Item — HN Reader

This is based on the game, Opus Magnum [1], where you basically program arms to move and combine units to generate the expected units.

You’re graded on a few thing: efficiency in number of movements, efficiency in number of units, and efficiency in space.

Like real programming, you often have to sacrifice one or two to maximize the other.

Definitely a game most on HN would enjoy.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/558990/Opus_Magnum/

5 comments

Another one of their games, Shenzhen I/O, is one I think HN would enjoy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenzhen_I/O

The player is tasked with creating products for clients, which involves constructing circuits and then writing code to run them.[4][5] The programming language used in the game is similar to assembly language and the circuit elements resemble simplified versions of real-world electronics.[1]

One of my all time favs

I was going to say this reminds me of Zachtronics games, but I looked it up and it is one, so no wonder.

Except for the simplest puzzles, you always have to sacrifice the others to minimize one.

For example, area and cost oftentimes have very similar designs, except to minimize your cost you're going to be using a plain arm with tracks, but to minimize area you're going to be using an extendable arm.

The extendable arm costs 40 and can oftentimes be manipulated to use no extra space, whereas the plain arm costs 20 but if you need to use tracks they're just +5 each. But if you have to use a track you're definitely using extra area.

And cycle time is completely at odds with both area and cost. Using a single arm to do everything will never win on cycle time because a single arm can't keep up with how fast the game produces reagents - you need two arms for that.

I really wish there was some sort of "aggregate" score in Opus Magnum. The specialized solutions are typically really ugly and unnatural.

You may enjoy the “sum” metric obtained by adding the three scores together: https://zlbb.faendir.com/categories/SUM

Thank you, that's very nice. I was skeptical a simple sum would work but these solutions indeed look very elegant. Shame this isn't in the base game.

You don't play Opus Magnum if you think that's true.

I admit I struggle to get further into the game when I pick it up from time to time but the ingame leaderboards really are missing a "balanced" category. I mean, that's how optimization usually goes, no? Focusing on just a single metric to the catastrophic detriment of all others might be funny but that's about it.

Am I the only person around who hates Steam? I would happily snap this game up except for the fact that it's on Steam. What benefit do I, as the person playing the game, get from having to run another program just to run the program I really want to run?

I made an exception for N++, but even there I play it much less often than I otherwise would because I loathe the fact that I can't just double-click the game itself and go.

HA! Here was my experience just now:

1. Open N++ 2. Wait maybe 5 seconds with no visible update 3. Steam opens a very primitive, very non-Mac-like dialog, to inform me it's downloading an update to itself -- 195MB!? 4. Wait for that to finish 5. Another primitive dialog: updating Steam. Not the game -- Steam. 6. Update completes. It's been about a minute? since I tried to run N++ 7. Steam presents a "choose user" dialog. I'm the only user, WTH? 8. I choose myself. Steam asks me to log in. I didn't log out, it's the same computer, why should I have to log in again? 9. Password doesn't auto-suggest. 10. I don't remember my password. 11. I give up and hit cmd-Q 12. Steam doesn't quit 13. Check the menu. Quit is disabled 14. Force-quit Steam

Steam, you run other programs. That's all you do. You're bad at your job.

This comment is completely off the rails. Your extremely idealistic interpretation of "I should just run the program directly" is preventing you from gaining enjoyment out of literally the most popular gaming program in existence. And it's popular for a reason: It's really damn good at its job. All these extra steps are just a consequence of you extremely rarely opening it - steam is likely giving you the "first start" experience because it's been so long (I say this because nobody else is reporting issues like this online). I've seen it happen after certain major updates too. There's also an element of PEBKAC; password managers are a thing and make logging in take no more than a couple clicks.

> This comment is completely off the rails.

My experience mirrors that of gcanyon. I'm an extremely casual gamer. I play every few months a single-player game sometimes. I'm fine with that and I don't want to change it.

Steam sucks and makes me play less my games. Why?

This is how the "play game" experience worked in my childhood: I had the game installed. Found the icon of it on the desktop, or in the start menu. I clicked it. The game loaded and I was playing.

This is how the same thing works now with Steam. I start steam. I need to wait while it updates itself. Then I need to log in. (yes I'm using a password manager, it still sucks) Then I need to sort out the second factor. Then the game updates. (Sometimes I have to do some wrangling so the game I actually want to play updates first, instead of having to wait while all the other games update). And then I can play.

> All these extra steps are just a consequence of you extremely rarely opening it

Okay? So I should feel less bad? It sucks. Everything else is excuses.

Sometimes I have a few hours, and I think "hey maybe I could play something" then I remember how much it sucks and I just go and read a book. That's not a glowing endorsement for Steam.

Steam is acting as if it is Fort Knox. I understand that I would need to go through all of that before I can purchase a new game with a stored card. But I just want to play a game I already have, and have it installed and it is on my disk. So just get out of my way and let me play.

You can save your password on Steam. You can also set games to not automatically update.

Steam and Valve are are pretty popular, in the absolute wasteland that is game launchers and gaming companies. Steam starts up reasonably quickly, and has pretty well thought out functionality for things like playing with your friends. Valve has nice sales, and contributes stuff like Proton (a nice wrapper around/extension of Wine, for Linux support).

That said, I think everyone who likes Steam/Valve should be able to imagine how you feel about it. Because that’s probably how they feel about stuff like the Epic launcher, and all those. It really ought not be that mysterious, we’ve all got different thresholds for what annoys us!

> Steam and Valve are are pretty popular,

I understand, and appreciate that. My brother who is an avid gamer told me (i paraphrase here) “when i was young i used to play more games than i paid for, now i buy more games than I can play with” which is a big change. Steam is one of the big factors behind that. That is nothing sort of miraculous.

> we’ve all got different thresholds for what annoys us

That. But also i totally see that my usage pattern is different from most other users of it. I assume if i would play every day that would keep my “cookies” warm. And even if not, and i would still need to log in once every few months that would be a “rare hickup” as opposed to “every darn time i start this thing”. (Just because the baseline would shift.) So i totaly understand that. I also understand that from Valve’s perspective perhaps my usecase is not that lucrative. I just don’t bring in enough dough to make it worthwile to “fix” things for me. Especially when fixing my use case could perhaps lead to other indirect costs like more stolen steam accounts. (I don’t really know. I don’t have a full understanding of all of their security practices. What I am saying is that i can imagine that it is a tradeoff from their perspective. They could make the session system more forgiving but then they would suffer other consequences.)

I see all of that. But just because i understand those things i don’t have to pretend things are working well for me when they are not.

I do not have that exp with Steam as I run it at computer launch so it is fairly a non event. However, I feel your pain. My playstation and switch I have that nearly same exp as I do not use them much. Which means pretty much any time I do want to play something on them is an update. Sometimes a fairly large one at that! By the time I am done updating I have decided to do something else.

These update systems only have one good use case. If you are pretty much connected all the time. If you rarely run them. You are pretty much stuck in a update stack.

I even joke with my wife 'i am playing my favorte playstation game "updating"'.

   1. Other apps *ask* if they can update; Steam just does it.
   2. Can you justify why Steam should *ever* log me out?
   3. re: password managers -- so your answer to my complaint that I have to run/use a second program just to run the one I want... is to install a third app to make the second one less problematic? And: I *have* a password manager: the one built-in to the OS.

I have over 100 applications installed; exactly one of them requires another program to gatekeep it. And I understand I'm in the minority here -- I did start with, "Am I the only one..."

My answer to your complaint of "I don't remember my password" is that you should be using a password manager. If you are using one and forgot it anyway, this is clearly not the fault of steam. The other 2 are easily googleable/chatgptable, so I'll leave that to you.

I'm saying that I use the built-in password manager in MacOS. I just checked, and it has the password, but Steam apparently isn't capable of auto-filling. So I looked it up, entered it, and then steam decided that wasn't enough and I had to confirm by email, because new computer. This isn't national security, it's a $20 video game that is twenty years old, that you used to be able to play for free through flash in a web browser.

Steam sucks.

> This isn't national security, it's a $20 video game that is twenty years old, that you used to be able to play for free through flash in a web browser.

You can still do that.

https://www.thewayoftheninja.org/n.html

https://www.kongregate.com/games/MetanetSoftware/n

Nice, thanks!

I play several times a week, and in my experience, Steam updates GBs of data too frequently. Nearly every time I open it, it starts downloading updates, so I had to uninstall but a handful of games to minimize that.

I like the convenience, but you need a good broadband connection to keep up.

It's comments like these that make me realize we've gone full circle in the convenience life cycle. Pre-steam when you wanted to play your game you would have to download system specific dependencies to ensure your game could run on your specific system. Most of the time these came pre-packaged with the installation files, but rarely you would just have to 'figure it out' when your game crashed upon opening. Time to spend hours trolling some forums to find the answer to the random byte string you were presented. If you are someone who only plays one game, then perfect, once you got that single install figured out you're good to go. Want to play another game? Time to figure it out again. Today you go to steam, click play, and steam just 'figures it out' in the background. Not to mention never having to deal with proper save files again because you swapped systems or the numerous other features that gamers have cried about for years. I'm not saying you should use steam if you hate it as much as you seem to. It's just really ironic to me that if all you're looking for is 'double-click the game and go' you don't want to use Steam. My favorite part of your comment is "Steam, you run other programs. That's all you do. You're bad at your job." because yes, all it does is run other programs, and that's why it's so GOOD at its job. You simply can't or don't want to understand what it's actually doing.

oooh, thanks for the context! I've installed and run... maybe 50 games over the past 30-ish years, and every single one has run right out of the box. I'm on a Mac, so maybe that's the difference?

So the meta-conversation is: why was (is?) installing and running a game so difficult? Why did game-makers suck at that, creating a billion-dollar opportunity for Steam?

So unironically the answer to your first question is yes. After reading your other comments in this thread now I completely understand your perspective, and I hate Apple even more for it. Apple literally coddles their users to the point where they have created likely millions of users like yourself. You expect everything to conform to the Apple way, instead of you adapting to the ecosystem you are in. Apple specifically forces developers of their ecosystem to follow specific rules when it comes to installation, UX, dependencies, the whole 9 yards. It's why a lot of game developers simply avoid Mac entirely as a platform. Because it takes a tremendous amount of effort to conform to Apples silly requirements, for less than 1% user base on average (from a game developer perspective entirely).

But then you may ask, well if Apple has such a standard for everything, why not everything just conform to that and we make everything easier... It's not that simple see: https://xkcd.com/927/

It's not that installing and running a game is 'so difficult' it's that you're expecting it to be as simple as everything else you do in your Apple ecosystem. Because that's how Apple wants it. It's entirely a perspective issue forced upon you by the ecosystem you use.

The end result for all this is all the jokes we see about children expecting everything to be touch screen, or having no idea what to do with a controller when they see one. As humans we adapt to our environment, but if we're always forced into the same systems, we start to expect every system to work that way and we stop adapting.

> I would happily snap this game up except for the fact that it's on Steam.

Opus Magnum is also available on GOG: https://www.gog.com/de/game/opus_magnum

EDIT: It is additionally available on itch.io: https://zachtronics.itch.io/opus-magnum

The UX of steam is bad for occasional use, but good for regular use. Regular users pay, occasional ones don't.

>Steam opens a very primitive, very non-Mac-like dialog

Macos is less than 1% of the PC gaming market. The decision to port to macos at all is questionable, spending extra effort to really "feel" like a mac native app would be crazy.

Your experience is bad because you are not the target market.

Don't buy it on Steam then. It's available on 2 other non-steam outlets, Gog and Itch.io.

Thanks! N++ appears to only be available through Steam :-(

I do hate steam! Praise be to gog!

There's dozens of us!

Assuming N++ does not have any more DRM enabled than Steam imposes on it naturally:

1. Take a look at https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/

2. If you'd like to be able to start the game without Steam using that, go through https://gitlab.com/Mr_Goldberg/goldberg_emulator/-/issues/12... which may or may not work.

Otherwise, your sentiment is shared, Steam is a horrible Rube Goldberg machine. I've given up on it myself.

Also found this fork for MacOS: https://github.com/inflation/goldberg_emulator

I'm happy with Steam on Windows but hate its behavior on Mac. It's slow and keeps stealing focus while starting up. I haven't gotten the "choose user" thing though. Cmd-Q does quit Steam for me.

I agree, the Steam Mac app is a lot worse than it is on Windows or Linux. I would suppose that’s because they’re just running it in some kind of wrapper rather than having any kind of native implementation, that’s just an assumption based on how it feels to use though.