Yep I posted one here. It's not that great though in my opinion

This is my first ever blog and to be honest I have no idea how the thing works but let's start talking.

I've been known as the "level making factory" of the community, at least by some of you. I have made over 500 levels, in which I am a proud of majority of them. You all might think I have really good levels that have a lot of potential, but would you believe me if I told you I was a terrible level designer at first? Well I think everyone can admit to that about themselves...

My first ever level set was titled "JoshL.dat" and was created in 2009, before CCLP3 was being voted on. Consisting of 202 levels, which is honestly an awkward total of levels in a set but then again most the levels themselves were awkward too. This set is my only set that consists of invalid tiles. Back then, I had no idea what the Lynx ruleset even was, or even existed for that matter. Because of this, none of my levels got into CCLP3, but a few of them actually made it pretty close in the final voting! After that is when I took a hiatus of level designing for a good 2 years.

I returned to the world of CC in the beginning 2011, after discovering CCLP3 was released. I downloaded it and began to play the set and I was amazed with the levels and their designs. Though at the time I never played CCLP2, I did watch most the AVI solutions to the levels. I was surprised how there weren't any invalid tiles in any of the levels. To me, it looked like the return of the Lynx ruleset was a major thing in designing levels, so I began my research on it; reading every detail on the differences from the MS ruleset I was so used to. After several weeks of learning everything on Lynx and thinking of so many level ideas at once after playing CCLP3, that is when I decided to make my own Lynx compatible level set - JoshL2 began in production that spring.

After several months of editing and finalizing, as well as with the help of Andrew Bennett for testplaying every level, JoshL2 was finally complete in the spring of 2012. 149 new levels was the count for this set, and every single one of them was compatible in Lynx. I was so proud with the result. But the fun of level making wasn't over for me...shortly after JoshL2 was finished is when I started on another new set of levels but mainly focused on the more difficult side, known as JoshL3.

Idea after idea, concept after concept....I decided to finish JoshL3 at 80 levels total, being that it was focused on the difficulty. After this is where I stopped my level designing career, or at least put it on hold for a while. Looking through all my sets I created, I noticed my old JoshL.dat set was still full of invalid tiles and such concepts that don't work in Lynx. That is when I overhauled the set and changed it around to be compatible in Lynx. Over 80 levels were removed entirely, thus JoshL1 was constructed at 120 levels. After this, I thought of probably the best idea for a new level set - a "best-of" level pack. Since I had 3 sets of levels, I took advantage of this and announced the construction of infamous - JCCLP.

I didn't want the whole pack to consist of levels from all 3 of the sets alone, I had to come up with brand new ones yet again to make it have a decent variety. I agreed on having a total of 65 brand new levels, and the remaining 84 would be from JoshL trilogy. This level pack took approximately a year to construct and finalize as it was at first for the upcoming CCLP1, but it was mainly focused as a "best-of" level set, only the best of the best levels of my creation were allowed to be in here. This is by far my best creation to this day and I am so proud of it.

Although I was short on level ideas after this, I wasn't completely drained out. Yet another level set was about to be created, which would be the next in the JoshL series, JoshL4. I officially ran out of ideas at 65 levels of this set, however, thanks to the idea J.B. Lewis gave me, I merged the 65 levels into JoshL3 to make it another 149 level set. JoshL4 unfortunately, ceased to exist from there on out.

There are rumors that I am making another set... but is it true? My factory is temporarily shut down on ideas, but maybe it will produce more ideas in the near future... should a JCCLP2 set be constructed remains to be seen. Only time will tell.....

Hello fellow Jellos! No, wait I meant fellow Chipsters!

It's been quite busy here lately, hasn't it? There's news on the CCLP1 front. The competitions have kept the staff busy. The arcade has come and won the hearts of many. Tom has kept improving the awards system. The only thing missing seems to be a large volume of talking on the forums, but maybe that has moved to the chat and other such live places? At least we have some cool new blogs started!

Life is good for a modern chipster. At least for me it has been. I haven't had time to work on going back to improving my CC1 and CCLP2 scores, but maybe later this year. I still have a few CCLP3 levels to dust off too, but not going to touch those for some time. I've also thrown around the idea of making a Let's (re)Play CC1 in Lynx, where I post all of my own best routes, but not sure if I have the time to do that, or if anyone cares any longer. I've been happy to work on the time trials this year, and those have really kept me busy. It's an incredible amount of work to make those levels, post them, keep track of the entries, post the results, update the Chip Cup standings, and upload the best solutions to Youtube. But it's fun and totally worth it. Perhaps in the summer we'll take a small break from the TTs and focus on other things. And of couse while I've been doing that, others have prepared Treasure Hunts and Create Competitions, both of which are even more popular than the time trials (and not only because I can participate in those when I'm not working on them behind the scenes). I posted that CCLP2 lynx project package to show that something is still happening with that idea. And did I mention anything about the CC1 Lynx boards? That was a cool and long-awaited addition for the community, in my opinion. (Now we just need people to actually report their full scores!) I've sampled some custom sets too, and tried to write some feedback on them to the designers. Hopefully when CCLP1 voting comes along, I'll be able to vote on most of the levels just from past familiarity. Talking of which, I really should work on updating my own submissions. I was in such a hurry to get them all released for the cut-off deadline, and really need to work on some of them.

I thought I had much more to say than this, but I'm a bit tired and not try to squeeze out any more stuff out of my brain. And I have no clue if that's really the way the title for this post is supposed to be written. See you next time!

-Miika

Just a suggestion...

donations in bitcoins?

Hello.

This is a levelset I made about one and a half years ago, for CCLP1. And since that, I've completely forgotten about that. Just about yesterday I randomly googled my name and found this website. Yes, I knew such website exist, but it was a long time ago and since then I am overloaded by campus activities. So, sorry for forgetting CC for those times.

It is strange to see that my levelset is mentioned several (not much) times. Some guy with the username flareon350 (I believe he is Josh Lee) even LPing my levelset. Wow, I never realised that this community is so lively.

From what I have learnt by reading posts in this site, it seems my intended lynx-compatible levelset is not, err, lynx-compatible. #104 and #146 are the levels that need to be fixed. So, I have updated both of them and reuploaded my levelset (version 1.5) to yahoo groups. I also updated #142 to prevent some busts. One major thing that still causing trouble is the length of the hints of some levels. I don't know what is the threshold for this value, hence I can't fix it for now. Any help would be appreciated.

Well, that's it. Thanks for remembering me (or my levelset, whatever). Any other critics or suggestion is very much appreciated.

Oh! Whenever you guys have problem related to my levelset, I can provide you the TWS file. I just don't know where to upload it.

Archie Pusaka

For those interested in chess, the candidates tournament are currently being played in London.

http://london2013.fide.com/

With the addition of blogs on CCZone and all, I thought this would be a good way to discuss my first experiences with CC, CC1 in particular, since I did not have much knowledge of the different extensions, the level editors, or any of that complex (well, for me as a five to seven year old, I'd say it would have been pretty complex.) stuff. I'll start, in this first entry, by talking about some of the earliest CC moments I ever had, the first ever computer video game I had ever played, and is still my favorite video game on PC to date. So let's go back to 2004.

My grandpa had an old computer, a Windows 98, that he didn't want anymore, so I asked my mother if we could keep it, and of course the response was yes. The entire BOWEP (Best of Windows Entertainment Pack, for those who haven't heard of it) had been installed on that '98, and I had fun playing all the different games, some of my favorites being SkiFree, Rodent's Revenge, and, of course, Chip's Challenge. The first time I ever played it, I figured out how to play pretty quickly, and sped through the first nine levels on my first day. I think after that was when I quit playing that day. I remember later that night I had a dream about a teeth monster in a factory-like building with thin walls try to eat me along with a pink ball somewhere. I'll remind you I don't really remember much of that dream, mainly because that was nearly eight or nine years ago. I spent five minutes admiring the first level of CC.. LESSON 1. I went on to complete the lesson levels and, either completed or gave up on Nuts and Bolts, the infamous first real level of the game. Without realizing it, at one point during that day, I had enabled Ignore Passwords with Ctrl+K (I think I used +K, not one of the other... two?). The next day, or, my second day of Chip's Challenge-ism, I figured out that all the levels had suddenly been unlocked! So I spent my time playing the ones that looked pretty cool, like Cityblock (you gotta admit, that's kinda colorful) Four Plex (my favorite CC1 level ever), and especially All Full.

I can't remember that much of the early days of my CC childhood, but from what I do remember I'll try to explain in best detail in the next entry of this blog, which I could probably write a series of novels on. Let's just say I loved Chip's Challenge as a five, six, and seven year old.

this program is supposed to help in command line cc programs... basicly:

1 put this program in the same dir as the command line program

2 run the program "Project1.exe"

3 it's not finished yet, but you can expect more

http://www.mediafire.com/?mej22rguw10aara

i'll post source soon

implimented:

mapmaker



this program currently doesn't support dirs/files more character filename 8 characters, sorry

Hi everyone,

While we're still trying to finalize the details regarding our voting administrator, I'd like to go ahead and present everyone else in our community with a proposal for voting and where CCLP1 will go in the days to come. I've tried to consider the feedback I've received from my previous posts about CCLP1 from months past. That being said, we'd like to present to you the following for consideration and further discussion.

--- 1. PRE-VOTING ELIMINATION ---

CCLP3 had (if memory serves correctly) about 2,030 levels in its initial round of voting, and all were available for the public to play at once. Several hundred of these levels were eliminated after about one month of voting. For CCLP1, one of the key goals we've tried to establish on the staff is to encourage voters to distinguish good levels from great levels. "Great" doesn't necessarily mean ultra-difficult or ridiculously clever. Sometimes, it's all about the little things, too: design quality, the packaging of the familiar in an innovative way, and consideration of new players. And ultimately, we're trying to seek out the levels that are the best fit for a set that's meant to serve as a CC1 replacement for beginners.

Toward that end, we'd like to conduct an elimination prior to the beginning of voting. This is a sensitive issue but one we felt was necessary for a number of reasons:


- Narrowing it down to good levels. During CCLP3 voting, some voters felt like many top-notch levels were shafted. Obviously, this will always happen when there are a lot of good candidates, but while there can't ever be a guarantee that every level in the voting process will receive adequate consideration by every voter, it's much more likely to happen if the field is narrowed down to good levels to begin with - without non-CCLP-worthy material to worry about - so that the great levels can shine a bit more easily.


- Removing a heavy burden from level designers. One of the most overwhelming feelings a designer could ever feel during CCLP3 voting came upon visiting a levelset info page on Mike's site, seeing a bunch of "unequal" levels throughout a set, and feeling the need to correct every one before voting, which was especially frustrating if the designer didn't even build levels with Lynx compatibility or appropriate CCLP1 difficulty in mind to begin with. With a pre-voting elimination, we can focus on encouraging level designers to correct the levels that could actually stand a chance in the voting process.


- Removing a heavy burden from voters. One of the issues that the CCLP3 staff noticed during its voting process was that some community members started playing some levels but then stopped. While we can't completely prevent that here, I think it's much less likely to happen if the number of levels in voting is much less overwhelming to begin with. More ideas on how we can further accomplish that in a bit, though.


- Shifting the focus from levelsets to levels. One of the initiatives we're hoping to try to push for CCLP1 voting is to conduct the voting across level packs of 50 or 100 levels each, randomly picked from the narrowed submission pool. I'll explain more about how we can make this work in Section 2, but one of the reasons why we felt like this was a good idea was because of "levelset bias." In CCLP3 voting, it was very easy for voters to assign ratings to individual levels based solely on who designed the levels or in what set they appeared, primarily because voting was categorized by set. This especially was an issue with the difficulty rating, but we'd like to avoid having it affect the "fun" rating as much as possible, especially for CCLP1. While randomly ordered levels can't completely remove certain biases (for example, a recency bias in which one's opinion of the previous level solved in the pack affects his or her opinion of the current level being played), they can at least encourage the evaluation of levels on each level's own merit, not by who designed the level or what else the designer made.

Please note that we would like the community to be involved as much as possible in the elimination and have the final say concerning what makes it into voting. Toward that end, we'd like to propose the following steps:


- The staff puts levels being considered for the cut on a "marked for elimination" list. The criteria for elimination are pretty simple: (a) excessive difficulty for CCLP1, ( B) excessive triviality (for instance, a level that involves just walking to the exit), © poor design quality that is not on par with the standard established in the original CC, (d) non-Lynx-compatibility that is practically beyond repair, (e) excessive length (especially if the level is extremely monotonous), and (f) any other criteria that defined levels eliminated in the first round of CCLP3 voting except for optimization-related criteria (in other words, we won't eliminate a level because it's not optimization-friendly or contains randomness). To translate our opinions into something more quantifiable, we've been assigning numerical ratings based on fun and beginner accessibility using a -2 to +2 scale for each. Please note: beginner accessibility is NOT difficulty - it's how reasonable a level would be for a beginner at an appropriate place in the set.


- Levels above a certain cutoff point would be placed on a "whitelist." I'm considering 0 and higher for fun, and 1 and higher for beginner accessibility. The staff will confer about the whitelist's content and double-check to ensure everything is in order and that a consensus is reached before proceeding any further. At this point, levels that need compatibility or bust fixes will also be added to the whitelist as well but marked so that they could be fixed. (Based on the increase in knowledge about the Lynx ruleset since CCLP3's release, as well as the large percentage of non-Lynx-compatible levels that fall into criterion (d) described above, I don't think this list of levels to be fixed will be huge.) In the end, I'm hoping the whitelist will contain about 800-900 levels.


- The whitelist and the "marked" list will both be presented to the community publicly. At this point, community members will have a set amount of time to (a) correct any levels in the whitelist that need fixes and ( B) nominate any "marked" levels they wish to see in voting for whitelisting. We may have to come up with some rules to ensure that some designers don't abuse this ability for their own levels, but we can discuss options for how to proceed among the rest of the community. That's what this thread is for. Once this period ends, the remainder of the levels on the "marked" list will be properly eliminated, and the whitelist as it stands will be randomly jumbled to form the level packs.

- Voting will begin.

--- 2. VOTING LEVEL PACKS ---

I've already mentioned above why we'd like to go with this option, but I'd like a few opinions about what everyone believes to be reasonable. How many levels do you think you can complete and reasonably evaluate in about a month's time? 50? 100? Even more? Please bear in mind that CCLP1 voting won't have levels whose difficulty matches some of the most devious triple-digit entries of CCLP3, so solving them shouldn't be terribly hard for most of us veterans.

One issue we've got to decide, though, is what to do about levels that need fixes. Should we cut off all level modifying at a specified date before voting starts, or allow level designers time until the pack in which the level in question is up for voting? I'm leaning toward the former, if only so we can be consistent across the board with respect to making changes to levels and avoid any confusion. Also, the latter option doesn't allow for flexibility in scheduling the pack releases. Speaking of which...

Another issue is how the packs should be released. Should it be done all at once or pack by pack throughout the voting process? There's pros and cons for either option, but personally, I'm more in favor of the latter. From the standpoint of making sure each level in voting receives as much consideration as possible, a small number of levels on which voters can concentrate at a given time will most likely be more rewarding in terms of getting more informed ratings than releasing everything at the same time. And although we would be running the risk of having Pack #1 receive more consideration than the rest by virtue of being first, the staff will take on additional marketing responsibility to promote interest in subsequent packs and create anticipation. Either way, any pack that has been released would remain released and available for voting until voting ends completely, which most likely won't happen until the staff feels like everyone's gotten a chance to play every pack and vote as much as voters see fit.

--- 3. RATINGS USED IN VOTING ---

This was an issue I brought forward several months ago. Back then, I proposed the idea of including a "beginner accessibility" rating (or "BA") instead of difficulty. Since one of our objectives was to create a set friendly to first-time players, we thought that evaluating the level based on how reasonable it was for that group of players at an appropriate place in the set - regardless of actual difficulty - would be more beneficial. But as the discussion continued, I started to wonder if BA might be more useful for the staff to use in deciding what gets cut in a pre-voting elimination, whereas the only rating voters would even have to worry about would be the "fun" rating, in which beginner accessibility and all other qualities could be considered. A couple of proposals:

First, we'd like to ditch the name "fun" and just give this rating the generic term "rating." After some discussion, we started to realize that we needed to encourage voters to evaluate each level as holistically as possible and not just focus on any one concept isolated from everything else: for instance, how unique the concept or presentation is, how great the design is, or how fun the level is to play. All of these factors are important, but we'd like to encourage voters to keep all of them in mind as they vote. I think renaming the rating, along with putting some guidelines on each voting page for making sure one's vote is as informed as possible, can help with that.

Second, we'd like to abandon the difficulty rating altogether. The CCLP1 staff would like to do as much as possible post-voting to ensure that a proper difficulty curve is established throughout the set, and toward that end, we'd like to rate the top 250 or so levels for difficulty ourselves and go from there (more on that in the next section). Not only will this be easier on us, it will be even easier for voters when there's only one rating to worry about!

--- 4. POST-VOTING ASSEMBLY ---

In CCLP2 and CCLP3, the levels inducted into the final set closely resembled what the top 149 levels on the voting results were. It was especially the case in CCLP2. In CCLP3, we had the wildcard round to further refine the results for the "bubble" of levels around the cutoff point, plus we removed some really difficult levels and replaced them with somewhat easier ones for variety's sake. These included Toggle Bust, Blue Blocks, The Haunted House, and Jaywalker. For CCLP1, the staff would like to have the final say in judging what ultimately gets inducted into the set while using the voting results as a guideline. A few reasons why we believe this would be necessary:


- Establishing a proper difficulty curve using the steps described above and ensuring that there aren't too many levels of any particular difficulty.


- Creating as much variety in the set as possible. This was one complaint levied toward CCLP3 that would have been somewhat worse if not for the staff's intervention with the inclusions mentioned above, and we'd like to continue that tradition here with more freedom and flexibility.

- Related to the above point: removing levels that are too similar. This will help ensure that we won't have pairs of levels in CCLP1 like Tool Box / Which One Next?, or Caves / Divide and Conquer, unless there's a very good reason to do so.

Let us know what you think. We'll be sure to listen to everyone's comments and suggestions before we take the next big step. Thanks for your patience while we've been testing!

- J.B.