[Project] Researching Maxium Sword Hit Rate (e.g. for Horseman's Blade Arena)
- Thread starter ZeroGravitas
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DicemanX
Brain of Cthulhu
Not always - during the moon event some pumpkins do target the birds even with hostile enemies on screen. This is based on proximity to the birds though - if the pumpkins are too far away from the birds they will go after more proximal hostile mobs.
Here's an interesting observation though from a couple of runs I did a moment ago:
I disconnected the mob statues in the player box from the bird engine and hooked them up to the 1 second timers again. The birds in the box on the far right were not targeted at all until the Queens showed up and brought some of the pumpkins closer to the birds and some of those pumpkins killed the birds. By comparison, when the bird engine was powering the mob statues in the box the birds were targeted almost right away. It's as if the pumpkins can "sense" that the birds are the cause of hostile mobs spawning, and are targeted. No other changes were made aside from the wiring in this comparison. Bizarre.
ZeroGravitas
The Destroyer
What wiring changes did you make, exactly? Was the bird engine still killing it's birds as usual? (Needless to say, I don't like any theory that relies on the code making reasoned inferences.)
DicemanX
Brain of Cthulhu
The bird engine on the right is powered by a 1-second timer, and once three birds are summoned by the timer they bounce around across 5 pressure plates. Here's the wiring:
The first set of tests had the wires between the bird engine and the mob statues connected, and the wires to the 1-second timers on the left were cut (birds were attacked shortly after the moon event was triggered). In the second set of tests the wiring is as pictured above, and the birds were only attacked once Ice Queens showed up at wave 11.
ZeroGravitas
The Destroyer
Very surgical. Fascinatingly bizarre. I think we'd need to simplify matters to tease out exactly what's happening though, too many variables there, with change in spawn rate and timing of statue mobs spawns, for a start. You could try seeing what happens to the birds when if the their plates activate a different device instead rather than nothing), like a bomb statue, or whatever. But either way it would prove nothing.
ZemmySix
Retinazer
I use the ice theme to fit with my avatar, I though you would us the mushrooms to match yours. Oh, and I wonder if the pumpkins all target the same enemy, also will pumpkins attempt to hit the same enemy the sword hit?
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ZemmySix
Retinazer
You look a bit like your made of pokeballs now that I think about it.
DicemanX
Brain of Cthulhu
OK attempted the following:
New record achieved, but not by much. I engineered a vertical NPC drop of 16 tiles (which is just above 0.5sec, since the player drops at a rate of 31 tiles/sec from my testing) and the pressure plate at the bottom of one drop is connected to 3 different colored wires hooked up to the mob statues in the player box. The pressure plate in the other drop is hooked up to 2 different colored wires. This means each mob statue is activated at 5 activation points every 0.5 seconds, and three of those activations are staggered compared to the other two activations since the NPCs don't drop simultaneously.
There is a massive increase in the number of pumpkins - it is quite noticeable. For instance:
In the early waves there is this floating mass of death that obliterates everything upon contact, including the first few Ice Queens. I think I might be able to beat the 1am time with this sort of set-up, but there is a bit of luck involved based on whether the Ice Queens can successfully evade the pumpkins upon spawning.
The other approach I could do is a hoik approach with 60 teeth and teleporters at both ends so that I can insert two pressure plates along the way and guarantee that the statue activations will be staggered. Thing is, the NPCs will take damage eventually from the Ice Queen piercing projectiles, since those projectiles are shot from almost every angle towards the player. The NPCs always live to the final wave at least. With a horizontal hoik system, it would be hard to place it on screen in a way to avoid collisions with the Queens, and I've had trouble with NPCs disappearing from the drop if they are off-screen.
ZeroGravitas
The Destroyer
Is there any reason not to cross-link the teleporter drops, shorten their height for 0.25s and then use a single NPC. Like ManBearTroll's teleporter engine?
I take it you are pretty confident that the NPCs aren't reducing frost moon spawn rate, then? (If not you could of course try having *all* the NPCs on screen at once, in case the effect is more subtle than usual? Dubious.)
DicemanX
Brain of Cthulhu
Well now, that's a great idea! Saves space, creates an automatic guaranteed stagger, and commits only one NPC to the engine. I'll try it out!
EDIT:
Set it up and it works like a charm! Now to do more tests...
Good question. When I was going through the 1:14am run I thought I was going to shatter the record because I got off to a flying start, moving through the waves faster than on my 1:15am run. But somehow in the end I only finished 1 second faster. I should see what happens when I summon more NPCs, although if they have an impact then at least reducing the engine to 1 NPC should help, and it's already proven to be at least as good as the 1-sec timer version. More testing to follow!
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DicemanX
Brain of Cthulhu
With the set-up in the previous post there was one major problem - the NPC wasn't surviving until the final wave. I kept summoning another in each run (the switch is just below where I'm stationed in the player box), but I'd prefer not to have NPCs die at all. So I tried this approach:
The NPC box is now in a sweet-spot - just below the roving Ice Queens, and close to the player level so that the Ice Queens cannot fire their projectiles at the player and hit the NPC.
The box is compressed so the plates are hit more frequently than every 0.5s, but while there may be a statue activation point 0.5s cooldown, I'm not so sure that any further activations during cooldown have any detrimental effect - I still get a massive swarm of pumpkins that annihilate everything upon contact for the first 12-13 waves.
However I'm running into another problem which I ran into many times before. It seems that no matter what farm configuration I run, the final wave times get progressively worse with repeated testing until I restart the computer. All my best times were when I first fired up Terraria after restarting. Curious.
The NPC box is now in a sweet-spot - just below the roving Ice Queens, and close to the player level so that the Ice Queens cannot fire their projectiles at the player and hit the NPC.
The box is compressed so the plates are hit more frequently than every 0.5s, but while there may be a statue activation point 0.5s cooldown, I'm not so sure that any further activations during cooldown have any detrimental effect - I still get a massive swarm of pumpkins that annihilate everything upon contact for the first 12-13 waves.
However I'm running into another problem which I ran into many times before. It seems that no matter what farm configuration I run, the final wave times get progressively worse with repeated testing until I restart the computer. All my best times were when I first fired up Terraria after restarting. Curious.
ZeroGravitas
The Destroyer
Perhaps the early waves just aren't important, the ice queen variability is a far larger factor...
That's annoying, if not co-incidental. I imagine there could be 'memory leaks' in the game code that clog things up a little, but shouldn't imging that's an issue on a capable PC.
I'm a little surprised that this activation configuration worked better than the all-out bird engine pressure plate frenzy... The birds should have created more staggered statue spawning, which I would have thought also spread the positions of the monsters out better. Which critcodedtuna found to be more efficient for killing:
So, my only explanations are:
- Spreading kills to successive sword swings if more efficent at avoiding kill gaps.
- The sparser, more structured teleporter engine activations are less likely to cause wasted activations, blocked by spawn limit.
Thinking of increasing mob availability: I imagine hoiking in each statue mob type (to circumvent spawn limits) could get messy to implement, although I think they should all work on a universal horizontal. It might be hard to avoid this messing with the pumpkins, I don't know. But there could be some fairly weird configuration designs, with teleporting mobs in from all sides of the screen, or something, that would work better... I don't know.
DicemanX
Brain of Cthulhu
Certainly a lot of factors to look at! What's particularly notable though is that even though I did noticeably increase the pumpkin spawn rate, it didn't translate into a significantly better final wave time. It's as though I've reached some sort of limit so that making things more efficient at this stage will not improve the time. I plan to test the current set-up a little more to see if I can break 1:14am.
I also plan to test the following:
During the early waves there's a build-up of pumpkins than roves around close to the surface and almost instantly vaporizes what it touches. However, there's a pause in mobs spawning at various times, causing the mass of pumpkins to travel to the player box and dissipate there when it touches the mobs. I figure that putting down mob statues close to the spawn surface will keep attracting the pumpkins to those mobs and prevent them from dissipating in the player box.
I also plan to test the following:
During the early waves there's a build-up of pumpkins than roves around close to the surface and almost instantly vaporizes what it touches. However, there's a pause in mobs spawning at various times, causing the mass of pumpkins to travel to the player box and dissipate there when it touches the mobs. I figure that putting down mob statues close to the spawn surface will keep attracting the pumpkins to those mobs and prevent them from dissipating in the player box.
DicemanX
Brain of Cthulhu
Hmm, when I restart the computer I don't let it cool between shutting it down and restarting, and yet I still see an improvement in final wave time. Could that restart really have a big enough impact on hardware temperature and performance?
ZeroGravitas
The Destroyer
No. Not unless your CPU's continuously on the verge of catching fire. The hardware will either work fine or not at all, IMHO. In addition to potential memory issues with the game code, might there be other programs running in the background? Causing any issue? I've just seen appalling frame rate lag while encoding my video (finally done!!!) and running a bunch of teleporter engines. But if you have no visible performance issues, then it's almost certainly esoteric Terraria code idiosyncrasies (or co-incidence).
Certainly it will be interesting to see how much you can guide a mass of pumpkins. Like one commenter on a hoik video of mine wanting to build a pumpkin accumulator. Can you keep them circulating indefinitely, untill you reach the 1000k limit?!
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