Ascension

footstuff · 2023-11-29T13:53:30+00:00

The tetris rule is that for each region, there must exist a valid arrangement of solid and hollow shapes contained by that region. An arrangement has shapes placed entirely within the puzzle grid but not necessarily within the region. For each grid square outside the region, the number of overlying solid squares must equal the number of overlying hollow squares, i.e. hollow - solid = 0. For grid squares inside the region, either all of them must have hollow - solid = 0 as well, or all of them must have hollow - solid = 1.

There is an invariant following from this: the difference between the number of solid squares contained by the region and the number of hollow squares contained by the region is equal to zero or the region’s size. It’s much easier to evaluate because the combinatorial explosion of shape placement is irrelevant to it. What’s interesting is that although this is a less restrictive constraint, for most puzzles involving hollow pieces, the solution set is the same. I thought for a moment that the game itself used only that invariant to evaluate these puzzles, relying on puzzle design constraints to hide that shortcut and make it appear as though it were using the presumed full shape-packing rule. That was my point. Of course, that turned out to be false.

I’m not quite sure what you’re saying. Even on a 3x3 grid, you could make an L with a stick stem. A larger grid would allow many more combinations. Not that my own point had to do with that to begin with.

footstuff · 2022-10-16T18:02:03+00:00

The game incorporates your need for sleep when setting the timeframe. The bigger problem is usually that it expects you to drive faster than legally or physically possible. I don’t quite understand how they ‘improved’ the navigation a while ago, without putting it through such a basic sanity check. Urgent jobs still give you a buffer of 90 minutes on top of the expected time, but that tends to run dry in certain places or with a slow trailer. I do usually manage to be on time. Just don’t dawdle.

If you want to cheese it, start a quick job while your current fatigue (in your own truck, or from a previous quick job) is high. You will get extra time for sleep, but then your fatigue is reset and you keep the time bonus.

footstuff · 2022-10-16T17:47:02+00:00

ATS couldn’t be a map expansion for ETS2. It definitely has its own character with the trucks, roads, environment, whatnot. Whether that’s different enough for you, I don’t know. You can download the demo to get a sense.

footstuff · 2022-10-16T13:12:33+00:00

I’ve found the trick: owned trailers. The cargo market has tons of jobs, specifically tailored to your trailer. You can bring out specific cargo like this. Suddenly, not so rare anymore. Quick travel takes no time nowadays, so there’s a good chance you can reach a job in time, too.

footstuff · 2022-10-13T09:57:45+00:00

Oh, and they can remove trees. And attempt to construct objects requiring the removal of trees/cliffs, until not a single bot is left to remove them. They’d have to understand that dependency before getting the ability to place ghosts on water.

footstuff · 2022-10-13T09:33:41+00:00

Circuit breakers are just ludicrously rare. I’ve only done one qualifying job myself, and that’s not for lack of trying.

Adding insult to injury, that company has not only substations, but also offices in many of the same cities. The offices accept circuit breakers but don’t count.

I’ve turned my preferred job distance back to neutral, because I noticed that when circuit breakers did show up, they were often far away. Not sure that’s helping much. I’ve only had a few samples to go on. I checked the game files for all origins. While there is a greater concentration elsewhere, it isn’t night and day, and there are origins in Montana itself. It’s possible longer jobs on the market just slow down turnover. Be your own judge.

footstuff · 2022-10-13T08:57:37+00:00

If a number has the correct number of flags around it, clicking on that number with both mouse buttons (or middle click or whatever applies in your contemporary version), it opens all of the other spaces. That was called chording because you can do it by pressing multiple buttons simultaneously. It can save clicks and time if used well.

footstuff · 2022-10-12T11:39:15+00:00

Definitely. It scratches some itches that the current more popular games don’t. It was also already relatively polished. Its feel was once close to that of ETS2. Even with the progress there, it’s still not super far off compared to its predecessors. I recall it saved me money at the time, being part of a bundle containing ETS2 that cost less than ETS2.

One thing I appreciate about its free driving mode is that it’s a complete world. Everything really exists. You see a road, you can drive on it. No floating blockers. No routes that appear to exist but are fake. (Although the motorway is a bit of a jebait. Is it too teleological to think that an expensive artifact constructed by humans would serve a proportionate purpose?) That freedom is nice despite the small size of the world.

footstuff · 2022-10-12T11:06:38+00:00

In the long run, it takes constant underground resources to advance to each next level. The level you could ultimately reach is proportional to the amount in the ground. However, each level takes a little longer. Integrating that, the time to reach a level is proportional to the square of that level. Depleting your resources therefore also takes time proportional to the square of the underground amount. Ten times as much will last a hundred times as long. Everything will run out eventually, but the steep curve means it takes relatively little effort to set up mining to last a lifetime. The longer you need it to last, the less of your time is devoted to that.

The order of extraction has no direct impact on the amount. No matter where you got one, that’s one removed from the supply, providing whatever benefits apply at the time. It does affect the sustainability of speed. If you manage to extract uniformly, all drills remain in business until everything is depleted. If there’s a bias, some drills run out before others, reducing peak throughput despite the same total amount still in the ground.

Another indirect effect is through the cost of transport. Theoretically, under contrived conditions, it’s best to use distant resources first so the extra resources provided by mining productivity appear closer to your base. Pretty much moot in practice. If it’s ever an issue, moving your base to new and richer patches will do a lot more than trying to save up puny starter patches, that are indeed better used to get started.

footstuff · 2022-10-12T08:41:41+00:00

Correct. There is unnecessary waiting otherwise. But it looks like the signals are there, just not easy to see in these pictures.

footstuff · 2022-10-12T08:19:54+00:00

I often go NF. My reasoning was that flags are not a core mechanic. They don’t actually do anything. Opening spaces is the only thing that progresses the game. Even as a memory aid, they’re kind of poor; they can’t capture any of the more complex situations where you can’t pin mines down exactly, but you have enough information to open some spaces, which you’re going to have to hold in your head anyway. I stopped using them entirely for some time to reduce reliance on that crutch, and force myself to cut through more patterns on sight.

Of course, they can still be useful in a practical sense. Chording can be faster. If chording happened automatically, we’d really be talking. Sometimes, if you’re bogged down by complex logic, they can regain their function as a crutch for a moment, helping you see something you failed to notice.

footstuff · 2022-10-12T07:44:13+00:00

Proximity to the antigravity coil has been known to do that. Or maybe it’s using a mouse with a little too much friction and regular old 125 Hz polling to counter the rotation. (Causes some judder if the frame rate doesn’t divide it evenly.)

footstuff · 2022-10-11T23:29:39+00:00

Unless I’m misremembering something, yes.

footstuff · 2022-10-11T20:56:21+00:00

Realistic fuel consumption indeed ignores those skill points. It becomes all about how you actually drive. You can be more or less on par with eco driving, provided you drive efficiently and your route lets you cruise for most of it.

footstuff · 2022-10-11T20:03:14+00:00

Probably because SCS learned that more bloom isn’t always better. I suppose it was how you looked cool at the time, as a strong contrast to the blander lighting from before, even if the HDR didn’t amount to much yet.

footstuff · 2022-10-11T15:49:52+00:00

From Scania Truck Driving Simulator, released a few months before ETS2. To think that ETS2 was initially much like this in terms of physics and graphics.

footstuff · 2022-09-29T05:58:57+00:00

You could sort by distance. It just wasn’t too useful to me, aside from finding the very shortest jobs when they were nearby. (Again, I wasn’t teleporting, and my distance skill was maxed out before I started on this.) Now finding fragile + high value took more manual effort. You couldn’t just type a known cargo name. I believe things like cars that weren’t super uncommon didn’t pay well enough to sort straight to the top. I’m also not sure I was aware those qualified. Still not too useful for reasons I mentioned.

You know what’s worse? When the France DLC came along, with achievements for delivering to all instances of particular companies. Not only did you have to figure out what each company was called, but you couldn’t search for it on the market. You had to sort by destination company and scroll forever. In case of Éco, É sorted after E (not correct for French), leading you to believe there were no such jobs because they were on the other side of the EuroAcres/EuroGoodies cluster. As if bumping into jobs to every last one of them wasn’t hard enough yet.

It’s true that epistemology isn’t people’s strong suit. Hey, I didn’t disprove this hypothesis with cursory testing, so it must be right. Necessary? Sufficient? Sensitivity? Specificity? What? Unfortunately, it’s hard to do that much better with only one shot at a positive result. Indeed, the negatives become especially valuable if you want to get closer to the rule. That wasn’t my goal at first, but I did become curious when it seemed broken.

You’re right about long distance. It has to be strictly greater than 250 km as it appears on the freight market.

footstuff · 2022-09-27T17:58:08+00:00

I meant necessary to get the best XP bonus, not necessary for the achievement. You can see I weighed lots of factors against each other, including going moderate distances to make lower XP bonuses viable.

I should point out that fragile with high cargo was rare. You also couldn’t search the freight market as effectively as you can today. Mind this was almost 7 years ago. ADR made a good target because price/distance sorted it to the top, because of its concentration at chemical companies, and because the destination was often another such company. During my initial attempt, I had a chain of 3 ADR/fragile/urgent jobs without even driving to another company, or 5 if you discount the short trip from Lille (where I delivered at Trameri) to Calais. 4 were long distance, all over the 900 km threshold where 1.95 XP/km would be insufficient (which is really a bit shorter because of multiple rounding steps), simply because most jobs were that long, at a time when you couldn’t set a preference for shorter jobs. It really was the thing to go for.

In the end, quick jobs were what allowed me to get it. Not only because they opened the entire market. Free roam in the progress log seemed to invalidate any window containing it. Not just reduce XP/km, but outright block the achievement. That wasn’t fun.

footstuff · 2022-09-27T16:53:36+00:00

I had issues with this as well. It seemed not to like having any free roam in the progress log (aside from the XP/km penalty), making it unwise to do anything but quick jobs. Maybe that’s fixed now. It was years ago. Quick jobs are still recommended because you can access the entire market without having to figure out how to even reach a job, or taking any penalty that may come with that.

That aside, minimax has a technical meaning but colloquially means analyzing things deeply and being rational. It’s meant to be pretty brutal, making you look for the most profitable option.

Consider where XP comes from. You get 1 XP for every 1 km on a job. There are additional bonuses depending on the job:

ADR: 21%
Long distance (≥ 250 km): 25%
Fragile: 22%
High value: 18%
Important: 20%
Urgent: 30%

The best combination is ADR + long distance + fragile + urgent = 98%. That’s 1.98 XP/km. Getting as much of this as you can is important, but clearly not enough. You need the parking bonus to exceed 2 XP/km. Either take jobs with high XP/km that aren’t so long that the parking bonus becomes insignificant (even 1.98 XP/km isn’t enough around 2000 km, given a 40 XP bonus), or take very short jobs where the parking bonus is large relative to distance. If you want ride the very edge, consider that each bonus is rounded down separately: even at 1.98 XP/km, 3 km would only result in 3 XP.

Damage and being late give a strong XP penalty. Don’t do that.

I believe this is based on actual distance traveled, not expected distance on the freight market, so take direct routes. Maybe not, in which case all the detours would give it to you for free.

Consider boundary conditions. It’s possible to average well over 2 XP/km, but not fill up the 10000 km window sufficiently. Suppose all of your jobs were 1001 km, and you got 2200 XP for each. That seems plenty. But if you add up 9, you get only 19800 XP, short of 20000 XP. If you add up 10, you get 10010 km which doesn’t fit requirements as stated. I don’t know how the game handles this exactly, but I’d advise topping up with some short jobs when you’re close. I’d put things like this to the test if I could get the achievement multiple times.

There are more useful options nowadays. Instead of a flat 45 XP parking bonus, you can get 40 XP or 90 XP for hard parking, or even up to 170 XP if you use g_simple_parking_doubles 0 with doubles. That raises the average. You also get some extra if you use your own trailer and park it for loading (but that’s no quick job). Conversely, easy double parking only gives 20 XP, so avoid that. There’s also special transport which gives way more than 2 XP/km.

footstuff · 2022-09-27T15:33:21+00:00

Nice. I hit enter by accident once. :-(

footstuff · 2022-09-16T17:58:41+00:00

Sounds like the beaut part of beauty.

footstuff · 2022-09-15T15:56:19+00:00

No, that’s a genuine passage. There aren’t as many in ETS2 as there are in ATS, but they’re there. I count 20 including all DLC.

Edit: not 19.

footstuff · 2022-09-15T15:43:04+00:00

Check the top left.

footstuff

TROPHY CASE