I've been working on a little javascript cube sim during my free time over the past few days. I really made it for myself, but I started getting some pretty good times on it so I figured I ought to share it with the community. I'll say before we begin that this sim is only intended for advanced users (as in, you should probably have the hi-games layout memorized) so don't bother complaining if you find the interface hard to use ^_^
The biggest change is the perspective, though! Your first reaction WILL be that it looks silly, but you should give it a try anyway, because I've set all kinds of PBs on it. 10.2x 3x3 average, 36.04 4x4 average, 1:00.72 5x5 average, 1:57.73 6x6 average, 2:54.88 7x7 average...
The concept behind it was that I wanted to include the stickers I care about when solving bigcubes without adding too much other stuff (information overload etc). You get two full faces, and... what are those strips? Those are the F-most and U-most rows on the L and R faces. When I do edge pairing on hi-games I look at those five edges, and I think having some of those stickers be tiny and behind other stickers was slowing me down a bit. The double-length sticker there is the corner. 3x3 solving will take some time to get used to (well, this whole sim will) but I don't think you will find it slower when you're done. I think this emulates all the stuff that's important to look at during normal solving on 3x3 and above.
Right, so, the basic controls are as follows.
- Regular hi-games keys. Also, z turns the top half of the cube 90 degrees, you can use it for a rotation-free PLL parity if you want.
- Handshifts! But I've modified it from the standard setup; this is a lot more like in IsoMinxSim. So the normal keys (3478) will shift both the inner and outer slices, whereas shift+number will shift ONLY the inner slice. This is really great for edges because now you can set it so the R key is unchanged but the r key does 4 or whatever layers, so you can do whole groups of edges on the M slice without ever having to mess with handshifts.
- Space has THREE SEPARATE FUNCTIONS! First, whenever you press it all the handshift variables get reset. Second, if you're not solving at the moment (which means you didn't scramble) it'll scramble for you. And third, if you've solved the cube, you can stop the timer with the space bar. That's right.
You have to stop the timer manually. It turns out the program will run significantly faster without automatic solved-state checking after every turn... and this might not matter on smaller cubes but if you ever wanna try a 20x20 or something it will be very important. Also, it prevents you from just spamming AUF like a nub
- Had too much? Press Escape to solve the cube and stop the timer. Oh yeah, and this will clear your times. No cheating!
- The - and + (well, - and =) keys control the size of the cube (i.e. the number of layers). If you hold shift, those keys will instead control the size of the cube (i.e. the physical size of each sticker). So that's all customizable, you can make this a big thing covering your screen or a tiny window your boss won't notice.
Enjoy, anyway. I know this layout looks weird; it really messed with me at the start too, but I got used to it after a while and I'm pretty sure you will. Everything's visible and it has a similar feel to hi-games, so I'm sure the interested people will be getting good times soon. Have fun!
OMG NEW CUBE SIMS - (qCube and standalone jflysim)
Originally Posted by qqwref
I've been working on a little javascript cube sim during my free time over the past few days. I really made it for myself, but I started getting some pretty good times on it so I figured I ought to share it with the community. I'll say before we begin that this sim is only intended for advanced users (as in, you should probably have the hi-games layout memorized) so don't bother complaining if you find the interface hard to use ^_^
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