eot

way back when

I'm mostly curious if it's intended to teach you something new. As demonstrated by some posters here, there's seemingly at least one way of thinking about these puzzles that 1) will let you complete all of them 2) will not leave you confused by the puzzle in question. There is also at least one other (simpler) way of thinking about them that will let you solve every other puzzle, but not this one. The other option is that Blow didn't intend for you to have to re-evaluate the rules when faced with this particlar puzzle. Considering how this game guides your self teaching it would be strange to me if a puzzle teaches you something that is never used again. That is not consistent with my sense of how the game is designed. On the other hand, the second option seems like a big oversight for a game where every detail seems intentional. My gut feeling is that it is an oversight though.

@ iax

Twig was right about the rule

I didn't notice what you said about it being tilted. You have a point there. Dammit! I know which puzzle to test it on though.

I'm not sure what you think is happening, but I'll give you my take on it:

omg

I didn't realise his new game was even out. Haven't heard anyone talk about it.

I finally watched Fury Road and didn't quite get what all the fuss was about. I rarely watch action movies nowadays though so I suppose I don't have much to compare it to.

Awesome. Real maps are one of my favourite things in games.

Minor thing, but does anyone know if you can disable those BioShock-esque objective pop-ups?

Do they matter for the endings? Because I don't enjoy hunting them.

Are you excited about the prospect of taking that other job? You say it's a good career move but that doesn't mean it's the right move for you. It depends on how much you value your career I suppose. Personally I would value work/life balance and vacation time over career opportunities, to a point anyway. To be honest you just have to go with your gut. I'm resistant to change too, sometimes it's good to push yourself out of your comfort zone, but sometimes it's completely awful too, so don't do it because it's "right" objectively somehow.

I'm disappointed that thing broke so easily. They should make a better one that's more like a black box.

Heh, I haven't done that area (I think), and I didn't notice myself getting spoiled. I guess I'm lucky! edit: just did the monastery, did not like it very much

Oh, you have drag. Well that explains what I was wondering about. I'm still curious why the original code behaves the way it does though.

Apparently this works, but I think it's weird that you're constantly adding that 'perpendicular' vector. I mean, if you're in the correct orbit that vector will be parallel to your velocity, so it will move you off your orbit, at which point towardsVector gets applied again. A proper orbit should be the opposite, you apply only the downward force in steady state. Maybe I'm misunderstanding what it's doing.

Just be aware that they don't all give steam keys.

I'm in the place where you can close the blinds Also, those +1s can be real finicky.

I was going to buy an XCOM key from humble, but remembered 10 minutes too late as I always do. The new bundle is quite good though, you get Grow Home and Rayman Origins in the $1 tier!

I'm not sure if I can help but I'll give it a shot. First of all, going through your code snippet it's not clear at all how that is supposed to get you into an orbit. You say yourself that you don't know why it works, that's a bad starting point! We can spend some time here concluding why it doesn't work the way you'd expect (which can be instructive), but I think you'll have to re-write it from scratch regardless. You're not doing that. You're appling force downward, and to the side. You could try simply removing the cross product and using orbitDirection instead (not sure if that would work tbh, but you can try it). Okay, so in steady state your spaceships end up in the same orbital plane. Without going through the details I'm immediately going to posit that your cross product tends towards zero, because that is the only part where a lateral force enters. Gimbal lock comes from using rotation matrices, not simple vector addition/multiplication. I would suggest making a graph in your program and plotting the magnitude of the vectors in real time, that would help you with debugging. Now, actually looking at your code it's not clear how this cross product would actually become zero, especially since you normalize it (it would have to be indentically zero then). What could be happening instead is that there's something funky going on with the AddForce method. I haven't used Unity's rigid body simulation myself, but I looked up the command and it has a second argument that I think has a default value of ForceMode.Force which according to this means the force is applied continuously. You know Unity better than I so maybe you're calling it right (also note though that gravity is an acceleration, not a force, so you actually want use a second argument that ignores the mass of your object when appling gravity). Also, when you calculate nextOrbitPt the first time, don't you want to take the timestep into account? I don't actually believe either of these two explanations, so maybe the answer is in the code you attached (haven't had time to look at that yet). I'm a bit curious to figure this out myself though because it doesn't make sense based on the first code snippet.

Those narrated 'mission briefings' were great. They still hold up too (I'll post one below). It's actually one of my favourite narratives in any game. I can listen to the guy who reads them forever. Considering how much of an unsolved issue narrative in games is I'm always a little amazed how something so simple can work so well, it's all down to execution I suppose. Just listen to this guy:

I'm not as far as you all, only 231+9. Sort of had the "+" thing spoiled for me on accident, that would've been a good "aha" moment otherwise. Still not loving the actual puzzle mechanic though. Most puzzles tend to fall into one of these categories: 1) simple enough that you can solve it more or less right away 2) slightly harder, but you can try tracing something, see what works and then adjust 3) puzzles where you need to stop, and try to define some constraints on all possible solutions then think through those 4) similar to 3) but complex enough that you feel like you'd solve it more easily by breaking out some paper 5) solution coded in the environment For me, the puzzles that fall into 3) are the ones I enjoy. 1) and 2) are fine but they aren't that satisfying. 5) is down to taste I guess, I don't super enjoy them. The ones in 4) tend to annoy me more, because so far I've been stubborn enough not to draw/visualise anything, but when I solve them I rarely get a good "aha" feeling. I think that comes from the process of solving them not being as enjoyable, and for me that goes back to the visualisation. The process of visualising the problem is key in all puzzle games I would say, but the difference is that in most other ones (ones I like anyway) the process of visualising them is intrinsic to solving them. For example, in Portal you act out the solution every time you attempt to solve a puzzle, maybe you go through a portal, realise you need more height, then start looking for a way to get more speed. It helps you break down the puzzle into individual steps (that is the actual act of solving puzzles in those games, break it down into small steps then solve each step). In The Witness though, if you're doing for example a tetris puzzle, the game doesn't visualise anything for you. In some cases it will flash a thing to indicate what's wrong, but that's more to teach you the rules than it is an actual aid in hard puzzles. To me it feels like the equivalent in Portal would be if you could see the entire room, but you had to describe the entire solution (where to put each portal) without acting it out, and if you got the wrong solution you'd simply get an error. Sure, I bet we could solve puzzles in Portal that way too, but doing it all in my head isn't more satisfying to me, it just feels ineffcient because you can only visualise so much. Doing it all in my head doesn't increase my understanding of the puzzle or its solution, if anything it's the opposite. If the answer is to make some cardboard cutouts, or open up GIMP then I'd rather just the puzzles be presented differently.

Oh duh :[