just an idea rumoring in my mind for some time: what about a speed curve, that automatically adjusts to the players capabilities? http://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/flowtheory.htm imlementation suggestion: 1) first, start with zero speed. the player will start playing, manually dropping pieces. 2) then measure the average, overall drop time (entry+drop+lock) using the mean of a sliding window of - lets say - the drop time of the past 5 pieces. 3) low pass filter that values to get a smooth curve and adjust the drop speed of the following pieces by: dropspeed = 20 / (avg. drop time minus entry delay minus lock delay) 4) if 20g is reached, start shorten entry - and lock delay too, if the player still does manual lockdown 5) measure somehow if the player can still manage that speed. for example: if the stack gets too high / the player makes detectable mistakes / does not clear lines for more that 20 pieces etc / or if the player does no more manual lockdown - then steer back the drop speed the hope would be that such a mode slowly drives the player to play faster, while not making the game too difficult. this mode maybe would be interesting in conjunction with 180seconds score attack. tepples? interested in implementing such a thing ? could it be done easily in lockjaw?
of course, in that mode there should be a speed dependent score multiplier. otherwise, such a mode would make no sense - because why should i play at 20G, if i could play with ZERO speed curve at the same speed, but just manually hard dropping and have much more freedom in piece placement...
You mean like the speedometer in Lockjaw? (Set preview to 3 or fewer or play the GBA or DS version to see it.) Interesting. Wouldn't abusing lock delay, such as tap-tap-tap on a pyramid or floor-kicking at every opportunity, scale back the speed by itself? Yes, such a "reactive" speed curve is possible. I'll summarize your proposal in BUGS.txt.
yes, like your speedometer! of course, abusing lock delay also lowers overall speed. BUT: then the gamer is not a FLOW mode, but rather in the "anxiety" mode, where he panically tries to abuse things to get a bit more time for thinking. and this is the key difference that we can maybe achieve with this auto-speed curve: always keep the gamer in his most flowing, most powerfull speed area. maybe this gives the highest score and a satisfying game experience...
I don't think speed should decrease. I think it should increase to a speed that the player is just about uncomfortable with.
rosti, you might be right - probably a decrease would make to overall game too soft and dull. at the end, tetris is still an action and only to a lesser extend a puzzle game.. but if we dump speed-decrease, then the speed increase algorithm, that measures the players speed, should be smoothed even more, to avoid a too harsh increase in speed (that then doesnt drop anymore) just because the player had a nice playfield situation and was able to drop some pieces very fast. maybe the sliding window measuring the speed should be increased to - lets say averaging over 20 pieces ? needs to be tested... by the way - there could also be a 20G version of the flow-speed curve: just like death-mode, but with dynamically adjusted entry & lock delay. i personally am even more interested in such a 20g flow mode! simply because even the 20g mode in TAP is too fast for me. i recently managed to get to 999 with lockjaw, but with unlimited lock delay and manual lockdown (and 1 floorkick ). now im trying to do 999 with 1sec entry+lock delay. next interesting would be 20g flow mode, to see if this would help getting me into my personal rythm and approaching my personal optimal speed.
I think it should be a moving average with a reasonably large window. Maybe even a TA Death-style increase, with the speed only changing at section boundaries. You could play for 100 levels (or 50 pieces or whatever) and then it would evaluate the speed over them, and change it accordingly I think if you're a lot faster it should change more quickly, but I also think that it should have a limit on how much it can change with each increase, because it would be quite difficult if it suddenly jumped from a very slow pace to around Death 300 speeds.
I know the main consideration here is to make things faster until 20g hits, then start dropping lock delay, but it's like there's something else to consider once it gets into the "middle area". I know that in TAP the 2g-5g area feels like neither the >= 1g nor the 20g section, so...I'd think that, there, it'd have to be considered differently. Being able to increase the lock speed AND drop the lock delay in that section would seem appropriate, depending on how much the player is moving pieces over before they hit bottom and how much sliding is taking place. And oh yes, with a sliding speed scale, I'd think it'd have to be more like...in TGM terms, 50 to a section instead of 100.
i'd like to see the speed changes even more frequently, every 10 or so pieces for acceleration, and then take the average of the last 30, if it's too slow or you've made too many holes/are too high, slow down a little bit. it would have to play like it was really responding to you, or it would just feel like Ti master.
I don't see how slowing down if it's too fast for you would be good. That would just mean you'd get a Tetris game which was bordering on hard, but could still be played indefinitely. I think if it settles just too difficult to cope with then it's far better, because it will at least kill you. How would it know the difference between you just having a section where you stack up a bit, and a section where you start making mistakes and begin to top out?
i don't necessarily think it should slow down, but that would be the way to do it, that is, in much larger increments. probably better to let the game just end when it gets too fast for you, (let you top out) but that does almost encourage you to play a little under your abilities. i dunno. it's a hard question.
You could use Mr. Rogers' favorite solution: stop the game after 3 minutes. But then why even have the adaptive speed curve? Why not just have the conditions of TDS level 1 or level 20 or TGM1 level 1 or level 500 throughout, and let the player push himself? Number of empty cells below a filled cell, the same way Tetripz does it.
That still isn't 100% accurate though. I could stack into the top half of the screen, with a Tetris hole on the right, then block it off, due to there being nowhere else to put a piece, which isn't uncommon in 20G ARS, with the idea that I'll easily be able to uncover it again. The game would think the speed is killing me, when actually it isn't. It's just how I'm playing.
A covered rectum would be a lot of cells, but easy to uncover. How about run-length encoding the field vertically, giving the number of vertical runs of filled cells, like in a nonogram?
I think that the dispersion of the holes in the stack would be a good way to figure out how badly a player is doing. One massive hole is either deliberate or a simple mistake. If they have quite a lot of holes everywhere then that's a better indication that the speed is killing them.
I'd go for holes of under 4 squares. Another alternative would be to count the number of columns that actually have holes in.
