I had some discussion with Kitaru about this. Its not a new idea, but I havent seen it being discussed here before. Thats why I thought it would be a good idea to post it here. The basic idea is that as soon as you press the rotation button during ARE, the remaining ARE time cancels and the tetromino drops. However, one of the problems is that if you want to charge DAS and do IRS both at the same time, this type of cancellation will cause problems. The piece will drop immediately on rotation (with canceling) and there wont be enough time left to charge. There are four possibilities with DAS charging and initial rotation. 1- Initial Rotation = yes; Charging = yes 2- Initial Rotation = yes; Charging = no 3- Initial Rotation = no; Charging = yes 4- Initial Rotation = no; Charging = no ARE canceling for initial rotation is concerned with possibilities (1) and (2). One of the control methods that can be used for possibility (1) is that when the player presses the left or right input button and then presses rotation button (in that order), the tetromino drops immediately and comes out with fully charged DAS. But the player also might want to use initial rotation without any charging (possibility 2). In that case, the player only presses the rotation button (and no right or left button). The remaining ARE time cancels and the tetromino drops immediately without any charging. The player then taps the direction button to place the tetromino (without any auto scroll). This control scheme is prone to unintended behavior if the player is not careful. However, it does seem workable to me (in theory atleast). I might be missing something here though. Thats why I made this topic. Basically what do people here think about canceling and can it implemented effectively?
Needing to rotate to cancel ARE would bring a lot of quirks with it in my opinion. What about the O piece that is never rotated? And you'd have to add useless rotations whenever you want the default orientation. Perhaps most importantly, this is something that's supposed to increase speed, yet it makes the game sensitive to the order of button presses. This is fine for slower Tetris, but if it's really supposed to increase the speed beyond the current approximately 4 piece/second limit then it's got to be really easy to exploit. Ordering input at that speed would be crazy challenging, and a misinput would throw your rhythm right off. DTET has ARE cancelling, and it's got a pretty clever implementation. (I'm not a DTET expert so someone correct me if I'm wrong.) It's entirely based on directional input. ARE is cancelled automatically if DAS is fully charged, or if you press up or down, and even I think if you tap left or right. This has the benefit of not requiring input any different than what you would do even if full ARE was forced.
Well that would fall under possibility (3) or (4) mentioned in my previous post. I don't think any changes need to be done to rotation states. In (1) and (2) the rotation buttons have a dual purpose: 1- To do the initial rotation 2- To act as a trigger to drop the remaining ARE time. If you want to keep the default position of tetromino and still use ARE cancellation, just use the down button as a trigger too, to drop remaining ARE time. Ordered input can again be used to distinguish between situations where you need auto-scroll or not (like I described in the original post). Ordered input method, in this case, can be discarded if ARE cancellation is only required for possibility (4) (no initial rotation, no charging) and not for (3). Sorry if this point felt ambiguous. However, I agree that the real problem seems to be the requirement of ordered input. Perhaps it is too demanding.
Just to be clear, I wasn't talking about adding rotation states. I meant that if you want to cancel ARE but don't want to rotate you have no options. Or rather, that the only option is to rotate, and then counter rotate to undo that rotation.
or you could always, you know, have an entirely separate button. i'm not sure any of the options are very viable though.
I think DTET cancelled ARE on any button press (be it rotation or movement) but you could still charge DAS during ARE if you held it from the last piece. I thought this was pretty neat, and it also allowed for some very fast bursts if you were able to make a lot of simple placements. DTET is allowed to get away with this where TGM is not because it has initial shift, though. Pressing a button during ARE will automatically spawn the piece and move it in that direction.
