Programmers of the world: please stop with the 2048 clones. We have jobs to do. Partners to attend to. Friends to acknowledge. Pets to feed. Plants to water. Have some mercy already!
Threes! has such great personality. It's so much more than 2048, and it's well worth the buck or so it costs. I hope it's had an uptick since the 2048 craze.
The chain roughly goes: Threes! was released in February. A near-clone called 1024! came out on iOS at the start of March. 2048 acknowledges the debt to 1024!, and the first commits to the git repository were in the first week of March.
Once the source code was available, tiny variations became much easier to fork, and we got a cambrian explosion mostly descending from 2048. (There was another 2048 as a parallel development, with significantly different visual style. Not sure where it falls in the timeline.)
Can people who use non-qwerty keyboard tell me if they have any convenient tricks for playing those html games that almost never let you rebind keys? Having to switch mapping is so inconvenient...
If web gaming becomes a thing I think people should start thinking about a standard way to let people rebind their keys, through the browser or some common library.
I'm French. I can tell programming is downright painful in Azerty, so I end up buying Qwerty computers and use the "switch to International US" shortcut whenever I need to write French. On that one, quotes and double quotes become accents and tails on letters. You can even put an accent on "l".
I'm German. Same thing, I buy US layout keyboards (often paying a premium for import, boo). I long ago retrained myself to the US layout because for programming and system administration localized layouts are hell (the / is on Shift-7 and the parens are offset by one, useful stuff like semicolons has been pushed outwards by useless Umlauts).
On the rare occasion I still write in German, I use OS X' fantastic compose key feature: ⌥u makes two dots and any following key is then converted to an Umlaut, so ⌥u + u = ü, ⌥u + A = Ä.
If you're playing on a windows machine, Autohotkey is probably the easiest solution. You can do key remapping based on the window that's open with #IfWinActive / #IfWinExist.
Writing the scripts is ugly, but effective and not too tough
I have to second AHK. Cube World was unplayable for me until I discovered it.
I've yet to find a reasonably good Linux clone of AHK, but then, most Linux games I've encountered tend to be quite configurable. Starbound comes to mind as problematic, but I haven't touched it in a few months.
Try using xbindkeys and xdotool together. xbindkeys uses guile as an extension language, with guile functions bound to keyboard shortcuts to invoke xdotool to simulate inputs. It works well enough that I get annoyed every time I have to deal with AHK's weird scripting language.
It's still annoying to need to change the entire input method, and then remember that it's different for that window (or globally, depending on particulars of your system).
In any case, QWERTY is not the default worldwide. The letters 'a', 'w', 'e', 'd', 'z', and 'x' have no special semantic significance for this game, they're chosen for their relative positions in a particular keyboard layout.
The actual game actions of 'shift upper left', 'shift upper right', and so on, should be able to be associated with any particular input - including other keys, or relevant swipe gestures on mobile.
I agree with OP - there should be a standardized way of doing this, so that game authors don't have to re-invent keybindings for every new game. (or, as they're wont to do, fail to re-invent keybindings)
I agree entirely. I attribute the lack of scancode usage in keybindings to the laziness and depravity of the young generation ;)
Actually, Javascript is a little weird with regard to scancodes. Try playing with http://javascript.info/tutorial/keyboard-events in different keyboard layouts - you'll notice that there's no code that's consistent across different layouts.
I think you have to explicitly enable that. Or it isn't enabled for me, perhaps because I installed Mavericks as an update rather than a full installation? I didn't even notice it was an option until I was adding a 3rd layout the other day.
Feels like I'm playing 2048 drunk. Every move requires a little thought to make sure I'm moving in the right direction. And having two extra sides on the shape is messing with my eyes.
After playing this for what feels like an hour (and what may have actually been an hour) I'm suddenly noticing square edges a lot more in my surroundings.
holy crap! I just played for two hours ( got to 2048 ) and when i was done everything (win7) looked very square, kind of small and ... old-fashioned? holy crap. It got back to normal after about five minutes or so...
I had that too! Switching back to my IDE I was surprised at how "boxy" my code suddenly looked. It's a really weird psychological phenomenon. I wish I knew why it was happening.
Is my math correct? If we simplify and say we make 1 move per second, the game only drops 1 tokens, and we always make a perfect move...this will take 4.5 hours (16384/60/60) to complete?
In reality my moves take more than a second, and I know I don't make perfect moves. So, over 4.5 hours.
1) if you win the game, the game end time doesn't really depend on how 'good' your moves are - it comes a bit after you've gathered 16348+ total value on the board.
2) The fact that the game doesn't drop only 1-tokens means that the time is shorter - again, since the 'total' accumulates faster.
That being said, the game is much, much longer than the previous ones - 2048->16384 alone increases the time by 8, and starting with ones instead of twos doubles it again.
just curious what your strategy is- i think i found a way to fill the bottom row with the largest number and keep funneling numbers down there... I think I reached 1024 on another computer. not sure if I should go all the way tonight.
I sure do like the hex nature of this version though.
I already had the experience of text appearing tiny after staring at the old grid version for another long playthrough. Now I have that, plus everything seeming overly blocky and stout, even things in the room around me. It's almost like a visual equivalent of getting tingling or pins and needles after not using a limb. I guess it's just another fun reminder that what we see is not the raw data from our retinal cells, but the adaptive interpretation that our visual cortex cobbles together.
This had the craziest effect on my vision, anyone else seeing everything else extremely square after playing it? I mean the borders of windows, the headers of sites etc. Everything was sooo round before.
Yeah going into these comments really gave me an intense feeling of looking at perfect rectangles. Not really that describable but a very weird effect of this game.
Swiping would work great. For desktop users, how about control centered around the center hexagon, such that clicking one of its adjacent hexagons results in a shift in that direction?
This does have swipe capability, as far as I can tell. I can swipe in all six directions on my phone. However, it still sucks to play, because the layout is totally messed up in portrait mode, and the page is too zoomed in to see the whole board in landscape.
Moreover you have a game field of 19 positions and require 14 of them to be filled in order allowing simple combination to 16384. In a game with 6 degrees of freedom this might be challenging.
There's a bug that causes an inconsistency with the displayed dumber on a disc and the internal value. (interestingly the colour of the disc is appropriate to the internal value).
I think it is happening when a merge happens when it shouldn't. like 1.141 --> causes ..24X where X has the displayed number 1 but the colour and behaviour of a 2.
I'm not positive on that but it feels like something along those lines.
[edit] I just got a disc which had the number was 4 in the top half and 2 in the lower. Moving the mouse off the screen and back again fixed it. I'm now figuring it's the browser rendering that's glitching rather than game logic.
2. If you chose to make a harmful product as a programming exercise, publishing it is a bad idea.
3. If you find someone else has published a harmful product, posting a link to a forum is a bad idea.
4. If you find someone else has posted a link to a harmful product, upvoting it is a bad idea.
Life is complicated. There is no simple formula that will tell you the right thing to do in the general case. And sometimes even when we know which is which, we end up doing the wrong thing because the right thing would be harder.
But when we know which is which, and the right thing is easy? Then, at least, we should be able to stop doing the wrong thing.
For better or worse, I have no authority to enforce anything here; what I'm doing is making suggestions. That said, forums whose content consists only or primarily of junk or links thereto, I simply refrain from visiting. The percentage of quality content on HN, on the other hand, is generally high, which is why I read this forum, and why I think it worthwhile to make suggestions aimed at improving it or at least trying to stop it deteriorating.
Precisely. If X exploits security vulnerabilities in your motivation system so that consuming X causes you to desire more X at a cost to everything else in your life, what difference does it make whether the medium is chemistry or graphics? It's the result that counts.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU Have you seen this TED talk about porn addiction and how it has similar effects like some sort of hard drug addiction on the brain. Everything uses the same pipeline.
People seem to be thinking hard about this game.. but if you're spending 1+ second/move it'll definitely take forever.
Think about it like shaking a jar of pebbles, where the heavier ones fall to the bottom.
Now simulate this by press Z->A & X->D back and forth
You can get a high score pretty quick. And if you see a situation where a low number is stuck at the bottom, make specific moves to get at that one, then go back to shaking the jar!
As in other derivatives three side strategy works pretty well. In this game that translates to awed key combination with top being accumulation direction.
Seems much easier. I've never gotten past 2048 on the square versions, but I'm already up to 4096 on my first game which isn't even done yet. I think having two forward angles and five rows to work with makes a huge difference in keeping things organized.
Hm, this doesn’t seem to load for me on Firefox 28.0 – I just see the brown-ish circles, but nothing is filled in. Curiously, in another profile, everything is fine.
I’m new to Firefox, any ideas on how to debug this? Disabling add-ons didn’t help and I’d rather not scratch my entire profile.
Found the issue: Apparently, Firefox disables web storage if cookies are set to ‘ask me every time’, which then causes a ‘SecurityError: The operation is insecure.‘ error in the console. Curiously, there was no pop-up or somesuch asking me to accept a cookie from the domain.
I was really surprised that this control system is very intuitive, with the keys forming a hexagon, I didn't have to look down at the keyboard or do any sort of translation of what I wanted into the keys to press.
Surprisingly, I'm finding this far easier and more absorbing than the square version. That means something, but I'm not sure what apart from my preference for all things hexagonal...
There are more possible moves, and so I think more "outs" for a long time in the beginning of the game. I think the game has a more gradual difficulty curve.
When the board is empty, you'll start and gain 1, 2, 4, 8, etc. pieces. You can often make pieces to combine with those easily, since you can move in any direction and the board is relatively empty.
Eventually, over time, larger pieces build up. 64, 128, 256, etc. You can't make such large numbers easily, and they'll start to be cluttered around and in between other numbers. When the board becomes congested, and when there are many different numbers in play, the challenge ramps up.
A lot easier just using a touch screen but its starting to feel tedious. Also reading the comments about the game taking 4 hrs... maybe I'll just quit before I waste too much time.
