Messages

Russian Doll?

Get Carter?

Borderless fullscreen just means that the game covers the whole screen without any window borders and with nothing else visible (such as the start menu or other UI elements from the desktop).

The difference between that and "regular fullscreen" is that in borderless fullscreen it's just a window on the desktop that covers up the whole screen, while in "regular fullscreen" the operating system goes into a special mode where it changes the screen resolution to the game resolution and more or less "forgets" about the rest of the desktop, with the game running separately from it. This means that any time you switch between the game and the desktop, the system has to switch in and out of this mode, and this can cause problems (because it can't quite recreate all the graphics correctly, or because it freezes up as you switch back and forth). That also makes it difficult to switch the game between fullscreen mode and windowed mode.

"Regular fullscreen" is the older way to do it, but borderless fullscreen is probably a better way to do fullscreen for most players nowadays. Really the only reason not to would be if the graphics look fuzzy or wrong in borderless fullscreen because of how the scaling is done, or possibly for performance.

That looks sweet! Very Martin Kellerman.

That's really great to avoid a ****ton of tiny files in your distribution. It's also great because it means I don't have to code the pack/unpack feature I've had on my TODO list for years.

[3.990]

Those are some pretty crazy stats, Mouth. I mean, the chance of guessing it on the first word is less than 1/2000. Getting it twice in only 37 games is a massive coincidence.

I didn't play well yesterday and got 5/6. Today I think I played close to perfect, but got unlucky:

Wordle 309 4/6

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Skill 97/100
Luck 42/100

Spoiler

CATER, WRITE, MERIT, INERT

After the first two guesses I had it down to MERIT, REMIT or INERT as plausibly valid solutions, with REFIT, RESIT, RELIT, and TIERS as dubiously valid ones (as it turns out, REFIT is on Wordle's list), and rejecting EFRIT as a non-standard spelling of ifrit/efreet. To ensure a win in four (unless it was one of the questionable ones) I had to pick MERIT or REMIT on 3. Unfortunately that was not it.

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Stats to date:

No. guesses	No. of times	Points
1	0	0
2	2	4
3	31	93
4	46	184
5	18	90
6	8	48
	Total	419
	/105 days	3.990

Wordle 306 3/6

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Skill 94/100
Luck 66/100

Spoiler

I was actually very lucky. After the first two, MINOR and SPOIL, I spent ages trying to come up with something plausible out of the remaining possibilities. AKIDO? Misspelled. COIFF? Same. HOITY? Not a valid Wordle word (I've tried it before). VOIDY? Not quite a dictionary word (but I think Lovecraft or someone uses it). NOICE? Unlikely. OUCHI? No.

The only real word I could come up with that fit was OXIDE, but I didn't believe in it as a Wordle answer. However, eventually I just went with it out of frustration, and lo and behold…

And then Wordlebot points out that I somehow overlooked VOICE. If I had found that I would definitely have guessed it.

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With today's game, my average is officially below 4.0!

On the front page, From the Forums lists two posts from new user davidjuhl in recent posts - one in What song are you listening to right now and one in a tech thread about Rotating Sprites. However, when i click on these, I get to the thread but don't see his posts. They don't show up in Recent Posts either.

These posts have been deleted because the user was identified as a spammer. That posts now in the trashbin show up on the front page is probably a bug.

Yikes! Bad luck, cat!

Since #300 I have been 4/6 each day (I haven't been very disciplined, and have played hunches rather than the smartest plays), until today when I got pretty lucky on the second guess (it was a strategic one that paid off), leaving me with only one possible answer:

Wordle 304 3/6

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Skill 90/100
Luck 67/100

Spoiler

CARED, TOWNY, FOYER

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This is also the first time I've beaten Wordlebot, which took 5/6 today.

But seriously, the ordering impacted more in frame rate when going for a low resolution. At low resolution, traversing the array for bubblesort took a ton of time. I attempted a quicksort too, but it did not improve at all (if you search the advanced technical forums I have done a quicksort in AGS script there at some point).

Ordering was very expensive to do on each frame, thus for dynamic sprite based software render in the module there's probably things to investigate in ordering algorithms.

Ah, so when working with overlays you just set the Z-order to be the distance, and the driver takes care of the sorting. I was thinking of the Z-order as the sorting order, and figured you would still need to re-sort them whenever you moved.

I think you could probably optimize something similar for the draw sorting, where you build the sort order as you calculate the object distances (and possibly leverage the idea that most things will remain in the same order as in the last frame), but clearly that adds a lot of complexity.

So by "sprite drawing" you mean RawDrawing all the sprites to the background each frame?

I updated the mode7 plugin to version 0.3.0.

Plugin?

rendering using Overlays instead of drawing a sprite. This can be significantly faster, and will allow a lot more objects to be on screen simultaneously.

Why is that? How are overlays quicker than how you were rendering it before?

Wordle 300 5/6

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Skill 83/100
Luck 47/100

Not great today. I tried to be sneaky and ended up playing myself.

My first two guesses were practically perfect, and left me with only six likely possibilities:

Spoiler

After CRANE and STALK, I was left with SHADE, SHAME, SHAPE, SHAVE, SPADE, SUAVE (though of these I overlooked SHAVE as a possibility).

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Now I let myself be influenced by knowing that Stupot had lost the round, and did something stupid:

Spoiler

I went directly for what I thought was the least likely word using the most rare letters, SUAVE. Not only was this terrible strategically, since it gave me almost no information if not correct, it didn't even make sense as something that could have led to Stupot losing the round, since it's when there are many possible choices for one letter that hard mode becomes especially hard. Therefore the logical inference would have been that the answer was probably of the form SHA_E. The smart play here would have been something like DUMPS or HEMP, which would have guaranteed a win in 4.

After SUAVE didn't pan out I was left with SHADE, SHAME, SHAPE, SPADE, and got it on the second try. (Though again my first guess was not ideal: SPADE would have guaranteed a win in 5, which I didn't notice.)

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Ouch! Commiserations. 

I did pretty well today, getting lucky on my second guess. (And could again discard one possibility as a word not fit to print in the NYT.)

Wordle 299 3/6

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Skill 90/100
Luck 66/100

Hope I won't flame out on #300 as well!

Yeah, that's looking very decent, Stu. Especially on hard mode.

Another 4 today.

Wordle 297 4/6

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I wasn't very happy with it, but Wordlebot says it wasn't too bad, mostly bad luck.

Skill 91/100
Luck 43/100

My lowest-rated guess was my second one. I think it's because I have a tendency to overlook a certain letter.

Spoiler

I tend not to prioritize L very high, but after RTSN it is one of the most common consonants, and S is less common in Wordle than in English because it very rarely uses plurals or inflected verbs in the solution. So I played ASTER (for the S) when LATER would have been a better guess.

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BTW, the skill rating in Wordlebot goes from 0 as "pass" (play a word you already tried) to 99 or 100 as the "optimal answer" (the one Wordlebot would have picked), measured in expected/average remaining steps to the solution given that guess. The luck rating measures whether the guess moved fewer or more steps closer to the solution than expected (averaged across all possible solutions, where 100 is the luckiest possible outcome and 0 the unluckiest possible; and 50 probably the expected outcome).

Wordle 296 4/6

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Skill 82/100
Luck 46/100

Despite getting nothing on the first (extremely unlucky, at 7/100), Wordlebot highly approves of my first two guesses, claiming it left only two possibilities (from its list of solution words, that is), thus giving me a 50% chance at getting it in 3 and a guaranteed max 4. But I wasn't able to see it, and had to use my third to cut the search space instead.

Spoiler

Even after that there was at least one other dictionary word that would fit, but given that it's considered derogatory, it wasn't a plausible solution.

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Congrats!

Wordle 295 4/6

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Wordlebot gives my play a skill rating of 88/100 and a luck rating of 49/100.

Got Wordle 294 in 3, which means I'm only two more of those away from getting my average down to 4.

Having now tried it a little, I have one criticism of Wordlebot: its strategy and recommendations are based on knowing exactly which words are possible solutions (a much smaller pool of words than the ones that are valid guesses). So the other day, for instance, it knew that the solution could not be BOYAR, even though that is a valid word, simply because it's not in the list of Wordle solutions. That's not something a human player could know for sure without cheating, and it affects the optimal strategy.

Next time I will go back to hard mode and guessing, this feels much better

Has anyone tried Wordlebot? It's a NYT feature that analyzes your Wordle games, telling you how good your guesses were at each turn and suggesting improvements.

For example, it tells me that today (Wordle 293), my second guess

Spoiler

(SPACE, following CLEAN)

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was OK, but it would have been better to go with

Spoiler

TRACE,

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which would have almost guaranteed a win in 3, while my guess could have left me with the possibilities

Spoiler

BEACH, REACH, TEACH, EXACT, or REACT

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if I was unlucky. (I wasn't, and got it in 3.)

BTW, Worldebot's analysis claims that the optimal starting word is CRANE.

Wordle is a bit inconsistent when it comes to languages and nationalities: Latin, Norse, Irish, Hindi/Hindu, Farsi, Slavs and Danes are blocked, but Dutch, Swiss, Swede (though that can also be a root vegetable), Anglo, Welsh, Gipsy/Gypsy, Greek, Turks and even India and Spain(!) are permitted.

I've played very averagely since last. 1x3, 1x5, 2x4.