Ouch, yeah, this is something that’s rattling around. It’s clear to me, because I made the puzzles, but it’s obviously not clear to you and other smart people, so I have a gap to bridge.
This feels like something I could and should have asked around about back in January, as part of the initial maintenance releases, so things were nailed down.
I have an example in HINT LL, but I still don’t think it’s good enough.
In the interest of not spoiling BBKK, I’d like to give two examples from LLJJ.
LLJJ first room puzzle
Bane Be Sane, See to ----- ---- (5 letters, 4)
The Learner sees two values: the from-average and to-average.
For Bane, the “from” values are 3.5 (average of the first words) and 2.0 (average of the second.)
The answer is (5.0, 4.0). So the learner shows (+1.5, +1.0) as a clue of what to get next.
Locking Lift puzzle
Locking Lift to (5 settings)
Five settings to see side areas:
8-5
7-4
7-4
8-5
7-6
From-average = (7, 4)
To-average = (7.4, 4.8)
Reading = (.4, .8) which changes based on which settings you figure out.
You can also have cases where fractions combine together but fortunately these are generally 1/2 and cancel each other out. (You can get a .17 where they combine in the Blight in BBKK.)
LLJJ room with two possible fractions
In the No-New-Show Shoe, the “from” quotient is (6/2, 7/2). But when you want the food and drink, there are two puzzles. One is (3 letters-4 letters) and one is (4 letters-4 letters). That means “to” is (7/2, 8/2) giving a reading of (.5, .5) until one is solved. Then it changes to either (3, 4) or (4, 4) with a reading of (0, .5) or (1, .5).
There are other nuances–if point-scoring answers are immediately available, you only see those, but if there are valid answers with nothing that immediately scores points, you see them. (I don’t detect if you’re unprepared, yet. That’d be messy code, and besides, the player can try to guess so they have stuff done ahead of time.)
And there are other cases. For instance, in Trust Track, there’s a 6/4 puzzle that opens a 5/5 puzzle, and the 5/5 puzzle doesn’t register on the Learner until the 6/4 is cleared.
I’m open to how I can do things better. It’s something where I checked my work a lot, but it’s tough to make intuitive to others, and the point of a hinting device is to do just that.
I think I’m missing a magic bullet or two that would make things easier. The device was intented to be upgraded from VVFF, because there was potentially more than one puzzle per room, and I wasn’t happy with how it worked then. But I’m still not happy with how it worked!
It would be programmatically easier to have something like “5, 37, 24” for the Lift example, but then that doesn’t immediately/intuitively give you an expected number of letters to try. I also wanted it this way because if you make a good guess, and the Learner is set to YO YES, you get a settler reading, e.g. if you guess FO FUDGE in the Sludge when you need to ---- ------, you’ll see (2,1) come up. FOE FUDGE gives (1, 1).
I want to reward the player for making good guesses in a 4-word room, so you get a potentially less fractional settler reading, but I don’t want to freeze them out if they don’t grok fractions right away. I meant it as more of a check-off than “you have to understand fractions,” but … fractions are tricky and intimidating and unexpected.
So I’m open to suggestions here from anyone! I probably can’t implement them until post-comp, but I appreciate them nonetheless, as any such suggestions would ripple through core code that affects several games.