This technical update brought to you by Aperturist !!SCIENCE!!
(I thought it was clever)
The text display works like this:
W E L C O M E _ T O _ T H E _ M A C H I N E . _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _After each letter is typed it automatically advances to the next tile with each tile being controlled by 15 pressure plates. Word recognition however looks like this:
W E L C O M E
T O _ _ _ _ _
T H E _ _ _ _
M A C H I N E
_ _ _ _ _ _ _It's very similar in that after each letter is typed it advances to the next tile, except when space is pressed it bypasses any unused tiles of the maximum characters-per-word limit of 7 and moves on to the next word. Each of these tiles is made up of 30+ pressure plate-pump combinations so there is a lot of wasted space when typing short words, but it makes for recognizing words MUCH easier. There's only 5 possible positions a word can be in that need to be taken into account, meaning I only need 5 pressure plate-pump combinations per word.
Word rec will also make it easy for me to put in place a set of rules of what can and cannot be typed by the user. 0.1 Alpha is pretty much a sandbox text display, but the next version will have rules like these:
-'!' '?' '.' '_' enter, backspace and clear will all be deactivated at the start as they have no use.
-If a 7 letter word is typed, only '!' '?' '.' '_' backspace and clear will be available.
-If you're typing your 5th word, space will be deactivated.
-Enter will be deactivated untill '!' '?' or '.' is typed.
-If '!' '?' or '.' are typed, only enter, backspace and clear will be available.
-On the 32nd slot of the display (the last one), only '!' '?' '.' backspace and clear will be available.
With these rules in place double exclamation marks at the beginning and end of a word won't be possible, sorry
. It needed to be done to prevent you monsters from possibly breaking the AI by typing some weird shit.
Since word rec works on the same advancing/backspacing logic as the text display i've begun transcribing my messy notes onto microsoft excel. It works quite nicely, I can add logic to each of the cells so if one that represents a pressure plate is changed from false to true, all the cells that represent gears it is linked to change. I've also discovered the underlying logic behind some gears like this XOR:
=OR(E6,I6)-AND(E6,I6)
That's on a cell representing a gear, and E6/I6 are cells that represent pressure plates. If both plates are on or off the gear is deactivated, but if only one of the plates is on the gear is activated.
Here's what it looks like:
The numbers are gears and the TRUE/FALSE's are pressure plates. It makes things easy to see what is linked to what at a glance.