Introducing Twizzle (alpha)

[Cubing Forever]

Yep!
Tom has been working on twsearch, which is a more powerful replacement for KSolve and ACube. The goal is to make that available on the web similar to ACube.js, and we're pretty close!

Nice!! Would it support all the WCA puzzles like KSolve++ does?

Kinda off topic: I wanna learn CSS and JS someday(I know basic HTML already). They seem interesting.

 

[CodingCuber]

Kinda off topic: I wanna learn CSS and JS someday(I know basic HTML already). They seem interesting.

CSS and HTML for me are kinda the boring part. JavaScript (or preferably TypeScript) is where it gets interesting.

 

[Christopher Mowla]

a much more powerful successor called Twizzle!

I forgot to mention it, but for those who want to appreciate that statement fully, take a look at this post by Tom Rokicki on the twisty puzzles forum!

 

[Humble Cuber]

Contributions are definitely welcome!
We rely on `npm` and GitHub. If you're familiar with those, it should be pretty straigthforward: https://github.com/cubing/cubing.js/blob/main/CONTRIBUTING.md

We have a few things marked as a "good first issue", although they tend to assume familiarity our tooling:

Build software better, together

GitHub is where people build software. More than 100 million people use GitHub to discover, fork, and contribute to over 420 million projects.

github.com

But it might be more effective to just start by tinkering with the code to see what changes.
(I want to make a proper "how to work with the code" video at some point. I have one draft, but it's very long.)

Feel free to join our Slack if you'd like to chat more directly about development!

Slack

join.slack.com

Lol I would love to help but all I’m okay at is making stuff look pretty with html and cs, I suck at JS and most other languages

 

[Lucas Garron]

It sounds like there's quite some interest in learning to work on this kind of stuff, so I'll see about making an "getting started" guide sooner rather than later. (If someone has experience running `node` and `npm` on Windows, please let me know!)

I forgot to mention it, but for those who want to appreciate that statement fully, take a look at this post by Tom Rokicki on the twisty puzzles forum!

Yep, this is an important design constraint!

We make sure that any algorithm that can *fit* in the text field can be animated efficiently. So we handle arbitrarily nested commutators, conjugates, and groupings with repetitions using a tree structure. This is fairly safe to do for permutation puzzles, but there are some fun considerations, like the fact that JS only allows us to handle move indices up to 2^53

 

[ray5]

Congrats on the alpha release!

Is there an option to make the edges of the cube black instead of transparent?

and with the megaminx I can't look at it from the top down. the camera is limited too much.

 

[xyzzy]

JS only allows us to handle move indices up to 2^53

There's BigInt now!

 

[rokicki]

And, if you don't want to install homebrew, the default Mac installer for the latest node works pretty seamlessly.

 

[qwr]

imagine being on a Mac and having to use homebrew

 

[rokicki]

Thou shalt have no other gods before me

I prefer to keep my Mac virginal. Eventually I need something that really *needs* homebrew, and then I feel dirty.

 

[Lucas Garron]

There's BigInt now!

Indeed!
We're thinking about how much work it would be to use this, but I want to explore some time.

Congrats on the alpha release!

Is there an option to make the edges of the cube black instead of transparent?

and with the megaminx I can't look at it from the top down. the camera is limited too much.

For right now, you can try this in the JS console or using a bookmarklet:

document.querySelector("twisty-player").twisty3D.experimentalSetFoundationOpacity(1)
document.querySelector("twisty-player").viewerElems[0].orbitControls.experimentalLatitudeLimits = false;

But I can't guarantee that those will keep working.
If you need to look at the top of the Megaminx, I suggest sticking with Twizzle Explorer for now: https://alpha.twizzle.net/explore/?puzzle=megaminx

Do you have a particular reason to look at the top of a Megaminx? My guess is that people will usually want to do this to look at LL cases, but it would be useful to know.

 

[qwr]

I prefer to keep my Mac virginal. Eventually I need something that really *needs* homebrew, and then I feel dirty.

my Ubuntu laptop needs no dirtyness (though I am running snaps...)

 

[Gil.zussman]

My everlasting inspiration! R E S P E C T!

 

[tsmosher]

(If someone has experience running `node` and `npm` on Windows, please let me know!)

Although my most recent experience was on a Mac (which I detested for the record), I have experience running node/npm in Windows.

If anyone wants to learn how to write JavaScript/TypeScript, Id love to teach you. I'm not the best JS/TS developer, but i know the ropes.

 

[Christopher Mowla]

If anyone wants to learn how to write JavaScript/TypeScript, Id love to teach you. I'm not the best JS/TS developer, but i know the ropes.

Why don't you record some videos and make a course on Udemy so that you can get the satisfaction of teaching and make some cash on the side (and help a lot more people than you can from one-on-one).

 

[Melvintnh327]

when you feel like the 6x6's corner is going to fall off:

 

[Melvintnh327]

I created a 100x100 rubik's cube on twizzle

link: https://alpha.twizzle.net/explore/?puzzlegeometry=c+f+0+f+.02+f+.04+f+.06+f+...

 

[Christopher Mowla]

This always bugged me with Twizzle. Twizzle Alpha - Throwing puzzles off the screen bug (Firefox 91.0.1 on Windows 10)

 

[rokicki]

This always bugged me with Twizzle. Twizzle Alpha - Throwing puzzles off the screen bug (Firefox 91.0.1 on Windows 10)

Howdy, Christopher! Can anyone else reproduce this? How hard is it to reproduce? Is there anything special about your setup that might help explain it? Anything strange in the console?

 

[xyzzy]

Oh, I've been getting that bug a bunch too. Just drag it up and down a bunch and the puzzle vanishes. Nothing shows up in the console for me, though. (Also Firefox; I thought I managed to reproduce it in Chrome before, but I can't get it to happen now.)

Maybe the coordinates turned into a sea of NaNs or something; if you change the puzzle geometry, the puzzle starts rendering again (because all the coordinates are recomputed?), but if you only change the cuts, the puzzle remains unrendered.

On another note, I think it'd be nice if the puzzles could have fully free rotation, rather than only two adjustable Euler angles (one of which is constrained to ±90°). Hovering face labels (like CubeDB has) would also be very nice.