Well, I Feel Stupid
So for the last few weeks/months, I had been struggling with something core to our game design. It hasn’t really help me up on development but it had been nagging in the back of my mind the whole time. One of the core tenants of our game requires six values to be in an on or off position. With these values there are 2^6 or 64 different combinations.I had worked out 62 of those but for the life of me could not figure out the last 2.
So I ignored the nagging voice in my head to focus on it for a long time. Well, it came back strong one I made progress on the back end portion of our game. This portion used that functionality and I wanted it to be complete. So this past Sunday, I was talking with Willis about the issue. I was explaining that Braille has the same situation of six positions each in an on or off state, but I couldn’t find any charts showing all 64 Braille Characters.
I began showing him some of the sites I had looked at and this site caught his eye. This site had all possible combinations up to four digits, but I needed six. But it was mainly this chart that caught his eye.
It is a tabled view of how to figure out the combinations of binary digits. Seeing that, he made the suggestion that I do that in a spread sheet. I can’t believe that I hadn’t thought of it.
So that is what I did. I created a spread sheet in Libre Office and went to work. Once I had all the combinations figured out there, I began cross referencing them to what I had already worked out. Turns out the two I had missed should have been obvious:
101010
010101
Those are the ones I missed. How I missed them, I will never know. It frustrated me to no end. So there you have it. I am kicking myself for not seeing it sooner or thinking to create the spread sheet. But that is the way the world turns.
Well here is a little treat for reading through my frustrations. A cool ghost dragon Willis made:
