Chronic Logic

Yeah, I've noticed that a train will be able to go up a steeper slope in hard mode than in normal mode, on complex level 16.  Don't think it's intertia, because the train doesn't start with any speed before it hits the incline.

Terminal velocity, as I understand it, is caused by air resistance, so like, when a skydiver reaches about 200 mph, his body offers so much drag that he can go no faster.  I really don't think that the Immortal Engine takes any air resistance into account.  And if it did, a bullet-nosed train doesn't offer so much resistance that the train would have its speed reduced at all on an incline.

I like to drop the hav from extremely high altitudes on my bridges to see how resilient they are to stress, and it seems to me that the speed of the hav is capped.  http://www.pontifex2.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/sad.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':('>

Any thoughts?  If it is indeed capped, it should be uncapped, at least for freefall anyway.

This would be a big plus.  Also, in a related note, what about cut/copy/paste and mirror?  It suxors to have to build the identical halves of my bridge twice.  Being able to copy one side of a complex bridge element and mirror it to the other side would be very L337.

Well, if anything were going to be submitted or tabulated or whatnot, you'd have to be submitting to ChronicLogic.com, mainly for security reasons.  ChronicLogic doesn't want users' information being e-hijacked.

The reason I mention this, is because there's some discussion of a Pontifex Benchmark, and so, submitting benchmark results and system specs, a la MadOnion 3dMark, would be putting somewhat sensitive information out there that it would be wise to keep safe, or at least, if not safe, ChronicLogic must be able to assume all liability for any mishaps.

Standard practice really...  I definitely would like to see some kind of submission scheme though.

I guess I didn't describe my problem fully.  I've got an 800 MHz athalon and a TNT2 Ultra, and my friend here has an Intel 550 and a Geforce 2 Pro and his performance on large bridges with higher numbers of links (like, 3000+) is markedly improved, so my suspicion is that it's a video card issue.  Though, I have win2k and he's got win98, so there could be some processor choke from w2k.  Then again, maybe the game is optimized for Intel special instructions?  Any feedback from other people with similar configurations to mine would be appreciated.

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but wouldn't it be nice if for us neanderthals with TNT2's and Voodoos you could have a rendering option to just draw a single tube for each cluster of links.  This would reduce the polygon count 96-fold.  http://www.pontifex2.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'>

The individual links could still break and stuff, and just have triangles start falling off the tube, or something.  Or, perhaps just have a construction option for tubular steel vs. box trusses.

Certainly, the train shouldn't be able to drive through steel.  This isn't quite as serious as detecting all possible steel collisions, but would prevent people from building things through the road (which just looks silly).

Hear hear!  H/L cable and Masonry/Reinforced Concrete would be excellent materials for the palette.

I have no idea what a houseelf is, but I am quite certain my computer is not infected with any nasties from the web as I:
   1) don't download unsolicited .exe files
   2) run a virus scanner frequently

Thus, anything happening with Pontifex is most certainly pontifex' fault.  Most peculiarly, when I left the game open all night, it was in test mode.   But the screenshots were of a blank screen.  My theory is just that pontifex doesn't, as someone else said, know how to play with all the other kids in the sandbox.

Well, just the other day, I left Pontifex open all night, and the only interaction that I had with my computer in that time was turning the monitor off.  When I awoke the next morning, Pontifex had crashed because of the screensaver, but not before again taking (this time) 1000 screenshots of nothing, and again saving out the open level to several dozen nonsense filenames.

I have a TNT2 Ultra and Windows 2000, and when I alt tab, Pontifex still grabs all mouse and keyboard input.  I made the mistake of starting a conversation in AIM and then alt tabbing back to Pontifex.  While conversing, I had managed to take about 500 screeshots of a blank screen, save my level out to 10 different gobbeldygook nonsense file/bridge names containing lots of non alpha-numeric characters.  http://www.pontifex2.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/sad.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':('>  Also, alt-tabbing in windowed mode crashes the program completely.  Go figure!

Well, here's what I've come up with to confuse the issue...  If you add beams to a joint, it does in fact cause the area around that joint to break quicker.  I made a quick little map which adds more and more beams at each joint as you go from left to right.  The rightmost tower has the most beams that I could figure out how to attach to the tower in some meaningful structural fashion.

If you look closely, you'll see that the tower with more cross-bracing will collapse sooner.  If you wish, you can toy around with my bridge

I do believe that this limitation is due to using stack memory to store beams.  This constrains the number of beams to roughly 16000, give or take.  It's a simple matter to instead store beams on the heap.

I was putzing around in a custom level where I was attempting to make an extremely large suspension bridge, which due to the limitations of cable required that I have lots of the stuff, so of course, I had very large towers and a reinforced roadway and all the fixin's.

I god-moded the bridge to smithereenes, and only registered about 8000 broken links, but I venture to guess that there were a great deal more.

At any rate, after adding a couple more pieces of cable, I went back into test mode, and my level appeared to have only a couple cables dangling in midair!

I can only guess that whatever data structure was keeping track of my links got filled up and cycled back round.  Deleting the links that I could see in the editor and then going back into test mode made my whole bridge reappear.

Hmmm....

In case you think this is my fault, keep in mind that I have 256 MB of RAM and a 1.5 GB pagefile.  I don't think I'm running out of memory.  http://www.pontifex2.com/iB_html/non-cgi/emoticons/smile.gif" border="0" valign="absmiddle" alt=':)'>