As in other derivatives three side strategy works pretty well. In this game that translates to awed key combination with top being accumulation direction.
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!
Exactly, the creators think it's the next Flappy bird. It's not. Besides, I just spent a minute bashing the keys randomly and got a score of 2,000. Dumb.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
111 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 151 ms ] threadThe 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.)
http://thoughtfulplay.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/a-short-game-...
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.
(1 + 2 + 4 + 8) + (16 + 32 + 64 + 128) + (256 + 512 + 1024 + 2048) + (4096 + 8192)
I just played til I got a 2048 in a corner. It wasn't fun.
For example:
after 2 seconds: [0, 1, 0, 0]* => [0.1, 0.8, 0.1, 0]
after 4 seconds: [0, 1, 0, 0] => [0.15, 0.6, 0.15, 0.05]
after 8 seconds: [0, 1, 0, 0] => [0.25, 0.25, 0.25, 0.25]
* Probability of [left, up, right, down] move.
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.
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)
But you are effectively changing the input method from "typing" to "gaming", so it makes sense to have to toggle some switch somewhere.
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.
Writing the scripts is ugly, but effective and not too tough
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.
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.
Why oh why?
http://icpc.baylor.edu/community/icpc-challenge-champions
https://www.quora.com/Who-Is-Was-X/Who-is-Rudradev-Basak
http://blog.codechef.com/2011/02/01/programmer-of-the-month-...
[0]: http://i.imgur.com/F0t5T21.png
In reality my moves take more than a second, and I know I don't make perfect moves. So, over 4.5 hours.
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.
Author should add this 4.5 hour estimate as a nice big warning message.
I'm done. I have banished myself from these kinds of games.
I sure do like the hex nature of this version though.
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.
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.