Chronic Logic

One word: MULTIPLAYER.  Each player gets the same set of blocks coming at them, but other than that it's completely up to their skill to outscore one another.  Perhaps large combos could rain unwanted single blocks into your opponent's arena, similar to sending lines to your opponent in Tetris.  You can't see what your opponent is doing, only his score and bonus (so very little network traffic, in fact).  Option to play until the first person 'loses' or to continue play until both players stack too high and see who has the higher score.

I've noticed that the 'build' sound will just stop working on my system.  I build several links, and hear the sound, and then any more that I add don't produce a sound at all.  I still get the sound for removing links, and I still get train sounds when I run with the train-cam, but the building sound is gone.  To get the build sound again I have to restart Pontifex, and it only lasts for a few links anyway, so it's not really worth it.  I actually have two sound devices, one is an SB64D integrated into the motherboard (it's Gateway's SB64 with a digital output), and the other is a true legacy ISA SB16.  I'm not sure what could cause this; maybe when the build sound is played, it fails to close the sound channel, until they're all filled up?  But then I would think it would screw up the rest of the sounds, unless they each have a dedicated channel.

(Edited by Entroper at 5:24 pm on Oct. 23, 2001)

It seems if you build lots of cross-pieces in a tower, the entire tower will break instantly upon starting the simulation.  The tower is constructed like this:

http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht000.jpg" border="0">

At the beginning of the simulation (note that "pause" is activated), the tower looks like this:

http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht001.jpg" border="0">

Immediately after unpausing, the tower looks like this:

http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht002.jpg" border="0">

Now, it occured to me, as I'm sure it will occur to many of you, that perhaps the tower is too heavy to support its own weight.  But you would think it would have to "settle" first, and then only the bottom links would be destroyed.  I further studied this by creating a simple box in midair, so that it would freefall toward the ground, and should have no stress whatsoever.  Results:

http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht010.jpg" border="0">

http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht011.jpg" border="0">

http://www.seriousfortress.com/images/SeriouslyForums/BridgeBuilder/riptower/scsht012.jpg" border="0">

Perhaps this is some sort of quirk in the physics?  If I were to take a stab in the dark, I'd say that floating point errors are accumulating... I had the same problem in a 3D program I wrote, where a series of rotations screwed up a model's orientation, and really funky things happened to it on the screen.  Maybe if too many beams are putting pressure on each other at once, the same sort of thing happens, and instead of putting insane stretches on a model, it puts those stretches on the beams, causing them to snap almost immediately.