jessecrossen/ttsim

A simulator for the Turing Tumble

ttsim's Issues

Add a text box to the board

Hello, Along the board, it would be nice to see a text box (nothing fancy, just plain text without formatting) where to store a kilobyte of comments. It would help the player write what is the current set of issues he is facing, what are the attempts he has already tried and did not work, or write down the goal to reach when he saves a board that is the starting of a puzzle to solve that he wants to distribute. And thank you for this beautiful program !

Bug: Difference in action between physical and schematic

Thank you for the wonderful simulator!

In the following set-up, the action of the physical simulator is correct (starter blue ball ends in middle interceptor), but in schematic mode, the first blue ball falls between ramps to end up in the left-most interceptor. Second blue ball seems to find the correct path!

Starting with red ball in either mode seems to work, it's isolated to starting with the blue ball in schematic mode.

Needs sound!

One of the most satisfying parts of turning tumble is the click click click of the marbles moving through the machine.

Add instructions for serving on github.io

I was quickly able to clone your code and use make to run on my development server. But for longer term support for derivative use with classes of students it would be helpful to given instructions (or a link to instructions) to serving through github.io as you do for your demo page.

Thanks for your fine work!

Enhancement: Support touchscreen use

This could be great on a smartphone or tablet, but as far as I can tell specifically requires a mouse, ignoring on-screen taps. Some of the folks I'd like to share this with don't get to laptops very often, but invariably have a phone in hand.

I'll apologize in advance if this is just my ignorance - if there's an easy way to simulate mouse events on a smartphone touchscreen, that would satisfy this, but I haven't found a solution for that which works on this page.

Add a mark stating if we should start with left or right lever

Hello, In the physical game, there is a specific piece that is added to the left or right lever, that states that you should press that lever (and not the other one) to start. It seems that this indication is not present in the simulator. When trying to reproduce the initial board state and saving the puzzle in the "before" mode, it would be great to have this information. Therefore, the kid uploading the "before" state can try to complete the puzzle, and know which lever he will need to start to test if he has succeeded. It could be as simple as adding a peg below each lever, and a new "Start" piece to plug on that peg. And thank you for this admirable piece of work !

Balls fall right through red gears

Actually, behind them.

E.g. https://jessecrossen.github.io/ttsim/#s=13,17&z=48&cc=7.5&cr=8.5&t=1&pt=8&sp=1&sc=0&b=data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAA0AAAASCAYAAACAa1QyAAAAAXNSR0IArs4c6QAAAPBJREFUOE+1kzEOwiAUhh+Lc0dHOIMHaAcP0gbvUS5C0t7DgdHJeAMYnYwnKPraggivcZKkSfn5P35e+2DGmKltW8BnGAZomgaMMRBGriulgAUITdY6EIJHILxo7UDKRScgy4JRCOGt/Z4XUGooolYBN4pJdV0vCWwN8v7DoZbMx3H0c00RCmAKZRoNUWBygt9QMONGa/o2FCrK6kH5TxDx7X8nbUFKqSlf6/s+dkbXdclPW5yMc15A1lkQXIB2GiSXRV4BpV1NtROuk0kBpCC8PiSEZgSpgfdt7sYTP8C1esDueYR7dYb9zcFlq9Xf+gs7cqew2FcrKgAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==

This in latest Google Chrome on Windows.

Ball continuation.

Great learning tool, for sure. Fun to play around with it!

Instead of distance from Turnstile to Drop, it would be better to be able to select and group these. For instance, multiple Turnstiles could be grouped with multiple Drops, or 2 Turnstiles with 1 Drop. Do away with distance and allow connecting by grouping so that it doesn't matter that the Turnstile is clear across the board.

Also, I channeled a ball from one Drop to another drop. For this ball, the second Turnstile to the second Drop containing the ball from the first drop would not release the ball. It hung. If the ball has an internal id connecting it to the first Drop, not the second, then I can see why it wouldn't continue on with the turn of a second Turnstile.

Awesome Program! For sure!

Dan

Switching from schematic mode to physical mode dumps balls out of the drops

If there are balls in the drops when switching from schematic mode to physical mode, they tend to just get dumped out all over the place. This could be related to #1 somehow, or might be because the drop has a sloped bottom in physical mode but a flat bottom in schematic mode.

Android build

Hey, cool project! It would be awesome if you could provide an android build of this. Or, perhaps you could point me in the right direction of how to do it myself?

Turnstiles are one row too high on medium/large board layouts

I could not find a start lever

Hi Jesse,
I am very impressed with your work!!

Maybe I missed it but I cannot find a button to start the ball.
I have just been dropping a ball up to to start it.

Thank you!

Ramp physics is unrealistic and not as deterministic as it should be

Balls often tip the ramp before they land in the "pocket", which looks funny, and often bounce out of the ramp, off the pin of the adjacent gear location, and back into the ramp. It might work to add a cheat that "glues" the ball to the ramp as long as it's in contact (i.e. set any upward velocity to zero for all contacts).

Gears schematics improvement

Hi, I'd like to suggest a better schematics for the gears, instead of relying on the color of the arrow to distinguish the "bit" and the "geared bit".

You could simply represent the gear as a circle, so the the red gear would simply be a circle, and the geared bit, an arrow with a circle on top of it.

What do you think ?

I could probably drop you a merge-request for it if you agree.

Flipping a ramp that's been in contact with a ball misplaces its constraint

The constraint anchor is not properly shifted to the new location when the body is flipped.

The first balls to drop in the physical simulator sometimes fall through slopes

Any additional balls that fall in the same place seem to work normally. I suspect a problem with the broadphase collision detection, maybe because of the way we add bodies to the world just before they're needed.

Enhancement request - Bits indicate on/off as a light

I created a countdown timer, and was showing my kid how it works. I got very confused remembering which direction was "on" and which was "off" for each of the bits. I'd love to be able to label up the parts/directions, or even better have a read-out of the bits.

I realise this is rather extending the scope of the simulator! But would help understand binary, and help when configuring the board.

Thanks for creating this simulator - it's helped me encourage the kids, while we wait for the real thing to turn up!

Ghosted part is not showing when dragging a part from one location to another

Slowing the simulation changes the physics

When you slow it down to almost paused, the physics is significantly different, so that gravity does not seem to work correctly any more and balls will not fall at the right rate, missing their normal path.

Sometimes the ball goes through the slope tool

My very first test was just to start the balls falling without any tool other than the initial ones.

The balls fall and bounce quite randomly till the bottom but sometimes one ball may go THROUGH the bottom slope line instead of rolling on it...

How to reproduce: just start the 1st ball by manually rolling the end gate. After some tries a ball will go quantic and cross the slope line.

Add peg numbering as a display option, as well as a letter for each (oriented) piece

Hello, The saving of the file as a compact PNG is great, but it would also be nice to be able to talk about the board over the phone or in a discussion. Instead of saying "add a blue bit oriented to the right on the peg that is two below and three right of the top interceptor", what about using references ? Like "on peg 21, add a piece BR". So each peg would be automatically numbered when creating the board of a certain size, and each piece would be named by one letter (two if there is an orientation). Combined to the other suggestion opened a few minutes ago of having a text box, it would help a lot expanding discussions. The display of the peg numbering and the pieces would be activated by a toggle switch. Thank you for the fun you give us playing online !

Board state download does not work on firefox

Pressing the state download button does nothing on FF (61.0.1/linux). I have confirmed that it works on chrome on the same platform.