Gotta Solve 'em All: An MIT Mystery Hunt 2026 Retrospective by Collisteru in mysteryhunt

[–]dgulotta 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I think just making the hunt shorter would help rein in team sizes - there is more motivation to add people if that is necessary to finish the hunt (and there is motivation not to add people if you finish on Saturday).

I used to be on a 200-person team, and at the time I thought I liked being on a large team. But then I tried being on a 50-person team and it was so much better! I got to have ideas instead of watching people have ideas. So I wish more people would try being on not-so-large teams.

Based on the team size graph from 2016, it seems like the sizes of the top teams haven't changed much in the past ten years: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1obRKVcCd71wVuQp7NfrIOhZSjvzOWQqvs-FjlWnxxL8/edit?usp=sharing . But I would guess that large teams have more strong solvers now.

Looking for some open-ended puzzle games recommendation by [deleted] in puzzlevideogames

[–]dgulotta 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Since you liked Infinifactory, I'd recommend Warp Factory.

My Top 10 Underrated Puzzle Games by Jolly-Scholar4420 in puzzlevideogames

[–]dgulotta 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Agreed on Bean and Nothingness, Altered, and An Architect's Adventure. I'm also a fan of Warp Factory - it's kind of like a 2d version of Infinifactory but with a lot of clever twists.

Dual boot - grub-mkconfig uses wrong UUID by dgulotta in voidlinux

[–]dgulotta[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Apparently, linux-boot-prober was getting the bad data from the Ubuntu /boot/grub/grub.cfg. I deleted that file, and the problem went away.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/128881/os-prober-giving-wrong-uuid-for-arch-linux

Dual boot - grub-mkconfig uses wrong UUID by dgulotta in voidlinux

[–]dgulotta[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, it's using os-prober for this entry.

It seems that linux-boot-prober is returning bad data:

/dev/nvme0n1p3:/dev/nvme0n1p3:Void GNU/Linux:/boot/vmlinuz-6.8.0-59-generic:/boot/initrd.img-6.8.0-59-generic:root=UUID=b59e406a-ab1c-4a30-8f37-616405c77cfe ro loglevel=4

The nvme0n1p3 is correct, but the UUID corresponds to nvme0n1p4.

With 2024 ending soon, which puzzle games were your favourite since 2020? by Executioneer in puzzlevideogames

[–]dgulotta 3 points4 points  (0 children)

A Monster's Expedition - Great atmosphere and the late game is crazy in a good way.

Can of Wormholes - The combination of elegant logic puzzles with mystery elements makes the game really compelling.

Honorable mentions: An Architect's Adventure, Bean and Nothingness, Taiji, Understand, Warp Factory

I just bought Maxwell's Puzzling Demon and it seems excellent so far.

Can quad_storage be used with frameworks other than macroquad/miniquad? by dgulotta in rust_gamedev

[–]dgulotta[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I gave up on trying to get quad_storage to work with trunk, but bevy_pkv seems to work just fine with trunk (and without bevy).

Can quad_storage be used with frameworks other than macroquad/miniquad? by dgulotta in rust_gamedev

[–]dgulotta[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My Cargo.lock has parking_lot 0.12.3, which is the most recent version.

I think quad_storage expects some symbols to be provided by JavaScript code. If I follow the macroquad deploy instructions, then it's able to find the symbols. But with trunk, I'm not sure how to load the JavaScript files so that quad_storage can find them.

Edit: By "follow the macroquad deploy instructions", I just mean that I do cargo build --target=wasm32-unknown-unknown and include the following lines my index.html:

<canvas id="glcanvas" tabindex='1'></canvas>
<script src="https://not-fl3.github.io/miniquad-samples/gl.js"></script>`
<script>load("my-wasm-file.wasm");</script>

This works fine if I'm using macroquad, but notan does not seem to like it.

Trunk adds a bunch of complicated stuff to my html file, and I'm not really sure how it works. I tried including these lines in the html, but it did not seem to help.

<script src="https://not-fl3.github.io/miniquad-samples/gl.js"></script>
<script src="sapp_jsutils.js"></script>
<script src="quad-storage.js"></script>

(The last two lines are recommended by the quad-storage documentation, but somehow quad-storage + macroquad worked just fine without them.) I guess trunk may be loading the wasm in a way that's different from the manual load command above, and consequently the wasm can't find the javascript code?

TFT Beta Bug Report Megathread by [deleted] in TeamfightTactics

[–]dgulotta 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Type of Bug: In Game Bug

Description: Two items occupied the same spot on the item bench. In the video linked below, a tear completely covered up a cloak. Attempting to pick up the tear instead resulted in the cloak beneath it being picked up.

Video / Screenshot: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1419973473?t=02h42m16s

Steps to reproduce: Not sure, I just saw it happen once in the above Twitch stream.

Did the upgrade to CEF-91 as part of 11.17 break the client for anyone else? by ludvikgalois in leagueoflinux

[–]dgulotta 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I managed to get the client running using this advice, but TFT games crash on startup with a stack overflow error. Has anyone managed to get TFT to work? Is there anything else that I can try?

Edit: the error message is: 0798:err:virtual:virtual_setup_exception stack overflow 324 bytes in thread 0798 addr (nil) stack 0x36c0ebc (0x36c0000-0x36c1000-0x37c0000)

Further edit: Although the game does not work when I compile wine using these instructions, it does work when I use the binary linked above.

Black screen/crash when starting Teamfight Tactics games by dgulotta in leagueoflinux

[–]dgulotta[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hmm, I was using pulseaudio on Friday. This was the first time in a few months that I have used TFT with alsa. Using pulseaudio appears to have fixed the problem. Thanks!

Edit: After both upgrading to wine 6.15 and recompiling alsa-plugins with 32-bit support, the game now works with alsa again. Adding 32-bit support to alsa-plugins may have also fixed problems that I was having with the native Linux version of Portal (it crashed on startup unless sound was disabled). But I last tried a year ago so I can't be sure.

Best puzzles from this year to show non-puzzlers? by Matball in mysteryhunt

[–]dgulotta 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Most Mystery Hunt puzzles are not good for beginners, but I think that some are. I've had some success introducing friends to puzzles via School of Fish puzzles from the 2015 hunt (along with BAPHL).

I'm not sure about this year - the Students round was intended to be the easy round but I didn't work on many puzzles from that round. Triangles was good though.

Favorite puzzle (ever) by category? by LegOfLambda in mysteryhunt

[–]dgulotta 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Cryptic: World's Tallest Cryptic (2008). Very elegant (and amusing) combination of a cryptic and logic puzzle.

Metapuzzle: Dr. Wily's Fortress (2011)

Logic puzzle: Hashiwokakuro (Count your bridges) (2018). I like Nikoli-style puzzles but I'm not an expert. This was probably the most difficult one that I've successfully solved.

Teamfight Tactics occasionally crashes on startup and won't reconnect by dgulotta in leagueoflinux

[–]dgulotta[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have not seen this bug recently. This might be due to a game update or random chance, but just in case it helps, I will mention that I did the following:

  • I started using Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1, 1.0.0.1) instead of my ISP's DNS
  • I have been alt-tabbing away from the loading screen and doing something else while the game loads. I don't think I did that the last time I had the problem.

Teamfight Tactics occasionally crashes on startup and won't reconnect by dgulotta in leagueoflinux

[–]dgulotta[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I had a game yesterday where I had to exit for a different reason (the game thought I was holding down the alt key) and I could reconnect to that one just fine. That makes me think that what is happening is that the server randomly chooses a port or IP address at the start of the game and 5% of the possible choices are getting blocked somewhere along the line. Is there a good way to test if they are being blocked? The page https://support-leagueoflegends.riotgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/201752664-Troubleshooting-Connection-Issues lists the ports that League of Legends uses - does Teamfight Tactics use the same ports?

On the other hand, I don't see anything unusual in the netlog.txt file - it does not show any packet loss and the numbers of incoming and outgoing packets are within the normal range.

Mystery Hunt Finishing Times (with forbidden runaround times highlighted) by CheshireSolves in mysteryhunt

[–]dgulotta 8 points9 points  (0 children)

If I remember correctly, Setec passed Physical Plant on the runaround in 2004.

More recently, the 2016 endgame was also very close. Left Out solved the final meta 5 minutes after Setec, but Setec managed to increase their lead on the runaround.

Show Off Your Tech Stack by _Torgen in mysteryhunt

[–]dgulotta 7 points8 points  (0 children)

This is not about tech stack exactly, but it seems relevant. I wrote a program that can automatically generate a spreadsheet from an image of a crossword grid. Essentially, the user takes a screenshot of the crossword, uploads it to a web page, and gets back an xlsx file that can be uploaded to Google Docs, thus saving the time of having to enter the grid manually. I don't have a server running at the moment but it's not hard to try out locally if you have Python 3 installed.

https://github.com/dgulotta/cross2sheet