So... I've made Snake Game

Title. Also bad English.

So... I've made it in vanilla starbound in current stable (Pleased Giraffe Update 5). Decided to finish it now, because new patch may (or may not) mess up my wiring and it took too much time to abandon it halfway. Got all the materials to build it in admin mode. Noone sane should ever attempt collecting this much copper.

Video demonstration:
(Actually I've made gif but Steam refused to upload it... And I'm kinda fishing for likes here so... Whatever)



Behind the scenes (/fullbright):

3rd floor:


2nd floor:


1st floor:

(Should it be called "ground floor" and the second one - "first floor" and so on? As non English speaker I never understood logic behind this.)


Now let's turn wires on:

3rd floor:


2nd floor:


1st floor:


My snake can't be longer then 10 segments because to make it longer I had to build that top-left section of the 3-rd floor over and over again. There is 9x9 game screen (81 lamps). My memory section can memorize only 10. To cover entire screen I need 7 more sections. And one row to say "you won". I'm too lazy for this.

Also it's not intended that it starts off with head and one additional segment. Probably I've miscalculated something when I was building my game loop.

I can explain it how everything works. Probably I'll do it later.

Truth to be told... It's not working properly every single time. Sometimes you have to flip a few debugging switches here and there to make it work again. Sometimes entire snake body messes up because I didn't take wire timeings seriusly and moon that rotates this ocean planet is causing tides that affect my wires. Or something like that.

I've recorded it on first try but when I decided to make another video it failed me two times in the row. Fourth one was once again lucky. So it's safe to say that it's 50/50.

Also attaching planet here: http://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=53245931643995361807
I'm using this file hosting for the first time in my life. If you don't trust it, don't use it. And if I were you I wouldn't trust anyone. Apparently .world is not on the list of allowed filetypes.
Coordinates:
596374662
-449207693
It's Alpha Gaia Minoris VII a
Radioactive Star, top left ocean planet

 

Awesome. I have no other words to describe it.

 

I'm... I'm not sure if I'm impressed or worried. I wouldn't even know how to begin to do this. Kudos to you.

 

Explanation time! I'm not the best teacher in the world and language barrier will probably make this hard to understand but I've made lots of gifs to illustrate my thoughts.

First things first. I'm using switches everywhere instead of buttons because I can get one tick long signal whenever I flip my switch up or down. It has a price of few ticks of delay but at least I don't have to wait until button "unpress" itself.
Other non-obvious thing is that you can't connect multiple switches to this one tick generator. Well... You can but you have to make sure that every other switch that is connected to it is switched off or the one you're using now will refuse to work.

Here's how my switch-button thing looks like:


Wires:

That last one XOR is unnececery.
First: it can be OR. I've used it accidently and rolled with it.
Second: you can connect outputs of both END's to the thing that you want to activate. But if you have to connect it to dozens of inputs it's better for your own sanity to have those.

Okay. Moving on.
First thing that I've made was snake's head and tail.
Main idea here is that snake's head moves across the "board" and "draws" it's body. And tail is moving using the same trajectory as head "erasing" it's body from the "board".
"Board" that keeps track of the snake's body is 9x9 cluster of persistent switches on the bottom of the 2nd floor in my first post.

Here's how head and tail was made.
Everybody knows about this beautiful way of using latches:

Wires:


I've figured out that you can upgrade it with AND switches:

Wires:

The signal moves upwards here.
RED switch sets bottom latch into activated state.
BLUE switch moves signal upwards if Small Wall Switch is ON. If it's OFF it resets whole line of latches into non active state.
I use this to reset snake's head and tail position into the center of the board at the beginning of each game.

Another upgrade to this design is that you, with a little change, can use this to move signal in both directions. You just need another row of AND-switches:

Wires:


And another super simple concept:

Wires:


Looks self-explanetory. Bottom row of switches attached to columns of the 3x3 AND-switch cluster. Left column of switches attached to rows of the 3x3 AND-switch cluster.
Works like Cartesian coordinate system. Bottom row is X-axis. Left column is Y-axis.

If you mix this with rows and columns of latches you'll get snake's head and tail that can navigate thrugh 2D space.
You can see it's implementation in the middle of the second and first floors.
The one that's on the first floor is the tail.
The one that's on the second floor is the head.

To the right of the both of them there are 9x9 clusters of AND-switches. Those clusters send signal to "draw" or "erase" snake's body.
I send my signal to do so to the OR-switches that labeled "PLACE" and "REMOVE".



Then I made input to control it's movement. Basic idea is this:
Whenever I push button (flip switch) I want to know should snake's head move horisontally or not and direction of movement (left or right). Also I want to know should it move vertically or not and direction of movement (up or down).
This resolves on 3rd floor. There are set of four latches near colorful switches. If you look at the wires it looks like a mess but actually it's something similiar to this:







Connected simultaneously:




Each input activates it's own predefined set of latches.

Those four parameters also used for tail movement. And if snake's body is longer then one piece then you have to memorize it in a tricky way.
Here's what I've came up with:



Looks complicated. It's not.
Top, left and right little pieces are there just for switch-buttons. Don't pay too much attention to them.

So, left part is basically the same column of latches that transfers some signal upwards. This signal is snake's body length. If signal is on the bottom - body is short. If it's at the top - body is long.
Here it is in action. When I flip BLUE switch I'm increasing snake's body length. This happens every time snake eats apple. RED switch and ORANGE small wall switch is there just for manual reset:




Second section of this memory cell is memory itself:


When I flip GREEN switch I save signal from YELLOW small wall switch into my memory cell to the slot that is defined by snake's length.
Snake's head saves it's movement variables to the top of this memory cell. It's tail reads them from the bottom of this memory cell.

Whenever snake moves and not eats any apples whole memory cell should be shifted downwards witch is basically same signal transfering latches as before:


I flip purple switch - everything shifts downwards.

And that's it. Only thing that I'm not explained is RNG that generates apples. It's really not RNG. It's same thing that moves head/tail only it's moving constantly and "drawing" apples on the apple memory cluster when head collides with one of them.

Game loop (little ugly OR-switch underwater appendix) looks like this:
MOVE HEAD
Check if there is collision with body. If not then
DRAW HEAD ONTO BODY CLUSTER
SAVE HEAD MOVEMENT PARAMETERS
Check if there is collision with apple. If not then
ERASE TAIL FROM BODY CLUSTER
MOVE TAIL ACCORDING TO SAVED MOVEMENT PARAMETERS
SHIFT MEMORY CELL
START AGAIN

And if there were collision with apple then
INCREASE BODY LENGTH AND START AGAIN
And if there were collision with body then
GAME OVER



So it's not that complicated but it takes too long to connect all the 9x9 AND clusters.

 

This is incredible! Those wire set-up images hurt my brain.

 

This makes me very happy

 

You monster.

 

Holy shit snacks thats amazing it hurts my brain

 

This guy deserves to be immortalized in the game. This is incredible. A bit concerning, but still incredible nonetheless.

 

I've felt that it needs better explanation, so I've made super long sequence of images that explains how it works step by step showing few game cycles as an example.

I think it took three evenings. And one morning. About two hours each. Steam says that I have 14.8 hrs last two weeks in Starbound, so I might be worng here : )

It's second attempt. First one were uglier and failed. I've managed to figure out how to move head across the game screen and how to generate new apple when head eats the one that already existed. But when I've got to the increasing length when it eats apples I've hit brick wall and couldn't think of any solution that might work. So I've abandoned this idea until I saw this Google Doodle: http://www.google.com/doodles/george-booles-200th-birthday

Somehow it inspired me and I flew to the new planet and started from scratch. And it worked.

Also. Yay! I'm famous now!

 

my god, this is amazing. Great job

 

Well... I had it in my head longer then I've build it, that's for sure.

 

And with all these explanations, and how long I'm guessing it took to build that thing, you said you were lazy.

 

*Raises hand*

Why?

 

wait does it run really slow because its using code inside a game

 

For the most of the time when you create something and you're not compleatly clueless you know how terribly flawed your creation. Sometimes you can fix it. Sometimes you can't for a lot of reasons. And sometimes you can but you're just lazy. That's my case here. I know what exactly is wrong there. Just got lazy and capped maximum length of a snake at 10 instead of 80. There is this saying that apparently (I googled it) originates from the movie "Colombiana": "You never really finish a painting. You just stop working on it."

There are two main reasons. Firstly my computer isn't that fast. Starbound really slows down when there are lots of things (entities?) on screen. I'm usually playing with x4 zoom because of that.
Second reason is that my game loop is really long. It's about 40 ticks (you can count OR switches that are at the underwater section). I don't know how many wire-ticks per second Starbound calculates. I think it's slower then FPS but I can't say exact number.

It's fun for in a weird way.
Long time ago I've played Jagged Alliance 2. And it uses funny quiz kinda like in Fallout 3 or TES3: Morrowind to generate your character. When the game was translated (terrible, terrible adaptation) to my language one of the questions were "Least thing you want to do is..." and I used to pick "Programming". Because programming is boring, right? : ) As it turned out it's quite fun.

 

People like you is why one day i believe we'll have some cool sci-fi stuff, keep it up man, you are part of those that make human kind envolve.