NOTINT

One of the better Tetris clones for the Unix terminal enviornment is TINT, a recursive acryonym for TINT Is Not Tetris. (There is more than one Tetris clone by that name, apparently obvious joke is obvious.) Clean C code, good responsiveness, color output (curses "text UI").

I bring all that up, because a couple of years ago I had a vision for changing some of the rules of Tetris to see how the game would play. To do that, I found an open source version of the game and started hacking on it. The one I first found was the version in the BSD Games package. The resulting new game I called Eastris. It showed potential, but the game was not responsive at speed. Digging I found the original code was based on an IOCCC winner. So the original source was more about size of code than playability.

Eastris screenshot

Score: 9                   ww                   ww
Status: 11 - 0             ww                   ww
                           ww                   ww
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                           ww                   ww
                           ww                   ww
                           ww    wwww           ww
                           ww  wwww             ww
                           ww                   ww
                           ww                   ww
                           ww                   ww
                           ww                   ww
                           ww                   ww
                           ww                   ww
                           ww                   ww
                           wwww ww ww      ww   ww
                           wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww  ww
                           ww  ww ww  wwwwwwww  ww
                           ww  wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww
                           wwwwwwwwwwwwww  wwww ww
                           wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

   j - left   k - rotate   l - right   <space> - drop   p - pause   q - quit

Then I found TINT, and it plays better and has nicer code. My derivative of that I'm calling NOTINT, for "Not TINT". Besides the "easytris" mode, I've modified it to have several other play options. But maybe a discription of what easytris is would be good now.

Standard Tetris has a blocks that fall and stack. You complete rows to clear the board area, and you strive to never run out of space at the top. Easytris has all those same features. It even has the same shapes. What it doesn't have, and what made me call it "easy," is very random piece distribution. Instead you get mostly the same peice over and over again for a while, and then it changes to a random new piece to get over and over again. The way it is supposed to be easy: you have a good idea of what's coming, next, and after that, and after that. So you can plan your moves long in advance.

In practice, most of the pieces are pretty difficult to use to clear the board when you get 25 of the next 30 pieces all the same. Only the 1x4 piece is really easy. The 2x2 square piece seems simple, but is extremely unforgiving of mistakes. The T shape and the two variants of L shape are tricky, but with care can be used to clean up a board. The two S-jog shapes can maintain an equalibrium, but cannot really clean things up. Playing easytris really sharpened my Tetris skills, even if I did get bored after a while.

One that I started to notice playing a lot of tint style Tetris is that scoring is dominated by how far you drop pieces. It's much more important than clearing lines to the score. So I started adding new play modes to notint.

First was "zen mode" where the game speed never changes (unless you ask it to) and the scoring is 100% about lines cleared. Next I added a "speed mode" that makes scoring a function of lines cleared over time, but to be honest, I'm not very satisfied with that scoring and I may rework it.

After that I added "challenge mode". This has makes levels mean something different. Each level starts with a set of blocks that you have to clear. Those blocks are all incomplete lines, some levels have random patterns and some have predetermined patterns. Some levels have traditional random pieces and some have "easytris" inspired preferred pieces. Whatever the pattern or drop ratios, once you clear all the challenge blocks away, the board resets for the next level.

Notint in easytris mode screenshot

 Your level: 6             <>                    <>            STATISTICS
 Full lines: 138           <>                    <>
Blocks togo: 50            <>      YYYYYY        <>       MMMMMM        -    30
  Score  2536              <>        YY          <>       MM
                           <>                    <>           RRRRRRRR  -    30
                           <>    YY  YY          <>
    H E L P                <>  YYYYYYYYYY        <>       WWWWWW        -    47
                           <>      YYYYBBBB    YY<>           WW
 p: Pause                  <>      YYYYBBBB  YYYY<>               GGGG  -    26
 j: Left                   <>YYYY  YYYYYYYYCCCCYY<>             GGGG
 l: Right                  <>    YYYYYYYYYYYYMM  <>       CCCC          -    18
 k: Rotate                 <>YYYYYYYY  YYYYYYMMMM<>         CCCC
 s: Draw next              <>  YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY<>               BBBB  -    27
 d: Toggle lines           <>YYYYYYYYYYYY  YYYYYY<>               BBBB
 a: Advance level          <>  YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY<>       YYYYYY        -   184
 q: Quit                   <>YYYY  YYYYYYYYYYYYYY<>         YY
  SPACE: Drop              <>YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY  YY<>       ---------------------
                           <>YYYYYYYY  WWWWWWYYYY<>       Sum          :    362
   Next:                   <>YYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY  <>
                           <>++  ++YY++YY++YY++GG<>       Challenge    :   5
                           <><><><><><><><><><><><>       Other blocks : 110

This has been my focus of late. All of the predetermined patterns I have been able to clear in random piece drop mode, but some are really hard unless you get lucky with your drops. After a while, I started to feel those were unfair, which is why I added less-random piece distributions. The really hard ones were the tall single-spaced bars and the two (one tall, one short) checkerboard patterns. Above, I'm failing pretty hard on one of those checkerboard levels with just a single challenge row left to clear.

NOTINT source at github.

Game Tools

Here, some discussion of two game tool programs I have in game-tools on github.

asciimapper

In the mid-1990s, I knew an admin of the Tsunami MUD and played the game a bit. Fast-forward a decade and I decided to give it a try again. At (then) about fifteen years old (now closer to thirty), it was one of the older MUDs around, which meant it had a very long time to expand. There were vast areas of the game to explore, and I set out to see as much as I could.

Over the course of several months, I visited huge swaths of the game, and got myself on the explorer leaderboard, where I was one of the lowest level characters there. (Accounts automatically delete after time time if you don't log in, so I can't know if others had done better than me before then, and you won't be able to find me there now.) Eventually I started to run into time-to-new-area payoff diminishing returns and stopped playing.

While I was playing I drew myself a lot of maps. At first these were on paper, but eventually I developed an ASCII art short hand. This let me have text files I could grep for noteworthy items or places. From there, I wrote a tool that could take my ASCII art maps and convert them into nice printable maps. asciimapper worked by converting my ASCII art into config files for ifm the "Interactive Fiction Mapper", which was designed for Infocom and similar games. The crossover to MUD maps was trivial. Some of the maps I printed and would hand annotate for further details, but most I kept only in ASCII file form.

I have all my ASCII art maps for Tsunami somewhere, I could probably dig them out and put them on the web. I haven't played in at least a decade now, though, and there's more than zero chance some of them are obsolete. Some became inaccuate while I was playing. In particular I recall the entrance to Toyland moving, to be friendlier to low level players.

I've been thinking about asciimapper again as I play "Andor's Trail"; (previously dicussed about a month ago here). In "Andor's Trail", there are perhaps 520ish visitable areas, most of which show up on the World Map, but about 20% are indoors, underground, or otherwise not visible there. How to get to those plus the inventories of stores in particular spots has been something I've been mulling over. The ASCII art needed for the World Map would be doable, but something of a challenge.

The maps are text form already though, just not very clear text form. Here's an excerpt from AndorsTrail/res/xml/woodsettlement0.tmx, an XML file apparently created by Tiled:

 <objectgroup name="Mapevents">
  <object name="east" type="mapchange" x="928" y="224" width="32" height="64">
   <properties>
    <property name="map" value="roadbeforecrossroads2"/>
    <property name="place" value="west"/>
   </properties>
  </object>
  <object name="woodhouse1" type="mapchange" x="608" y="288" width="32" height="32">
   <properties>
    <property name="map" value="woodhouse1"/>
    <property name="place" value="south"/>
   </properties>
  </object>
  <object name="woodhouse2" type="mapchange" x="640" y="128" width="32" height="32">
   <properties>
    <property name="map" value="woodhouse2"/>
    <property name="place" value="south"/>
   </properties>
  </object>
  <object name="woodhouse0" type="mapchange" x="224" y="256" width="32" height="32">
   <properties>
    <property name="map" value="woodhouse0"/>
    <property name="place" value="south"/>
   </properties>
  </object>
  <object name="sign_wdsetl0" type="sign" x="800" y="256" width="32" height="32"/>
  <object name="sign_wdsetl0_grave1" type="sign" x="128" y="160" width="32" height="32"/>
  <object name="sign_wdsetl0_grave2" type="sign" x="128" y="224" width="32" height="32"/>
 </objectgroup>

You can easily see how the map pieces connect together, including ones like woodhouse0, woodhouse1, and woodhouse2 that don't show up on the World Map. In woodhouse2.tmx we find Lowyna:

<objectgroup name="Spawn">
  <object height="96" name="smuggler1" type="spawn" width="96" x="32" y="96"/>
  <object height="128" name="smuggler2" type="spawn" width="96" x="128" y="96"/>
  <object height="32" name="lowyna" type="spawn" width="96" x="288" y="96"/>
[...]

Which with a little bit of work we can connect that the shop "droplist", in this case in AndorsTrail/res/raw/droplists_v070_shops.json, to get items she stocks.

A map.tmx to IFM format converter might be handy, but I haven't put any serious thought into it.

asciimapper

I have thought about game play efficiency with "Andor's Trail". In particular while playing I thought it would be useful to have a way to see how fast I'm earning in-game rewards like XP, game currency, item drops, and how fast I'm using consumables while doing so. I imagined a tool that I could tell what I have at a particular time and it would work out how much that changes over time.

Those imaginings lead to stat-timer, a CLI with a very old school interogation interface. You can use the command line to give it starting stats or just start it and it will ask for stats. Then you can update as many or as few stats as you want each round and it gives updates. The design requires that you name stats for the initial state, and then if in same order, you can omit names. Thus the most important things being measured should be first, and least important last. Or least changing last.

In practice this means I've been putting XP first, then common area item drop and/or gold, then health potion count, and then rare drops, and finally — sometimes — constants I want for annotations. As I play, I update XP frequently and other columns less frequently. To update just the first two columns is a matter of just entering the first two numbers. To update first and third requires labeling the number for the third column. After each entry it gives a snapshot of how things are doing on a per-second basis. When done, I can <ctrl-d> out or put a ! at the end of the numbers to indicate final update. It then gives a final update with total changes, per-hour and per-second rate of changes. This makes it easier to compare play style one to play style two even if they are on different days and for different lengths of play.

If I update it further, things I've been thinking about for improving it include: a curses interface with data at particular screen locations, sophisticated "pause timer while entering data", realtime per-second updates, and perhaps a more sophisticated state model for the command line, for better continuation after an intertuption.

ascii-art