Let's Play: Jigsaw

Playing
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While we’re in flight, LOWER/U does nothing apparent (and it seems to be a toggle switch rather than a button?), while CUTENG/R is instant death:

Clunk! Suddenly all the B-29’s engines are dead! The plane drops from the sky like a brick, turning wing over wing… Not even a genius could hold it to a glide, and here there’s only you.

*** You have died ***

Gotta compliment the sardonic tone again. It used to be very familiar from the default messages built into Inform, though the snark has been gradually pared away from them over the editions in favor of something more neutral.

It definitely works better when it’s commenting on specific situations, rather than snarking at the player over parser errors.

REL/B…also doesn’t do anything obvious.

Clunk! The plane judders slightly as if its airstream were disturbed, then steadies.

We can press it as many times as we want, and get this message every time. Nothing changes in the other room descriptions. Having the undercarriage down also doesn’t seem to affect this. (I do wonder what part of the world I just carpet-bombed…)

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> x engine
A 2200hp Wright R-3350-23 Duplex Cyclone 18-cylinder radial with double exhaust turbocharger. At a guess.

Huh, so they are implemented (as opposed to the hatches and such). I wonder why. The description is the same between the left one (which we cut) and the right one (which we didn’t), and I haven’t found any other verbs that work on them.

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I’m sure Graham specifically quoted this bit of the game when he asked me about putting trig functions in Glulx.

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Hmm, grasping at straws here – I went back over the room descriptions and noticed that the navigator’s chair is specifically called out in the cockpit. Anything findable there by Xing, SEARCHing, LOOKing UNDER, etc.? Maybe a map or a message or…?

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> x chair
You see nothing special about the navigator’s chair.

> look under chair
You find nothing of interest.

> search chair
You find nothing of interest.

Hm, nope, seems pretty plain…

> sit in chair

Navigator’s Alcove
A little alcove in the crew cabin, cowled and windowless: where you sit, resting your arms on the chart table. The charts have been hurriedly torn away, leaving only a rough edge with most of the word “SECRET” on it.

The radio is on. Above is a three-figure car milometer type number on a readout: currently 160.

What?!

Okay, so we have a new exit!

Most of the scenery here is unimplemented, but the radio can be switched on and off (no description sadly), and I think the number might be a frequency? I haven’t found a way to transmit with it yet, but we might be able to receive something relevant.

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Yay, progress! Or maybe “progress?” Can we SET RADIO TO ### to change the frequency? Even if so I’m not sure what number we’d pick, though, and I’m running out of ideas other than trying to blindly fly places on the map…

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No map, sadly, they’ve all been torn away for SECRET reasons. I was contemplating putting some paper on the table and scribbling over it with a pencil, to pick up on imprints from previous writing, but we have neither paper nor pencil right now.

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Is the table actually implemented? If so, might as well try to lick rub it.

(Actually, can we keep RUBBING the pinup? Maybe there’s more to the message?)

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291

Mysterious plane! A few random questions:

Did we ever go to 2700,0? (I know that’s a little tricky with the heading and all.)

Do we know where we started? The position was reported as (2815,200) at one point, but I’m not sure how far into messing with the engines that happened.

Can we listen to the radio, or is there no sound even if we change the number?

Can we drop the safe like a bomb or otherwise get it off the plane?

I don’t think this is the right answer, but I’m curious if it’s possible to try landing the plane by tipping the nose down just a bit to start reducing altitude (not enough to cause a stall), lowering the landing gear, and reducing thrust a bit, then when the altitude is very low, raising the nose to slightly above level again to increase drag and cutting the thrust. I’m not a pilot, but I did study aerospace engineering, so I know in very general terms how an airplane flies and what it takes to land it, although I have no idea to what precision that sort of thing might be implemented here (probably not much).

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Is it possible to go under the clouds and, with the right bearing, visually find a suitable landing spot?

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Afraid not. “There’s nothing beneath that.”

Not implemented, unfortunately. The only things implemented here are the radio and the number display, and doing anything to the display just tells you what number is on it.

I haven’t managed it yet, but that might be our goal.

The first turn we can see the instruments (our second turn on the plane), we’re at (2919, 8). That becomes (2815, 200) by the time the plane is functional enough to fly without crashing.

“You hear nothing unexpected.” If we try to set it to something: “The channels are preset and numbered 1 to 3.” Unfortunately, none of them make any noise.

Notably, the number on the display doesn’t seem to be the current channel. When I restored to play with the radio, it changed to 001, and has stayed that way even when I change the channel.

I thought it might be this, since that would explain the DROP/B button and why the safe can be removed from the locker but not interacted with further…but unfortunately DROP/B and LOWER/U do nothing to it.

A better idea than any of mine, certainly! This will be my next course of action.

Also a good idea! The descriptions of the clouds do change as the plane crashes, so if we make a controlled descent we might be able to see our goal.

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Oh. It helps if I turn the radio on. When it’s off, the readout always says 001; when it’s on, it says 160. And the save I’d restored was before turning it on.

Channel 1 gives static; channel 2 gives “bored Slavonic voices”; channel 3 gives static. All three of them set the readout to 160. The readout is implemented as its own object, but every action on it does the same thing:

> x readout
The three-figure number is presently 160.

> turn readout
The three-figure number is presently 160.

> hit readout
The three-figure number is presently 160.

I also haven’t found any way to transmit with the radio, which makes sense if we’re on a spying mission.

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Inasmuch as we’re in a nuclear-armed bomber I doubt this was initially conceived of as a spy mission, at least!

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I’ve just found that out by redoing the Fleming chapter. I’ve been trying to find a way of wrecking history in that one - apparently you can’t lick the petri dish and contaminate it. (I tried eating it, but that’s too revolting.) Although a future without antibiotics is pretty terrible to contemplate …

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The puzzle with the safe is rather annoying, it’s not really describe all that well, so you don’t even know what mechanism there is to open it whether it’s a key or a combination, so I feel like it would be fair to save you a bit of trouble, don’t bother trying to open it until you find your destination, you won’t be able to do it. Can’t help so much with the actual finding of the destination, I ended up just brute forcing this puzzle and coming across the solution by sheer luck, so I don’t know what reasoning you need to solve it.

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Some more experimentation reveals:

  • If we go down below the clouds, “Below the plane is a vast expanse of black, choppy ocean, with waves like shifting skyscrapers.”
  • After about 20 minutes the fuel runs out again. When this happens, our speed gradually drops until…
  • “The plane, flying far too low, scrapes across the wave-tops, ditching into the ocean. But B-29s were never designed to float, and you drown almost at once.”

So I think our goal is to get over land before the fuel runs out. Then we can start thinking about landing. In the course of this death, the radio and the readout above it never changed, so I have no idea what’s going on with those.

Dipping down below the clouds and then flying around randomly, I haven’t found any sign of land. The throttle affects how fast our fuel runs out, but I haven’t gotten the hang of it—so I’m just leaving the autopilot on, which drains 1% per turn, giving us a solid hour and a half.

I also discovered we can hit the water at higher speed, if we want a different message:

The plane, flying far too low, smashes onto the iron-hard waves, where it explodes in a great oily fireball.

I did manage to reach (2763, 11), which is as close as I’ve gotten to (2700, 0), but no dice. Still nothing but choppy waters. Similarly, I managed to get to (512, 143) in an attempt to reach (0, 0), but then ran out of fuel and crashed. Again, nothing but water.

I’m going to keep mulling this one over, but the possibility space for flying around randomly is just too big, so I don’t think that’s going to get us anywhere useful. There must be something else that will give us a destination to aim for—but what? The navigator’s chair and the radio seem the most promising, but nothing I do to them seems to have an effect.

I’m hereby officially requesting a hint. Is there some basic step I’m missing, like not examining the joystick in the lunar rover? Some place in the plane I should be searching more closely? Or is the intent really just to brute-force-search for land?

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For anyone who wants to experiment, here’s a very tedious transcript:

16c.txt (27.2 KB)

And a save file right after stabilizing the engine, as fast as possible, so that you have the maximum amount of time to fly around:

tmp.sav (6.7 KB)

I recommend playing on Bocfel (the default Z-machine interpreter in Gargoyle), because of its very convenient /undo command: this works exactly like normal UNDO but bypasses the “can’t undo twice in a row” rule this game imposes. I’ve been making liberal use of it in exploration since learning that it exists!

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Challenge: Infinite corridor in Inform 7
300

Does the number on the radio change as you move? If the channels are numbered 1 through 3, I wonder if it might be a bearing? That we could head for (or away from)?

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Aha, it does. Seems to change by increments of 5 degrees. And you can’t see the position while you’re in the chair, ugh. So I guess you have to check the position; sit in chair to check the angle, then out and check the position again and interpolate?

Do we seriously have to triangulate?

Edit: Oh. Or you could just point the plane in the direction of the radio bearing. (he realizes, after having spent ten minutes flying around to take bearings and charting them on paper and doing the math)

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Yeah, so that gets you to an airfield. The radio bearing is from the beacon to the plane, so you have to add 180 and just fly in that direction. You can push control as many times as you need to refill the fuel tanks. I haven’t managed to land yet.

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