAND cell and I don't know how to make these sort of circuits with NORs and such.

Dunno, I'll give it another swing tomorrow, and stop trying to mix up latches and flip flops in my head.

I guess I shouldn't talk until I actually go back and finish SpaceChem, but does Shenzhen I/O seem easier than the previous two games so far? It's hard to tell how long the main campaign is going to be, but there haven't been many difficulty spikes, and based on the documentation it seems like I'm a little less than halfway through. In particular, the last few puzzles (sandwich maker, haunted doll, I Ching oracle) were surprisingly easy and hardly took any time.

Weirdly the very few negative reviews on Steam all say it's too hard, except for one guy whining about intentional mechanics

...

One sort of tip I have for that game is looking at NOR logic on wikikepedia if you're stuck. They're usually workable solutions, but inefficient.

I personally find the sandwich maker hard, and the haunted doll was just the right level of difficulty. I Ching was easy, but it was sort of a check if you understand the DX300. Maybe it's just easier because of your way of thinking, I found Infinifactory the easiest of the last 3 games.

Sounds like your PC is the problem, not the Shenzen torrent linked ITT.

It does seem a little more forgiving to me so far, because you have more freedom to keep on adding components. So far my biggest restriction has been my own autism.

I want to apply to Longteng now.

Man, this looks interesting. I liked their previous games, even if I never finished one
Is there a linux build flying around? Not so hot on the whole early access thing, but I can't find anything in the usual places

I wish to live this life, hopefully someday.

I wish the 'camera feed' you're shown would actually have shit moving on it, or like rain/weather effects and day/night time.

I forgot: Post appropriate music.

I'm so god damn close on the three kingdoms tokens one.

FUCK!

Back to Infinifactory I go

Infinifactory is also a programming game, user. You just don't realize it is one apparently.

INTO THE FUCKING TRASH NIGGER

I mean programming as in you actually need to know a programming language like assembly, not just conduct "visual programming"

Spoilers tip
Not to fix what you have, but to fix for a problem down the road. In one of the patches they changed the tests so that in one of the tests the coins input are exactly equal to the price, which broke my previously working solution. Make sure to account for the possibility of no change.

To actually fix what you have those +mov 000 p0 and +mov 000 p1 commands in the far right look worthless to me, if you need to make some space there

In the first one you're sending data to the I/Os at certain intervals. In the second, you are receiving from one, and sending twice as much to the receiving one. So simply use mul 2 and then mov to the connected pin.

I downloaded from this magnet and it's working fine.

Those commands aren't worthless. p* ports are 'set and forget' ports. You set it once, and it will hold that value. I need to unhold the value to stop giving change

Oh so it reads the zero at the end of the loop

Then why don't you shorten the whole chain of moving 100 and then sleeping and moving 0 and then sleeping with a gen command, so it only needs one line instead of four

Based Zachtronics is single-handedly keeping the programming game genre alive.

I translated it into an image for you.

Based Zach.

Managed to solve this without using gen commands which would shorten the code, barely managed to fit in because I'm a retard

Can anyone help me with this? I can make a "snake" on the screen with WASD, but I tried making a filter that adds a wall to the bottom of the screen and doesn't let it go past 120 but it's not working

when you have the "mov x2 acc" instruction, the other controller must be writing something to this bus instead of sleeping or it will block. not sure why tho, can you post ss of when it actually blocks during execution?

also not sure what you're doing with the 1st controller, you keep adding to acc but never use it?

Holy fuck, how come I have never played KOHCTPYKTOP before? It's great.

not really just RTFM scrub. There are like 10 commands in the game, and it starts off very easy. just give it a go. I never learned any assembly and I'm at like level 20 now

Today is good day!

First image is the MC bricked. It just stays like that forever during simulation.

The first one draws on the screen using WASD. It works when connected directly to the screen.

strange. did the "mov dat x0" instr execute from the lower controller? it should have waited on this one until the bus is read instead of going to sleep

wait i see. you write to the bus once with the lower controller, then this data is CONSUMED by the "tgt x2 120" instruction, and then the input blocks when you try to red it again.

Duplicate the "mov dat x0" inst for the 1st one, so it says

mov dat x0
mov dat x0

and see if that works.

Remember that comparing the xbus input consumes the data there

It did. I just added another mov dat x0 line to the first one, and now it's working. But the filter is not doing anything because when I go past 120 it starts adding 10 forever until it reacher 500 and then bricks.

Yep I tried that and it worked. I just started playing and thought that xbus connections worked like I/Os and held data, my bad.

I don't know, Spacechem only really got hard for me on the last two or three planets, but I pirated it before without beating it so maybe I have some hindsight bias. TIS-100 wasn't really hard, I only have yet to beat like 5 puzzles on the net tab. Infinifactory is more of an annoyance than a difficulty, having to move around and wait until the blocks come to the part that you don't know if it works, I didn't beat it because I got lazy, but I pirated it.
I'm really enjoying this one, it took me half of a day to get the 6¥ solution on aquaponics, it felt very rewarding.

Then why are you playing with the sandbox, you still have a lot more parts to unlock that will make your life easier.

I used it like 10 years ago

WELP
At least it works, not the most elegant solution tho

Still trying to understand this. Why does the first oscillator work, but the second one doesn't? In the first one, all gates are connected to VCC, and in the second one, every gate provides both the control signal, and the pass-through signal. That's the only difference, and theoretically I don't see why it shouldn't work - but it doesn't.

That looks a bit more elegant than my solution.

the second one, all the gates switch off simultaneously, since they are powered through the yellow gate. common mistake I used to make.

The difference is that the first one is powered through the red part and controlled throught yellow, and the second one is both powered and controlled through the same wire, and it will cause all the gates to lose power when your osc reaches low pulse.

you get better at it mang. All my solutions for the first playthrough were a mess. Now most are pretty elegant, I even got on the kongregate top 100 for a lot of levels

also do yourself a favor and don't look up other people's solutions. you get much better at the game if you figure out stuff and understand it rather than copy paste a design for some part

That'd completely defeat the point. Why play a puzzle game if you look up all solutions, when you can have fun producing circuits of true soviet engineering quality.

That's exactly the opposite of what he was saying.
To NOT look up the solution.

I lean toward more of a "look up once you're absolutely sure you're never going to ever touch this one again" school of approach. But if this one has dark magic and hidden inputs, that doesn't really apply until you know everything about everything.

Which is a good thing, I guess.

Oh, I get it, the gate operation is delayed on the control signal, not the pass-through signal, that's why I had this mistake.

I thought I was saying that looking up the solution defeats the point of playing a puzzle game. Has my English become that bad?

yeah, basically, if power is switched off on the yellow pin, the gate will stay active for 1 cycle, but if power is off on the red pin, it will switch off immidiately, because power flows through the red part, and is only controlled by the yellow gate

Kek, that took me a while too. I did it like this

get on my level casul

i just wanted to jam a capacitor whit a resistor on that level

God damn it I just need one more line where the cursor is to reset the data register to 0, it's the only thing keeping it from working

Was working on another solution for a while that didn't use RAM but that one also needed more space than an MC6000 allows

i know the pain, the nr of lines is pretty restrictive.
you can do it without fucking with RAM if you notice that the meter ID is always >100 and data always

Being a programmer definitely helps in some puzzles. The window one was trivial, coded it in two minutes, pressed play and it worked.

Looking at it, you could delegate some of the work to the MC4000X instead of saving stuff in the dat register. I don't know what your line of thought is though.

I didn't use that and still managed only two MC6000. Maybe knowing that I could lower it even more?

Probably so, but it'll take some rearranging and rewiring. I keep looking for some redundant line of code in that first MC6000 but I haven't seen one yet.

Test if the first value is greater than, less than, or equal to the ID, move 1, -1, or 0 (from the data register) down the line to tell the last MC6000 what output to use. Move the second value to the accumulator and count down until the sequence is over, then move on to that MC4000 to start moving the sequence to the output.

If it's going to take some rewiring anyway I may just go back to trying it without RAM, since I wouldnt need that extra MC4000.

I appreciate the clue but the significance isn't clear yet

my problem with that was that I had to store the address, the length, and packets sent to do it, so I was short 1 data register. How did you know when to stop reading input?

I take the ID first so the second MC can select the port, I sent him a negative number so it doesn't interfere with data. At this point the second MC will just send the data to the correct port. In the first one I still have the ID so I send it, then I take the length and also send it, and start subtracting to send the rest of the data.

...

Holy fuck I actually can't finish the xy one. It's so simple in my head but when I write it down something always breaks and when I try to go back and fix it the spaghetti code makes no sense anymore and I end up breaking it even further.

You can do it user, I believe in you. Copy the designs so you can break things and go back later.

Some tips for anons stuck on a level using RAM or ROM, you can actually read from the address pins to get the current address at any time, you don't need to count by yourself.

ah thx, I got it now. I considered it before but didn't think I could fit all this instruction in the 1st controller. I BARELY made it.

the game controller? protip use the IO expander for the button inputs. I don't remember if you have to have it unlocked by then, but if you don't have it yet, do other lvls first

also the two address inputs have two independent pointers, which can be useful window level

iirc the only problem with that level was turning the a/b status into a number. It's easy if you notice that you're being asked for bit-flags.

You are thinking about the controller one.

oh I just realized you must mean the thorium miner one with mapping xy values. I also hated it, if you really struggle maybe wait until you get logic gates?

Is there a way to invert tcp? I need an OR gate for equal or higher but I only have two lines available.

If anyone wonders how the FPGA works, I reverse engineered the fucker, it's not hard:
**There are three inputs on the left, and three outputs on the right.
There are 6 AND gates with 4 inputs each, one of these inputs is the first output on the right from top. These gates are connected to 3 OR gates. You can choose which AND gate is connected to which OR gate in the field at the bottom, each cell is one connection. Each OR gate of course is connected to one of the outputs, so the first OR gate from top is the one that comes back as input.
Then each AND gate has a column, for each input there are two cells you can set: Not connected (0 0), Connected (1 0) or Negated Connected (0 1). You can't set (1 1).
Lastly, there is an RS latch, the first OR gate is connected to the Set and the second one to the Reset. The two cells are a switch to set whether you want the output of the first OR gate or the output of the latch.**

What do you mean by invert? Equal or higher is the opposite of tlt, so you can put a '-' instead of a '+'.

Aw come on, how did I fuck up that spoiler.

That's the level where I wished there was a MC6000 with 3 analog ports.

spoiler for solution

OOOOOOOh I'd always use tcp when I wanted => or =

Wew I didn't think about just multiplying 1 or 0 and then adding 30 or not, so I just sperged in the most inefficient way possible

The one with the Chinese documentation?

Looking at it again made me realize that I could make it a little bit more energy efficient.

You can add - or + to labeled lines, but the label comes first.

Why not just mov 50 acc instead of 1?

Yeah that one.

Beat me to it, you can change tgt p1 59, + add 30 with tgt p1 59, - tlt p1 20, + add 30. Then you can remove two lines
Nice solution user.

My mistake.

You can get the effect of an AND gate with a series of conditionals.

...

Well I somehow added another MC4000 inside that mess and solved it.

Can't let the thread die

Working on killswitch, seemed deceptively simple at first, probably has a deceptively simple solution too

how many levels are there anyway?
I'm on somewhere around the color shoes.

No idea, but there's plenty of supplemental data pages left in the manual for me so I think I'm about halfway after I did the Carbine Illuminator. You're further than I am though, so no idea how much you have left.
And knowing Zach, once this comes out of early access it'll have another list of levels as long as the current one.

I only have 1 unused data sheet now. I hope something like the periodical user created levels in Spacechem will be added.

Seems like that would be pretty difficult to do with how unique each level is, or at least it would be difficult to make user-created levels like the ones in the main game.

He did it for TIS-100, that's pretty much what the sandbox/make-a-game level is for. People come up with an idea Zach didn't think of, he alters their creation a little and turns it into a challenge.

you literally just create input signals and expected output, seems like it would be really easy as long as someone has a good idea for it. It was similar in Spacechem and some of these levels were pretty nice

The SpaceChem custom levels are evil. EVIL. Most of them are way out of the league of the base game.

Anyone else feels like this

well you are supposed to do them as extra content after beating the game as I understand, so it only makes sense. If they were easier then I would get bored fast since I completed the base game

You think it would be easy for just anybody to create visual feedback like the one for the aquaponics robot? Or the neon sign? Or the sandwich maker?

really nigger? this is purely a polishing touch and completely unnecessary to enjoy a level. most of the base levels don't even have an animation like that

At least half of them do

so you wouldn't play a level just because it doesn't have that tiny animation in the corner?

Are you really underestimating how much visual feedback plays into satisfaction? This is fun to watch, TIS-100 solutions are not. If some of the levels in the main campaign didn't have animated feedback attached to them to drive home how the solution is useful, player fatigue would set in more quickly because every solution just ends up being a row of lines.

The users create the IDEA for levels user. Their basic code idea. The specifics like inputs given, animations like that and the description you get are then created and implemented by Zach, and then a whole set of them are released at once.

That makes more sense

I've only gotten to the cocktail level but only 8 levels so far have an animation compared to 18 that don't.

I count 8 by the pocket oracle. The carbine illuminator, precision food scale, and traffic light ones will make it 11 when I finish them. 11/22,

I've been considering getting Infinifactory for quite some time. I tried TIS-100, but that didn't immediately catch me like SpaceChem did. I did some levels and enjoyed it, but I sort of forgot about it after the first session. Maybe I'll get back to it.

Still, I'm not buying anything from Early Access anymore. Maybe I'll try the demo

I'll never miss a chance to brag. It's been 5 years

This is all I have.

I didn't count the food scale because it uses the same LCD display that's in the sandbox and I figure if there's going to be a level editor it will probably have all those. The pocket oracle one isn't on that list so I guess that one could be counted as a unique item though. Do you mean 11 out of 22 levels that you've seen have unique animations or that there are 11 with and 22 without.

It uses an LCD display, but it's a pre-programmed one, you'd have to do some work in the sandbox to get the display working the way it does in those puzzles. Unless they do give you access to those specific LCD displays in the level editor.

The first one

The food scale LCD works the same way as the one in the sandbox. Also which one did you mean by the stoplight? If you meant the color changing vape pen with the RBG LED that's in the sandbox too.

Guess I hadn't been back to the sandbox since they first provided it, I didn't realize they were adding new parts incrementally.

Excuse me, traffic signal, they're called stoplights in the US

how many colors are there actually for this one? there are only 3 ranges in the data sheet.

There are 6 colors.

I'm using 3 of the big chips and one small one and they're all completely filled except for a single like on one of the big ones.

wtf my pdf reader must have sperged out. It was only showing the first 3. Well, that's a level I'll have to redo

I know what you meant I just didn't see the traffic signal level until just now. I thought the progression was linear but it only unlocked the traffic signal after I finished the control router. I put that one off until all I had left was it and the cocktail mixer.

As in you've completed the game? How long did it end up being?

So did I, but I've just been completing the puzzles top to bottom, I haven't been skipping around. If the progression isn't linear that might explain why the difficulty curve is so weird.

I haven't finished, I meant that at that I had finished everything I could see except for the cocktail mixer and the control router. I just did the mixer but it didn't unlock anything I guess since I still have to do the traffic light. I'm seeing 30 levels (including the sandbox and solitaire email which aren't really levels) but there has to be at least once more since there's an unused page in the manual.

any hint on the cocktail mixer? I'm kinda stumped. I figured out how to write all the timing data into one mem module by doing 3 digit numbers that go [bottle 1 on time][ [bottle 2 on time] [bottle 3 on time], and similarly for bottles 4-6, but now I have no idea how to convert it into actual outputs. Doing dgt three times will never fit into a controller as I see it.

if only I could read back the set bit flags back from the expanders it would work so beautifully, but it doesn't work this way AAAARRRGGH

also it should be sub x3 not x1 , it doesn't work so I fucked it up trying other things

I was going to do the same thing, but after writing everything to the rom I noticed how simple it would be to have a chip for each output. I ended up doubling up two of them for a total of 4 chips. It's a shitty solution but it worked.

I'm fairly sure you can
3-digit number that captures the state
of the simple I/O pins. The digits of
the resulting XBus value will be set to
either a 1 or a 0 depending on if the
simple I/O pin is on (100) or off (0).

That's how I first understood it but it doesn't work because the simple output pins of the expander are not receiving any signal, they are simply being set by the expander. Try it, it doesn't work this way. You can only read the Xbus if the simple pins are actively being set by something else, unless I'm missing something

ok I did it somehow, but it's a spaghetti solution. Definitely my worst level in the game ATM. Need to think of a simpler way

How would 8ch rate this game?

withthetimeyouspentplayingthisgameyoucouldprobablylearnaprogramminglanguage/10

Are logic gates useful for any of the levels? I saw a solution for the test generator that used only gates but that's long before you even get them. It seems like most of the time you're dealing with xbus shit where they'd be useless.

That time probably is pretty good training for you problem solving and logic skills, so I wouldn't count it as muda.

Well, it completely consumed all my time for the last 2 days, but I finally did it. Amazing and extremely satisfactory game. The last email is not a level btw Sun Haotian invites you to work for him. Will you accept? I say fuck him, Jie is my man

Time to get motivated

Well that was a lot of wasted time.

If you like Zach's other games, godtier/10. If you don't, it's probably shit.

Alright, I managed to do the vape pen level with only ¥6. Seems like I'm the only one that did this.

So I had a little look-see around the save data (Documents/My Games/SHENZHEN IO/[numbers]/level-designnumber.txt) and noticed one interesting thing. Some level-specific chips, like the RGB LED in the Vape Pen level, can have their position edited in the save, but not in-game. Loading that design then has the part in the location you put in the save. Haven't tested if it still works, but you might be able to cheat a little this way.
Other things I haven't felt like testing yet:
But I'm tired, so I'll save that for a next thread. I'm fairly sure we'll have another one, right? This one's been very comfy.

I also beat it, it's been a pleasure user.

nice.
I was to annoyed with only having 2 simple outputs on MC6000 to try doing anything else with this level. Could have been 5$.
Honestly there should be more controller types with different pin types, as well as a horizontal bridge

I'll probably come back to it in some days to try and fix a few horrible levels I'm unhappy with. my cocktail mixer is bottom of the barrel mess

PS did you accept the invitation? Does anything happen?

I got the cocktail using only MCs, the wiring is insane though.

You get the ending/credits and move to Avalon City, it has a new tab like in TIS-100 or Infinifactory, but there are not any levels inside yet

I lied, I also use a single ROM, forgot about that.

can't imagine it being worse than this.
I like the general idea of this design but you end up with 1 missing line there and no place for a wire here, and it ends up a mess because I have to shove in all these controllers to do trivial shit

I got it like this, also deepest lore in Avalon City.

This is how I did it.

using gen sure makes it simpler, but I wanted to do a more "general" solution. In yours for example, you couldn't switch on both gin and lemon, or lime and vermouth

Just finished it too. That last level was a clusterfuck but somehow I was only worse than 3/4 of everyone else.

How can I make these 2 more energy efficient?

Goddammit, I keep wasting time optimizing fictional gadgets that I should be using to finish my real CS homework.

For the second one (first assignment)
place an @ in front of the slp, then replace the 0 in your gen command with the number behind slp (so 6/4).

Hold up, the bottom on is reading from x0 even after it's slept. When you get a signal from rx is available for more than one time unit?

The radio X-bussamajigger queues up whatever it has to send to you. You could start reading 20 steps later and get everything you've missed up to that point.