Message #1295

From: Andrey <andreyastrelin@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [MC4D] 8Colors solved
Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2010 08:19:31 -0000

Melinda,
Thank you very much for your words. Yes, it’s difficult to find something familiar in this H3 world, so for 8C I took the most simple way: I worked only in contiguous-cubies mode, and most twists were of one face and of "opposite" faces - only around 2C stickers adjacent to the first face. There was easy to build 6-twists macro for 3-loop of 3C, 14-twists for the pair of 4C transpositions (like 3^3 (FRF’R’)^3 operation) and 30-twists for rotation of two 4Cs (hmm… it could be 14-twist? need to check). Everything went smoothly and I was very surprised when twist counter showed 1400 twists, then 2300, 3300…

To create puzzle that I can’t solve? I think it’s easy. You see, even simplest 4D douprizms are too hard for me now :) So something deep-cut and 4D easily may be out of my reach…

BTW, next game will probably be 5D Pacman - just for fun and to take a rest of puzzles :) I think that I see good interface for it.

Yes, some stickers are not animated. It happens if there is no 2C sticker connected to the moving face. Unfortunately, mathematics in the geometry part is not as elegant as I hoped, so some internal navigation in data structures is almost impossible witout risk of serious bugs in the code.

As for the wish list:

• I’m not going to implement stereo view in the nearest future: screen is already too small for this puzzle.
  
• Slider with the computed area? May be, I’ll add one or two layers, but number of stickers increases exponentionally with the radius of the area. And recalculation of geometry will be slow and probably you’ll loose position of camera during it. So it will be operation that you want to do once in a game. May be, it’s better to put it in the menu.
  
• sticker highlighting is implemented. It is shift-click or shift-right-click. One of them highlights a piece and a place for it, and another highlights a piese that should go there (like in 120Cell program).

I’ll add to the list such feature as the checkbox "reverse twist direction" (very useful when you work in contiguous-cubies mode) and something that helps to see 3C cubies that are hidden below 4C. May be it will be mask "show/hide stickers of particular type" or just a flag/bar "shrink corners".

Andrey