Opus Magnum: Just what the autism ordered

I don't know, this was my first pass at Curious Lipstick and I'm sure it could be made faster. For Unstable Compound there's the obvious bottleneck but maybe it could be sped up if you just say fuck the area and use multiple special bond pads instead of spinning on a single one.

Yeah, even watching this now it's true that you're confined to a single disposal glyph, but there's nothing to stop you from doubling up on the mors/vitae glyphs and having two solutions running in parallel to speed things up

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Love it when a puzzle game is turing complete

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end my suffering

I'm surprisied the Infinifactory/Shenzhen guy hasn't jumped on this game.

This one?

You can optimise that so much better because the iron and tin components should take the sameish amount of time to pump out.
Also you open and close the 6 armed grabbers every time they rotate one step for no reason.

Seeing other people's solutions makes me feel retarded since a lot of the time mine aren't as efficient.

Got a higher quality version?

I can't stand it. I can't stand the feeling of partial victory. Only absolutely crushing something feels remotely satisfying. I need more autism to make progress in this game, or maybe less I don't know.
I enjoy it, but I'm just not smart enough to all-kill the puzzles and too stubborn to just move on to the next one.
FUCK

That's really not possible as the puzzles get more involved. Low-cycle solutions are necessarily high-cost and high-area while low-area solutions are necessarily high-cycle, etc.

You'll notice the trailer said "Make it smaller OR make it faster", they're aware that the histogram metrics are inversely related

Welcome to (al)chemical engineering

I suppose I can live with that.
Efficiency is the most fun followed by smallness, so I'll go with those as best as I can and fuck expense to hell.

It smells a lot like hell.

Just ignore one of them. In fact, you should learn to take a perverse pleasure in seeing one of the measures skyrocket so you can have a tiny gain in another.

Shit, I never could figure out how to save that extra tile on Rocket Propellant

I had a zsimilar solution

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Why is yours 100G? The extra piston arm should only bring it up to 80.
Did the costs get rebalanced in a patch?

Yeah, the piston arms used to cost more. Should have been 40G apiece for the pistons, and then the glyph of bonding and calcification covered the other 20

I'm just hunting for the pretty. Symmetries, rotationals, etc. Graphs can't measure that.

Okay, now that I know I should only focus on min/maxing one or two of the stats, I'm having fun again.
Minimum cycles confirmed for most fun, but I also respect you aesthetic and infernal contraption types.

The main reason you should only focus on one at a time is because the game saves your high score for each category individually, so you don't have to worry about your min-area score going away when you go for the min-cycles solution (although lowest cost and lowest area are often the same solution).

Is my dream of spinning wheel arms spinning spinning wheel arms really too much to ask?

I suppose that's acceptable. I just like the idea of creating the "perfect" machine for each puzzle.

It's never not going to bother me, but I can live with this.

I played a bit of this Opus Magnum while it was in early access, then I got interested in the other games by the same developer, mainly Infinifactory.
These are possibly some of the best puzzle games I've played, and I'm not even a fan of the genre to begin with, I just love how creativity and ingenuity are encouraged to solve problems your own way. That's one of the most important aspects to me in vidya.

I know that feel. Trying to play SpaceChem while going for as few crutch Syncs as possible results in some messy solutions, especially when probability input get mixed in.

I couldn't handle SpaceChem. It was fun for a while, and then I just suddenly imploded or something. No idea what happened.

Have you played Factorio? It will devour your life.

psa: playing this while extremely tired is a terrible idea

Not the best, but I at least somewhat beat the area average.

I can already see some ways to optimize the commands a little, but I enjoy watching it nonetheless.

So is it a Spacechem sequel? The combining and rotating just screams Spacechem no matter how you cook it. How's the music? That's what kept me going in Spacechem.

I still haven't finished Spacechem because it's too hard

How do I git gud at optimizing stuff in games? I feel that I don't even know what kind of thinking is required and what contributes into a better solution.

Says it in the OP, it's a successor to The Codex of Alchemical Engineering. There was an expansion to the Codex called Magnum Opus, that's where the title comes from.

It's Matthew S. Burns, the same guy who did the Shenzhen and Infinifactory soundtracks, so it's good. I can put it up on the vola

I think that one of the reasons Opus Magnum is getting such a positive reception in the press, it's easier. I think this is the most attention a Zachtronics game has received since SpaceChem

"How can this be made faster"

Not trying to be flippant or anything but seriously just watch out for any awkward gaps or pauses in the gifs posted in the thread and imagine how they could be removed

That roulette wheel sets me off every time. Hella ballzy.

The perpetual spinning is a nice aesthetic, which is why I did it, but I think I prefer this one . It's so fast it doesn't even have time to spin all the way back around.

I bought Infinifactory some time back, but surprisingly didn't really like it at all. It probably had a lot to do with the way you had to move around in the world, activating you jetpack with double tap jump, having inertia, being able to fall to your death etc.
I loved SpaceChem (and I consider having beaten the story a significant achievement) and this looks more up my alley in that sense.

I'm trying to play Spacechem actually.

I think Infinifactory is really solid outside of that one missile defense puzzle. From different interviews Zach's given I think it's his favorite of the major releases. Couldn't relate since TIS-100 is my personal favorite.

Oh, well that's different to OM. I wouldn't recommend sitting there and continually optimizing a solution to a single puzzle if you want to stay motivated to finish the main campaign. Optimization is something you'll naturally learn as the puzzles go on, since you'll have to get good at it to get the solutions to fit at all. I'd say the optimization casual filter is the 7th planet's defense mission, "Don't Fear the Reaper".

It's been a couple years since I played SpaceChem but two optimization tricks you should be aware of are doubling up on your instructions by overlapping the lines, and alternating instructions between the blue and red waldos instead of delegating all of the work to a single one. The webm is soundless intentionally because I don't know if anyone would have wanted to hear a snippet of commentary over it anyway

Great! Now he can get back to work on TIS-100 3!

If you think that's bad, try making top tier in power efficiency in Shenzhen.

I kinda agree with your sentiment, dubdubs. As much as I like Zachtronics games, his open-ended programming-based puzzle game style gets samey. I'd really like to see his take on a different genre sometime. He doesn't even need to go that far outside his comfort zone; I think he could do a physics-based puzzle game like Poly Bridge or Besiege really well.

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Are you sure?

Fuck, I totally forgot that existed. Is it that bad? I never tried it.

It's not like it's offensively awful but it's not even close to the quality of his other games. I remember Zach said that he was surprised that TIS-100 sold better than Ironclad Tactics, so it seems like they were pretty confident in the product, for some reason. If it's going to result in some subpar product just for the sake of branching out I'd prefer they just stick to what they know.

I haven't played it myself but if you're looking for a slightly different kind of game you might try The Bureau of Steam Engineering. I don't know why Zach doesn't just pull an Edmund McMillen and release an anthology of his old flash games for $3. I mean they're still free to this day, but it's not like that stopped Ed

>Accidentally figure out a solution that has

Am I the only one to have enjoyed it? It had lovely steampunk combat boilers and the whole half real-time half-turn-based gameplay premise was interesting. I feel like it would have fared extremely well if it was to come out after Heartstone kicked off the interest in trading card games but before the market got overfilled with them. Anyways give it a go if you want a deck building game demanding quick thinking.

so i guess it doesnt have any collision with the arms?

Arms don't collide, but anything they're holding collide and their nodes collide.

There's just something really satisfying about this kind of thing. Are there any games of this type that are more about mechanical engineering than chemistry or alchemy? I dig the rhythmic pistons and whatnot.

You'd probably like Infinifactory, maybe SpaceChem too.

Infinifactory more, since it has that clean assembly line appeal. Doesn't have the satisfying sound effects OM does, though.

I want to blame this on lack of sleep, but I just couldn't see a faster way to do this beyond marginal improvements.
Is there any way to blast the center out of the wheel more quickly so I can run some stuff in parallel instead of one after the other like this?

Infinifactory looks okay, but it kind of just seems like the 3D nature of it would make it needlessly cumbersome to play. It's basically just SpaceChem/OpusMagnum with a z-layer and a different setting, isn't it?
What I wouldn't give for those sorts of mechanisms to be built into Space Engineers, though.

Sleep on it, and if you can't figure it out, I'll tell you tomorrow.
Yes, and some more physics-y things (e.g. if there's nothing supporting a block it'll fall down, but it will fall straight down without accelerating or rotating).

You'd be surprised, I found that flying around and then zooming in to fine-tune the blocks in close quarters was very satisfying, especially since the endgame puzzles are very large and involved productions. To me the distinguishing characteristic of Infinifactory was that inputs are automatically pumped out at a set rate instead of needing to be prompted, it makes it so that your ratios are really important. It does have a significantly higher price point than his other games, though, so it's understandable to pirate it or something before buying it.

Obviously, you are making it way too hard on yourself you goofball

You're dramatically overthinking it.
My solution isn't great (and is going for cost while you want speed) but what you've done wrong is the same either way.

I think I'm on the right track here now. I had no idea you could transmute things that were bonded, and that changes everything.

I'll look at that once I've done a few more optimization passes to get this working as well as I can. Fingers crossed that I'm not still missing some major concept here.

Thanks for the push, anons.

You've already got what my spoiler was meant to show.

After staring at it moving for a while, I'm pretty sure that's as good as I can get it - aiming for size anyway.

I'm glad that's the only place I went wrong. I don't even know why I was thinking I couldn't transmute bonded metals, considering I've transmuted bonded atoms to salt plenty of times already.

Strike that, it can still shrink.

The minimum cost solution to this thing evaded me for so long. It just felt too strange to have the entire chain waving around like that.

Is this the latest patch? I had thought they made it so that you couldn't rotate chain solutions weeks ago, but then they made some other adjustment to chain solutions I haven't tried yet.

The torrent says it's v.28.10.2017 so if they made that patch "weeks ago" then I probably don't have those changes.

Yeah, I just got to the first hard level (Last level of Sernimar VII where you need to make Formaldehyde with 2 reactors and 3 sources) and I've been stuck for over an hour

Get used to it. Those are the best parts of the campaign.

Bought the game since I'd been meaning to do so anyway, and I can confirm that that solution still works.

One of my goals in my Chips Challenge clone is to make it turing complete (agdg). I know its needed to build a machine, but I cant fathom a game where such states are impossible.

Also how you could test a given state based on a particular arrangement

cough

He's got you on area, though, which is what he seems to be going for. You could save a few cycles yourself by manually resetting instead of using the reset command, anyway, the wheel doesn't have to rotate back around like that.

True. I wanted to save on area by excluding the track for the long arm, but a collision occurs.

10 less cycles and 4 less area for only 5 more gold, a straight upgrade in every respect.
deleted old because im retarded and didnt include gif… at least it was saged.

I hate the polymers.

Well done.

They do get pretty repetitive, but I think Refined Bronze might be the best puzzle in the game.

FUGG :DD

This game has reawakened my inner dorf

boy what i tell you bout that alchemy

All I can see is you tipping your metallurgical hat.

someone help i think im an retard

Here you go user.

That's cool but I think you can do a little better

Very nice. My warming tonic is probably garbage but here.

Just tried it out and it seems like it's marginally faster to not have to contend with that additional fire atom. The top percentile is 28 though, so you'd probably need all three reagents to get that

Indeed. I just finished Proof of Completeness btw.

jesus christ you're gonna go bankrupt

This isn't fun and makes me feel stupid.

Shitposting aside, you should try it, you might like it and it's probably the easiest of the Zachtronics puzzle games.

I really, really liked that puzzle.

I should probably be a little more frugal since he's lost his financial backing at that point

This game's fun

Sure looks like it

High area, but pretty good cost and cycles

fug, I just realized there was an extra bit of idle time near the end, and I got it down to 60 cycles

I finished SpaceChem (+DLC) and Infinifactory. I gave up on TIS-100 because it got ridiculously hard for me in the second campaign and I just wasn't enjoying it that much. Now the question is: Opus Magnum or Shenzen I/O?

Depends on what it is that you didn't like about TIS-100, besides the difficulty. Shenzhen I/O may be a direct sequel but the minimalist presentation is gone, and so are most of the constraints on the mechanics, there's a lot more freedom when it comes to operands and registers and node placements. It's also a good choice if you enjoyed the physical manual for TIS-100, since that's even more relevant to Shenzhen. It still gets pretty tough towards the end of the main campaign (not quite to the level of the TIS-NET) and I'm told Avalon City is even harder.

Opus Magnum as you can clearly see from the thread carries a lot of the benefits of SpaceChem and Infinifactory, but I can say personally I was pretty disappointed on my first playthrough that it never even approached the challenge of SpaceChem. It wasn't until I started going back to optimize puzzles and share solutions that I really started enjoying myself.

i did it
i am the most frugal
my autism hurts

I am an frugal.

wew lad

Just started, this is some fun shit. Can anyone see a way to make this cheaper without adding to the area? I love these size/cost solutions but I can't get this one quite right.

I can't see any way to make it cheaper without adding to the area. The only way you could cut costs would be to swap the piston arm for a fixed-length arm, but then you'd need to make the arm 2 tiles long and add a track to push the arm up and down, or do the entire thing with just a single 1-length arm and rotate the finished product to fit. Either of those would increase the area significantly.

I don't see a way either. You can bring the cycles down quite a bit, but I don't think it's possible to decrease the cost while keeping it minimum-area.

Yeah, you could reduce your cycle count and keep the same configuration by doing it like this instead.

It used to be that a fixed-length arm plus two track tiles were 10G cheaper than using a piston arm, but they changed it so that the costs were equivalent, which is a shame.

My minimum area solution only beats your cycle count by a little, but I think it feels a little more elegant as well.

I feel there's a whole lot of twists and turns I could avoid or do more optimally. I think I'll optimize this later.

It does look very nice, I like the last salt move.

1) Your configuration looks nice but spinning those three-atom chains around still counts against your area
2) Why don't you just rotate the product tile instead of rotating your final molecule?

Oh ignore me, I didn't notice that you were one bond short

dude what

I guess I'll go with Opus Magnum first then. Anyone got a magnet link for the linux version?

It looks kind of neat swinging everything around like that, but it definitely has room for improvement.

Anyone know where I can find or are willing to share Shenzhen for Linux? I just noticed it's on sale on GOG and intend to buy it but I also noticed it requires OpenGL3 which my laptop doesn't support. I've had some other games with OGL3 listed as a requirement work without a hitch but I'd rather make sure it works first. As I assume if I buy it while being aware my computer doesn't meet the requirements I won't be able to get a refund with the assurance program thing if it doesn't work.

In hindsight it was an all around bad solution. I rotated the (not yet) finished molecule because it needed one more bond.

It was clear that some kind of weaving solution was the best one (in terms of cost at least) when some thought was put into it.

Not as good as other solutions here but it's not bad.

Also a lead separation I just did. Apparently they changed the name and products of the puzzle.

Yeah, I don't really like the new version, bottlenecking all of the Lead outputs to that single panel is a pain.

See, that twirl at the end looks great

I only just remembered it but in Shenzhen there was a way to access legacy versions of puzzles through the menu, by entering a code. I know they patched OM to include that option but I haven't been keeping up with what the codes are supposed to be, I guess I should check the patch notes.