The Let's Play Archive

SpaceChem (2012 Tournament)

by GuavaMoment

Part 9: Week 3.5 Mini-Bonus - Save file cleaning and PAX

Week 3.5 Mini-Bonus

Save File Cleaning-
Hey, BACKUP YOUR SAVE FILE IF YOU'RE GOING TO SCREW WITH IT.

I wanted to talk show was a way to trim down SpaceChem's save file. SpaceChem has an infinite undo history, and if you've played the game as long as I have, your save file is huge at 79MB. SupSuper realized the save file can be read with sqlite database browser, with the results looking like this. Go to the Execute SQL tab, and enter DELETE FROM Undo and DELETE FROM UndoPtr then excute. This will remove your undo history, but not your current solution or best scores. Then file -> compact database. Doing this trimmed my save file from 79MB to 1.5MB. This is helpful since solutionnet times out if you try to upload a zipped save file over 10MB, which mine were months ago. I found no problems uploading to solutionnet a solution with no undo history at all. UndoPtr seems to be a count of the number of lines in the undo, which I had the most of on the final boss at 21410. I had almost over half a million lines in my undo history total.

The level tab show your best cycles, symbols and reactors, which you can use to cheat locally, but since SpaceChem and solutionnet record your times by running your actual solution, it won't get updated anywhere. This would fix a glitch some people have where they scored 0 on everything. On levels you haven't beaten your "best" times/symbols/reactors are 2147483647, which is 2^31-1. If you design a solution that takes exactly 2^31 cycles to beat, does it roll over and say you've done the challenge in 1 cycle? Try it out yourself! It'll only take 63 days to solve!

PAX Spacechem Tournament Challenge 1

MrBlarney posted:

Condition: Fastest to solution (i.e. who comes up with a working solution quickest, no matter what the efficiency)

H4sIAPMwQVAA/3WQT2vDMAzFv0rRaYMEJDcrIz6VXHYZ23Fs7OClShNw7eA/hy60n312skFLGY
YHfnqSfvYEgxljKL+tYQ/1BJhl9tL1Y4KD1dxGzVDDM4deGZbN0xkriUSEkjAdSbShpIIQpUg2
QgGtjSZATeL0eSqA/h/bKPdljWzylJvO1GpjuCW86N+2HFJN3mWu9f0ZRfMixfoxsdB6IxJXtd
DNSplXzKSYUSVWWUWVHXq4Zse8v1e+1MrtuVxIoA4ucgEJeseu/M1WS9Cz8dZB3SntebG66Nn9
Nc2ZUQ8h8HUqsObRuks7HMf8PseelWv7xGXUITuv27dV0yut2ex5RamgYujzWnhXc3A3dN2Q/i
ccocbTDx92+MzlAQAA

If you want to replicate tournament conditions, start timing as soon as you start the puzzle, and end as soon as your successful solution completes.

 I got first place at approximately 12 minutes with a 429/1/44 solution. Not a pretty solution, but it got the work done. I'll post it after I return from PAX. I was handicapped a bit from having to use a trackpad instead of mouse, but it was still good enough to win by a few minutes. What did I win? Signed copy of Spacechem physical copy and a copy of Spacechem Paper Edition (booklet with Spacechem-inspired puzzles). 

Well that sounds like fun and a gauntlet being thrown down. I haven't really been doing too well in my own tournament, so I'm pretty happy with the way this turned out:

Link to video
I'd embed the video but then you'd see the challenge and you wouldn't be able to do it yourself totally blind.

I swear that was my first time seeing the challenge, and that I didn't do it to show off or anything, I just thought it would be a neat thing to try.

Congrats MrBlarney!