toblix

Curiosity – What's Inside the Cube?

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This is out today for iOS, and apparently tomorrow for Android. I've picked away like a million little bricks, and bought and used a couple of disappointing firecrackers. I'd like to know how they go about synchronising state between players – whenever I open the game there are more nice, almost organic looking scratches, but when I zoom in suddenly everything's removed in 16x16 squares – even my own stuff.

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there can be only one!!!

ccccccooooooiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiinnnnnnssssssssssss

error accessing server

the cube has disappeared and im left with a blank white screen and some seriously ugly icons

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Are you suggesting that the secret in the middle of the cube is the where abouts of Madeleine McCann? That's some seriously dark humor

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I feel that, since the only thing with this game is the massively multiplayer write-once manipulation of 1 bit-per-pixel bitmap, they should at least make that part great work. The various zoom-levels are really inconsistent, and if I zoom all the way in, everything's just big green blocks, and not whatever's actually there. I can start chipping away at this, and I get money and everything, and after a long while, suddenly it gets updated and everything changes. So the feeling of actually playing along with others is not really there, which I though was the whole point. I'm guessing it's performance problems, since they said something about the amount of players being SURPRISINGLY HIGH!

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Yeah, I'm getting constant server errors and freezes. Facebook login doesn't work at all. I finally managed to open up the shop page, then couldn't get back to the cube

Maybe it's ententionally buggy, that's also part of the experiment

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Even they thought nobody would actually want to just scratch some goddamn cube.

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Are you suggesting that the secret in the middle of the cube is the where abouts of Madeleine McCann? That's some seriously dark humor

I am not. Someone did.

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It's perfect that this is a Peter Molyneux thing. ONLY HE would say "What's at the centre of the cube is a life-changing secret", and only Peter Molyneux would get me curious of what the hell he's actually put in there.

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If we assume that the life-changing aspect of the equation is serious, the only thing I can think of that would truly change a person's life is either a big monetary reward or soft power in the form of access to a network to move upwards in social strata.

But since this is Peter Molyneux it's probably a voucher for ten Christmases he'll spend at your house having diner with your family. Certainly life altering!

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GiantBomb said "What if it's just 'There is a million dollars under this tree, here are the directions.'"

The best part is of course that only one person gets to see what's in the cube. So I'd GUESS they wouldn't just tweet it instantly. If I got to the centre of the cube I don't even know what I would do with that information. Obviously game sites would be poking you about it and you'd get a giant flood of messages. I can't wait for the headline "THIS MAN KNOWS WHAT'S IN THE CUBE."

And then what if he or she just never tells anyone?

You have to give P.Molyneux props, I've come around, this is a pretty fantastic game idea.

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If they had managed to make this real-time, and you could pan around this huge cube watching tens of thousands of people chipping away, some systematically clearing out neat columns, some following weird patterns, some writing messages, etc., it would be incredible. Currently it's synchronising state with minutes delay, if at all, which only emphasises the pointlessness.

Apparently they're working on some fixes that will primarily focus on the coins, which seems weird to me. My guess is people's interest and activity will die down from the initial release burst and level out until people start closing in on the core, at which point news sites will mention it and players will come rushing by the thousands, flooding the servers and leading to the most chaotic, unstable endgame the world will ever see.

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If they had managed to make this real-time, and you could pan around this huge cube watching tens of thousands of people chipping away, some systematically clearing out neat columns, some following weird patterns, some writing messages, etc., it would be incredible. Currently it's synchronising state with minutes delay, if at all, which only emphasises the pointlessness.

Yeah, this. That would've been pretty spectacular to witness, but this is not. Implementing that would probably be quite server-intensive, though.. (I imagine, having no experience with server magic at all)

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I suspect if things are going too slowly they have the ability to make the layers beneath made out of gigantic blocks or something. It's going to literally take forever if it's comprised of dozens of layers this size.

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The only way this is successful (for me) is if the secret is taken to the winners grave.

E: Alternate option; Skynet.

molyneux.jpg

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