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corona_wind

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Posts posted by corona_wind

  1. I have discovered how to unseat a fidget spinner:  Magnetic flux.  If it can't touch you, it can't throw you off course...  And with that out of the equation any good sized bot is four times stronger than it.

    dQFbbz0.gif

    Cheesed an entire galaxy of two and three star arenas with it.

    • Like 2
  2. All it is is a direction indicator, four engines, and some tanks.  The placement of the engines is very finicky, closer to the center and it moves faster but stalls at a nudge, too far out and it spins really fast but does more spinning than racing.

    Screen%20Shot%202019-03-31%20at%203.15.1

    • Like 1
  3. The outer rotors turn more than the inner one because the inner rotor is slower.  This lets it anticipate curves instead of falling behind them, but rides the ragged edge of oversteering.  Quote or select for details.  speed 80 for inner rotor, speed 100 for outer rotors

    • Like 1
  4. You can use them to double-secure something, like a spring block connecting from the core to "open space" inside a hollow block.  You can even build chains that way, hollow blocks secured to each other with springs, not really "connected" in game logic just kept together with forces and hitboxes.

    • Like 2
  5. Passive "avoid the edge" and "hold the center" strategies dominate the ring right now, but once in a blue moon you'll find something in random rotation which seeks your drone and takes it out.  I call them active drones.

    fdxd5X4.gif

    Their strategy is to avoid the opponent until they're in a good striking position.  They're persistent, difficult to confuse, stronger than radial designs, and eat "tricky" things alive.

    Idle Behavior

    Your drone shouldn't always move towards the target unless you feel like catching facefuls of magnets, bees, and rammers.  It shouldn't sit still either, or the bees will come to you.  Your drone must keep moving even when it's not busy attacking things.

    P26rTw9l.png

    Building vertically avoids rammers!  You can win an amazing amount of matches just by not being where anyone expected.  After that, the tilted direction indicator lets it circle the ring (orbiting is just aiming for something and missing) until the forward sensors trigger other conditions.

    You can build a direction-follower you can turn off with NOR gates.  They're like inverters you can turn off;  X NOR FALSE = NOT(X) but X NOR TRUE = FALSE .  So they get wired up like ENGINE_R = DIR_L NOR TARGET.

    Attack Behavior

    When TARGET is triggered, the idle behavior turns off, letting other gates do something else.  Something like ENGINE_L = ENEMY_L AND TARGET.

    TARGET itself can be simple -- TARGET_L OR TARGET_R -- or as complicated as you want, including things like "give up and move away after 12 seconds".

    • Like 2
    • Thanks 1
  6. The uses of these things are severely hampered by their fixed internal reference points and how awkward they are to rotate physically.  If they possessed a "gimbal" to rotate the inner reference point on keypress and a way to configure that in the editor, we could do so much more.

    Look at this drone, the Axe X:

    Nimbatus_Axe-X.png

    That funny "tail" which rotates a direction indicator on a joint?  That's a gimbal built the hard way.  It has so many uses it ends up everywhere on my designs despite how awkward, wobbly, huge, and fragile it is.  I've used it for:

    • Following walls very reliably.  I completed all racetracks to the top 50 100 just following walls, until I realized 'next waypoint' was an option!  Doh.
    • Holding unbalanced drones on a straight line course.
    • Catching and correcting overshoot for very fast turns without oscillation.
    • A drift compensator to "lean into" curves on racetracks
    • Tracking the size of the sumo ring
    • Making sub-drones orbit the main drone at a distance.
    • [edit] Angular accelerometers
    • [edit] Tracking your drone's location on a planet

    They're really awkward to use in other ways.  Observe the pair of 'eye's in that drone.  I needed two since I didn't have room to rotate one at 45 degrees.

    • Like 1
  7. I have one big fast smart drone which resists many strategies:

    • Rushers and Missiles.  They fly straight past.  It's glorious.
    • Bees, My God:  Direction indicators don't fixate on garbage.
    • Pure Muscle:  Unless they turn very very fast, they get caught on the side.
    • Edge Followers:  Tracks the center to avoid being tricked out of bounds.  Sometimes.
    • Center Spinners:  Not much but brute force works, got to be persistent and never get confused.
    • Magnets:  Big drift-thrusters compensate for off-center pushing.

    Just typing this out has given me a few more ideas.

  8. I agree, to the point I suspect factories were always intended to consume resources, even in non-PVP, and just haven't been implemented yet.

    It's not something they should be too hasty about implementing, either.  We don't want to get stuck with unbalanced placeholder numbers for resource costs (cough cough KSP cough cough).

    • Like 1
  9. Another place "inverted inputs" is really useful is the "output enable" above.  It's so helpful to invert OE that, in real life parts, OE usually comes inverted.

    It'd mean sensors would come "default on" just like they are now unless you specifically pick a key to disable them, set OE to non-inverting, or both.

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