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[Tack]

-10,000 is a “quantum reversal” or some such.
People would accidentally reset the game when they went too low, so they had to give it an “are you sure” pop up which was great.

[Retropunch]

Am I the only one unable to tab out of this without it stopping production and such?

It's an idle game, you shouldn't need to be tabbed in the whole time.

Yeah it happened to me too - I had to keep it open in a separate window.

[0x517A5D]

Am I the only one unable to tab out of this without it stopping production and such?

It's an idle game, you shouldn't need to be tabbed in the whole time.

Blame your browser.  Recent versions of both Firefox and Chrome now throttle background tabs.  It doesn't surprise me that a javascript-based game would be affected.


"The Quantum DOM project will make Gecko more responsive, especially when there are a lot of background tabs open. When Quantum DOM is finished, JS code for different tabs (and possibly different iframes) will run in separate cooperatively scheduled threads; the code for some background tabs will never run at all." -- Mozilla Wiki.

(Note: Quantum DOM was added in Firefox 56 or 57.)

"Starting in version 57, Chrome will throttle individual background tabs by limiting the timer fire rate for background tabs using excessive power." -- Chromium Blog.

[qwertyuiopas]

Browsers have throttled background tab timers for years (I quickly found a stackoverflow question from 2011, an answer saying setTimeout was throttled to once per second in background tabs), it's up to the games themselves to look at how much time has passed and compensate. If a game can't run at 10x speed to catch up, it needs serious optimization already (or at least separating game logic updates from UI updates, and performing N ticks then one UI refresh), after that it's just storing the time from the previous update and comparing it to now. Finally, for example when using hibernate mode (but also users "cheating" by changing clocks), the time skipped can be hours or even days. For that, just put an upper bound on maximum ticks per update, or discard ticks over a certain amount.

It's not a new problem, though recent efforts might be making it far more significant than before.

[Egan_BW]

Yup, generally you want to run idle games in a separate window.

[a1s]

Yup, generally you want to run idle games in a separate window.

Sadly.
I almost feel like you shouldn't run them there on principle, because it encourages programmers to be lazy (qwertyuiopas has the right of it- the problem was well known before the development started and the author did none of the fairly obvious things needed to fix it), but since idle games tend to be free, I don't think they will care.

[Tack]

And I wouldn’t exactly feel comfortable paying for a “confronter” (although this is very tame compared to games like Spec Ops)
Makes it a little cyclical.

[Antioch]

I don't get the "self-correcting Supply Chain tech", it says "Each factory added to the network increases every factory's output 1,000x"

but I'm not seeing anything like that at all.....

[Putnam]

It makes the paperclip production growth with factories quadratic rather than linear.

At that point your factories will likely far outweigh your drones in terms of production, though, so drones will be the bottleneck.

[Antioch]

It makes the paperclip production growth with factories quadratic rather than linear.

At that point your factories will likely far outweigh your drones in terms of production, though, so drones will be the bottleneck.

But it doesn't seem to have that effect at all. Every factory I add is still a linear increase.

[Tack]

I’d be curious to know if any of the researches which “cost paperclips” can be skipped in order to have the most possible paperclips.

[Jopax]

Don't think so, since the counter is only for produced, so you always end up with (provided you picked the appropriate ending) the same amount of 3*10^lots paperclips

[motorbitch]

i have to say i was quite bored with the game and only played it because im more bored with my life.
anyhow, the ending was worth it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

its a nice analogy, consuming everything then even the self just to continue to consume a little longer.

[ZeroGravitas]

i have to say i was quite bored with the game and only played it because im more bored with my life.
anyhow, the ending was worth it.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

its a nice analogy, consuming everything then even the self just to continue to consume a little longer.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

plenty of people have made this warning explicitly (the game is an explicit reference to this: https://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Paperclip_maximizer ; no need for it to be an analogy

[kat_1980]

I just downloaded the game on my android phone. weird that's its paperclips but anyway it's a fun idea.