A silly game

[fivemack]

Recently, thanks to mobbsy, I have been playing quite a lot of SpaceChem.

I suppose it's most like Peeko Computer on the BBC Micro, except that the machine model is multi-threaded (yay!) and lacks jump instructions (less yay); you're given a set of primitives with slightly awkward behaviour and a task to perform, and you have to write the best program to do the job. It seems that I can usually write programs that work, but they are much bigger and slower than the optimal ones whose existence is suggested at the end of the level; and the game doesn't tend to give you advice on style and efficiency.

See: large, slow acetylene and ammonia factories





I know that a lot of my friends play this; how does one build smaller, faster factories?

Comments

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

http://yfrog.com/nx8au8p hope that should work; my acetylene.

It saves a lot of moving things around if the first bonder is on the input and the second is on the output. It also helps to keep things as simple, linear and non-tangled as possible.

The acetylene has a simple blue loop to bring in the carbon, then the red moves the two halves into place on the output, triggers the bonding and output.

My ammonia (not shown) similarly doesn't move the carbon at all, uses the red to place 2 hydrogen atoms and the blue to move the other and remove the output.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Oh! I had thought that only blue could do IN(beta) and only red could do IN(alpha) ... that makes life considerably easier!