I enjoyed playing Linex! It reminds me of doing perfect clear solves in Tetris, but without the stress :) I appreciate the skip, next, and hole-fill power ups.
If you don't mind me asking, how are you doing piece generation? Is it random%7, drawing from a bag, or something else?
It's neither purely random 7 nor like drawing from a bag. It's a little bit more complex.
If I were to explain it the technical way:
I use a custom Linear Congruential Generator (LCG) seeded by the current date (YYYYMMDD) to ensure deterministic gameplay—everyone gets the exact same piece sequence every day. I don't use flat probabilities; instead, I run the LCG output through a weighted roulette that changes based on the day of the week (e.g., higher probability for 'I' pieces on Mondays, higher for 'S' and 'Z' pieces on Sundays). Lastly, there's a system to mitigate consecutive identical pieces.
In simpler terms:
I use a formula based on the current date to generate a different sequence of pieces every day, guaranteeing it's exactly the same for all users on that specific day. Then, I adjust this sequence using a probability matrix so that on Mondays you get more of the easy pieces (like the line or square), and on Sundays you get more of the hard ones (like S or Z).
Very cool! I am a good Tetris player (in the top 10% of players) and wanted to give brick yeeting against an LLM a spin.
Some feedback:
- Knowing the scoring system is helpful when going 1v1 high score
- Use a different randomization system, I kept getting starved for pieces like I. True random is fine, throwing a copy of every piece into a bag and then drawing them one by one is better (7 bag), nearly random with some lookbehind to prevent getting a string of ZSZS is solid, too (TGM randomizer)
I actually grew up playing the Spectrum HoloByte version of Tetris for PC, which only lets you rotate in one direction. As a result, I ended up playing NES Tetris for years as a kid before realizing it lets you rotate clockwise / counterclockwise!
The worst thing is that the delayed auto shift is slightly off and it messes my finesse. (I used to play competitive tetris as well, but between getting older -> worse reflexes and vision problems I can't really play anymore. Weirdly, finesse muscle memory is still working.)
I don't think the goal is to make a PvP simulator, it would be too easy to cheese or do weird strategies. It's mostly for LLMs to play.
On the topic of reflexes decaying (I'm getting there, in my late 30s): Have you played Stackflow? It's a number go up roguelite disguised as an arcade brick stacking game, but the gravity is low enough that it is effectively turn based. More about 'deck' building, less about chaining PCs and C-Spins.
cool to hear about more randomizers. I am not a great tetris player but I absolutely love the game. I put NES, 7-bag and my own take on randomizer (crap) in my online tetris-like experiment https://www.susmel.com/stacky/ (you can press c for more controls or h to see shortcuts)
One of my dream goals was to make a licensed low lag competitive game kind of like TGM, but I heard licensing is extremely cost-prohibitive so I kind of gave up on that goal. I remember I said to someone I was ready to pony up few tens of thousands for a license + cut, but reportedly it starts at an order of the magnitude higher.
That was true a few years ago. The next few years are here :) take another look, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.
E: that sounded like snark, definitely not the intention, Ableton supports MPE now and they were lagging behind. Roger Linn keeps a list of MPE/MIDI2 compatible software and hardware, every time I revisit it, the list has grow : https://www.rogerlinndesign.com/support/support-linnstrument...
coldtea’s point is that MPE is backwards-compatible with MIDI, but MIDI 2.0 is not.
Linn’s list appears to include MPE devices but I can’t find any mention of MIDI 2.0. I’m not sure why you’re calling this a list of “MPE/MIDI2 compatible” devices.
It sounds like you’re saying that MIDI 2.0 is widely supported; do you have a list of MIDI2 devices on the market?
It always fascinates me when I see Max/Live/etc. mentioned on Hacker News. You wouldn't think the overlap between the user demographic would be very large, y'know?
I'm a bit scared of this. There are so many horror stories out there to the tune of, "Google banned my account, now I can't get into anything, and there's zero ways for me to get in touch with a human to talk about any avenues to fix it." and then extrapolating that to government.
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