Interactive Online Manual for Efficient Experts

[Aaron]

Hello everyone!

I created an online interactive manual for me and my friends to use to help with Bomb Defusing. I thought I might as well share it for anyone else to use.

It definitely does not make the game "easy" by any means, but it really helps in areas like deciphering complex wires, keeping track of everything in memory module and generating a visual guide to the maze.

Oh and if anyone has any good ideas to automating the Password module (The only module I didn't manage to make more efficient interactive) I would love to hear it.

Check it out at meteorice.com/bomb

Aaron Kison

[[FOR]mica]

You are amazing.

[Allen]

Thanks for your dedication and enthusiasm Aaron, that's really cool to see! :)

[Kristo]

I kind of think using the interactive manual makes the game less fun, but when some people find it useful I am willing to contribute. The way I would do the password is having 5 arrays of 35 letters each and 1 array with 35 booleans.
1st array is the 1st charater of every word in the order they appear, 2nd s the second character etc...
Then give the expert 5 fields to input letters corresponding to the position of characters in the password.
Have the expert write all the possible characters from the 1st position in the field. After all the 6 characters are written down, make the loop to check which words can be excluded. Just check if the character in the array appears in the input field, if not, set the corresponding boolean to false.
After the loop display all the possible words that still have the boolean set to true.

An example what the loop should look like. Not familiar with the syntax, but you should get the idea.

for(int i=0;i<35;i++)
{
if(arrBool(i) == true && !strInput1.Contains(arrChar1(i)))
{
arrBool(i) = false;
}
}

Hope you get what I mean.
Edit: Couldn't use square brackets, so used normal ones instead

[Aaron]

Yea, that's a fantastic idea and would definitely help exclude passwords, the problem is that inputting the combinations of letters to exclude could take just as long as doing the password manually.

The method you have described is similar to a Radix sort, and would probably crack the correct password (or narrow it down to a few) with inputting 15-20 letters.

The method me and my friends use is to quickly scroll through them looking for logical combinations, i.e. consonant-vowel / h etc. We found that manually inputting to exclude them was slower then guessing the password based on the first letter. Though perhaps with enough practice the automation could be faster.

It will definitely give me more to think about though, hopefully we can find something that works!

[Omenpapa]

I was expecting that some1 is going to create an automated manual like this, but was hoping that he/she won't just put it up on the forums.

I agree that at some parts the written manual is problematic, for example not following the alphabetic order is silly at a couple of the puzzles, or colorcoding the complex wires' venn diagram should have been down by default imo but..

Your manual on the other hand is going to ruin some ppl's experience too. Yes, you can say that if some1 don't wanna use it, they don't have to, but as a defuser when I would like to play with "randoms", I would want them to use their brain as an expert, and obviously that's not happening with ur manual :)

I really hope we are going to have procedurally generated rules in the future, because an automated manual like this is basicly killing the "play with randoms/people you don't trust" feature of the game.

Btw, if you want even more efficiency, then the site should first ask all the relevant informations somewhere at the top, and not asking it again and again for each relevant puzzle. Also clicking multiple times to select a puzzle type is not ideal. I would put 11 buttons at the top to select each puzzle individually and fast.

EDIT:
I love this message tho: "Oh crap, that's not in the manual! Cut randomly!" =)

[Kristo]

Originally posted by Aaron:

Yea, that's a fantastic idea and would definitely help exclude passwords, the problem is that inputting the combinations of letters to exclude could take just as long as doing the password manually.

The method you have described is similar to a Radix sort, and would probably crack the correct password (or narrow it down to a few) with inputting 15-20 letters.

The method me and my friends use is to quickly scroll through them looking for logical combinations, i.e. consonant-vowel / h etc. We found that manually inputting to exclude them was slower then guessing the password based on the first letter. Though perhaps with enough practice the automation could be faster.

It will definitely give me more to think about though, hopefully we can find something that works!

With the method I gave you could include a script that would find the most relevant position of letters to input.(the position that has the highest number of unique characters might be a good choice)
That way it should mostly provide the correct answer after inserting all the letters from 2 columns. 12 letters total, should rarely as for the 3rd one. Going through 2 columns of letters and writing them in a field shouldn't really take too long at all. And that would be a consistent way of doing it.

EDIT:
For example 1st and second column should actually be the worst ones to start with as over 15% of the words start with TH, so you would waste unneccessary time over 15% of the time. Taking on the last 3 letters first would be a better choice.

EDIT:
Actually, now that I look into it, 1st or 4th should be the best ones to start with.

[Aaron]

Originally posted by Omenpapa:

I was expecting that some1 is going to create an automated manual like this, but was hoping that he/she won't just put it up on the forums.

I agree that at some parts the written manual is problematic, for example not following the alphabetic order is silly at a couple of the puzzles, or colorcoding the complex wires' venn diagram should have been down by default imo but..

Your manual on the other hand is going to ruin some ppl's experience too. Yes, you can say that if some1 don't wanna use it, they don't have to, but as a defuser when I would like to play with "randoms", I would want them to use their brain as an expert, and obviously that's not happening with ur manual :)

I really hope we are going to have procedurally generated rules in the future, because an automated manual like this is basicly killing the "play with randoms/people you don't trust" feature of the game.

Btw, if you want even more efficiency, then the site should first ask all the relevant informations somewhere at the top, and not asking it again and again for each relevant puzzle. Also clicking multiple times to select a puzzle type is not ideal. I would put 11 buttons at the top to select each puzzle individually and fast.

EDIT:
I love this message tho: "Oh crap, that's not in the manual! Cut randomly!" =)

I must admit I didn't look at it from the perspective of playing with strangers, I've only every played with a few friends.

I strongly believe that those willing to find a "more efficient" way are going to do so anyway, whether it be brute memorization (Which I did for the button), handy short notes/translations for the Venn Diagram / Morse Code (Both of which also exist on the Forums here) or their own methods.

Perhaps online - if you are able - you could specify to play "Classic" instead of "Assisted". If anything I have learnt from the speedrunning community, it's that divide and conquer always works. Those who enjoy playing purely classic can do so, just requires a bit of communication - exactly what this game promotes.

Oh, and for asking for repeat information (Like last digit of serial number), I had an internal debate about the merits of remembering the information vs forcing people to use a "Reset" for stored information, and the "Do the most expected thing" side of my brain won out. People will not be able to tell when the site is incorrectly "remembering" information. The only consistent relevant information across the modules is number of batteries and last digit of serial number.


Also programmers will always adapt. Procedurally generated you say? Well then I guess I'm going to be brushing up on my Lexical Parsing skills, they do feel a bit rusty. If there is a consistent pattern, it will always be exploited. =)

[Aaron]

Originally posted by Kristo:

EDIT:
For example 1st and second column should actually be the worst ones to start with as over 15% of the words start with TH, so you would waste unneccessary time over 15% of the time. Taking on the last 3 letters first would be a better choice.

EDIT:
Actually, now that I look into it, 1st or 4th should be the best ones to start with.

Brilliant!

That's exactly the type of information I was missing - it seems so obvious now. At worst case, you'll always get the correct word in a generated "guess set". When I get some quiet free time I'm definitely going to look into it.

Thanks Kristo!

[Omenpapa]

Originally posted by Aaron:

Also programmers will always adapt. Procedurally generated you say? Well then I guess I'm going to be brushing up on my Lexical Parsing skills, they do feel a bit rusty. If there is a consistent pattern, it will always be exploited. =)

The best scenario would be to have an ingame freely downloadable client for the expert/experts, and then the defuser and the expert/s join together into a game, then the gmae randomizes the rules, then generates a random bomb.

Let's call that new mode to Ranked, and there ppl could compete on a leaderboard for example.

I would also keep the current 1.0 version "mode", which would be the classic with the same ruleset always, but randomized bombs.

That way both parties would be happy imo. Those who prefer to use sites/shortcuts/whatever could use the classic mode, and the guys who wanna compete and want more challenge could play the ranked :)

[Kristo]

Originally posted by Aaron:

Originally posted by Kristo:

EDIT:
For example 1st and second column should actually be the worst ones to start with as over 15% of the words start with TH, so you would waste unneccessary time over 15% of the time. Taking on the last 3 letters first would be a better choice.

EDIT:
Actually, now that I look into it, 1st or 4th should be the best ones to start with.

Brilliant!

That's exactly the type of information I was missing - it seems so obvious now. At worst case, you'll always get the correct word in a generated "guess set". When I get some quiet free time I'm definitely going to look into it.

Thanks Kristo!

I whipped together a quick sample just for the heck of it. The only problem with it might be the loading times as I made it in Unity as a WebGL application. If you want, I can send it to you to test and possibly use in your interactive manual.

[Aaron]

Did you write your source in C#? I should be able to easily translate it to javascript. While I love unity as a whole, it does both load longer and exclude various platforms and people. (No automatic language translations, some people use browsers without Unity support/plugin etc).

[Kristo]

Yea, it's in C#. I can send you the code tomorrow if you want. Will need to add some comments to it and should be good to go.

EDIT: Send me your e-mail and I'll mail it to you.

[Aaron]

Thanks for the code Kristo, I've added it to the Password module.

The site has also now been converted into a JavaScript application, which means once you visit the page you can take it with you and go offline, and still be able to use all the interactive modules. As well as there are no more page loads, so all the modules are super fast to use.

As always, comments and feedback are welcomed and encouraged.

[kandebonfim]

Hey, good work Aaron. I'm working on an interactive manual too! keep-talking.herokuapp.com
The password module is very hard to solve programmatically but I made it too! Lol

Here is the link for discussions about it: http://steamcommunity.com/app/341800/discussions/0/451851477887243421/

[Ssnakes_Everywhere]

Is this happening to anyone else? im trying to open the link in my browser but it just says it cant reach the page. any help would be nice.