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alg.cubing.net

Stefan

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The more I use it, the more memory it consumes.

Maybe this does tell Lucas something, but my question to statements like that is always: But is it a problem?

Because in general, it can be quite normal to not free memory as soon as possible. Garbage collection can get off its lazy ass and get to work whenever it feels it's appropriate. Surely you have a trash can inside your house, right? Do you take it out as soon as you put one thing into it? Or do you wait, put more and more things into it, and only take it out when it's (almost) full or you for some reason feel like it (like you having nothing better to do)? So unless it's actually a problem, like you getting full-memory errors, everything might just be going according to plan.

That said, if I'm wrong and misjudge the technology and such increasing memory consumption likely does indicate a real problem, please let me know.
 
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Renslay

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Maybe this does tell Lucas something, but my question to statements like that is always: But is it a problem?

Because in general, it can be quite normal to not free memory as soon as possible. Garbage collection can get off its lazy ass and get to work whenever it feels it's appropriate. Surely you have a trash can inside your house, right? Do you take it out as soon as you put one thing into it? Or do you wait, put more and more things into it, and only take it out when it's (almost) full or you for some reason feel like it (like you having nothing better to do)? So unless it's actually a problem, like you getting full-memory errors, everything might just be going according to plan.

That said, if I'm wrong and misjudge the technology and such increasing memory consumption likely does indicate a real problem, please let me know.

Well, yeterday after an hour or two of playing around with alg cubing net (doing some FMC), my 4 GB memory became full, and everything was like frozen. I was able to move the mouse, but every single click (or button press) had a minute(!) long reaction time. It was annoying and frustrating. So yes, I call it a problem, because if you don't watch about it, eventually it becomes almost like a blue death.

Applying your trash can analogy: not just your trash can, but your enitre house gets full of trash, and you only notice that when you can't even move.

Moreover, alg.garron.us don't have this problem. I know that it works differently, but this problem forces me to use alg.garron.us, while alg.cubing.net should be the superior page if I understand well.
 

Christopher Mowla

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Applying your trash can analogy: not just your trash can, but your entire house gets full of trash, and you only notice that when you can't even move.
LOL. I nominate this as one of the funniest phrases this year so far!:)

Moreover, alg.garron.us don't have this problem. I know that it works differently, but this problem forces me to use alg.garron.us, while alg.cubing.net should be the superior page if I understand well.
Apart from the ability to have cubes larger than the 7x7x7, I find that alg.garron.us is more user-friendly (and simple) to use overall (no offense Lucas). If it confused me when I first saw it, how can we expect beginners to be more comfortable using it than alg.garron.us (apart from the fact that it is not built to rely on Java)? Also, Lucas, when my mouse pointer is in the cube window, and I accidentally touch the scroll dial on my mouse, the cube disappears.
 

Lucas Garron

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The more I use it, the more memory it consumes. So if I put there some scramble, a solution in the move section, another scramble, different solutions, etc. (playing arond with FMC), the physical memory usage always increases, but never decreases (only if I close the webpage).

The current internals are extremely inefficient right now; an entirely new cube is constructed for every letter you type.
I'm going to rewrite the internals soon, and this will become a lot more efficient as a side effect (it should be able to reuse the same cube every time). It just hasn't been a priority because modern browsers can handle the current situation for most users.

As a simple workaround, you highlight your browser's URL bar and hit Enter to reload the page; memory usage will start from scratch with your current state.

Apart from the ability to have cubes larger than the 7x7x7, I find that alg.garron.us is more user-friendly (and simple) to use overall (no offense Lucas). If it confused me when I first saw it, how can we expect beginners to be more comfortable using it than alg.garron.us (apart from the fact that it is not built to rely on Java)?
That isn't very specific, but I'm always happy to hear feedback; can you point to specific things that were user-friendly, and that are not anymore?

I'm focused on features right now, but I eventually want it to be just as useful for alg.garron.us for everything. (However, playback mode is already meant to make viewing algs as simple as possible, by hiding all the input controls.)

Also, Lucas, when my mouse pointer is in the cube window, and I accidentally touch the scroll dial on my mouse, the cube disappears.
The cube should change orientation by a bit, but it should remain visible.
Does it ever reappear? Do you see any error messages in the browser console?
What is your OS/browser?
(Perhaps the scroll event triggers and exception, causing everything not to be drawn. I don't usually test on IE because I work on OSX.)
 
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I think a supercube setting would be pretty useful. I just generated some algs for 4x4 <2R, U> and I had to do this to see how the centres moved around

KJz1H0y.png
 
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Petro Leum

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I have a few suggestions for additional features:

1. a tool (a button) to count the moves after each line of solve and add them like (moves of the step/total moves) at the end of the line
2. make the visual cube like a sim (is that hard to do?) so you can do the same process the other way round: make moves on the visual cube and the script then writes them down properly.
3. along with the simplify/expand/invert/image buttons there could be a "remove rotations" button, that does what it says: removes all x/y/z/ or even x/y/z/M/E/S/Uw/Dw/Bw/Fw/Rw/Lw moves from the algorithm like this:

R U' z U R z' R' U' z R' U R -> "remove rotations" -> R U' L' U R' U' L U

4. just like 3. it would then be cool to be able to add a cube rotation in the algorithm, not just adding it in between the moves, but so that the program then changes the remaining moves of the algorithm accordingly, like this:

R U' L' U R' U' L U
->"add rotation"
-> chose "z"
-> chose a spot, for this example between L' and U
-> R U' L' z R D' R' U R

Now, this is alot and i have no idea if its even possible in the way alg.cubing.net works, but i'd certainly appreciate those features.
 

Lucas Garron

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I have a few suggestions for additional features:

Those are all good suggestions! In fact, my plan is to support all of them eventually – roughly in the order you listed.
It's also great to hear explicit feature requests. I honestly don't have much time to work on this, but if I know people want something I can give it higher priority.

One reason I implemented to cubing.net/touch recently is so that I can support both keyboard and mobile input.

If someone wants to work on something that can remove rotations or add rotations, it should be easy to work on alg.js if you know Javascript. I'd be happy happy to expose contributions as features in alg.cubing.net.
 

Renslay

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Those are all good suggestions! In fact, my plan is to support all of them eventually – roughly in the order you listed.
It's also great to hear explicit feature requests. I honestly don't have much time to work on this, but if I know people want something I can give it higher priority.

I also find those suggestions very helpful!
 

cubernya

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Those are all good suggestions! In fact, my plan is to support all of them eventually – roughly in the order you listed.
It's also great to hear explicit feature requests. I honestly don't have much time to work on this, but if I know people want something I can give it higher priority.

One reason I implemented to cubing.net/touch recently is so that I can support both keyboard and mobile input.

If someone wants to work on something that can remove rotations or add rotations, it should be easy to work on alg.js if you know Javascript. I'd be happy happy to expose contributions as features in alg.cubing.net.

This already has a way to manipulate algs in different ways. You should message him to see if you can rip some code.
 

Lucas Garron

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It only mirrors the Moves, not the scramble. This should be corrected.

Maybe not. None of the tools affect the setup right now, and there is no way to guess what the user wants in general.
I can think of use cases for mirroring with either behaviour for the setup. I'm going to leave it unaffected for now. It's at least possible to copy the setup into the moves field to mirror it.
 

Lucas Garron

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By popular demand: 1x1x1 support!
Inverses also work better now: [F: [R, U]] is inverted to [F: [U, R]].

what about a check box so you can disable live updating? it runs really slowly for me because of that
Efficiency rewrites are the next big thing.

I could probably introduce a small delay (so that it waits to re-render if you type a few things in a row), but angular.js makes that a bit annoying.

Supercube stuff
I plan to support custom stickers/supercubes, but it's not a huge priority. You can fiddle with the three.js code if you want to hack together something quick.
 
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naliuj

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The cube isn't showing up on screen for me anymore. I don't know if that's an issue on my side or not. May as well tell you though.

Edit: I refreshed it a bunch of times and it finally showed up.
 
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