Drawing arbitrary high-density bitmaps (aka: without using Letter Writer's technique) with missiles coming from infinity is *hard*. In fact, starting from only a 3x5 (or more if needed) filled rectangle, these letters are impossible:
Upper: ABDGOPQR
Lower: abdegopq
r
(Hope I didn't miss any)
Edit: Not r
Note that these are the letters with loops with a few exceptions (ex. G).
Now consider what if the missiles can only come from the top/bottom; this is needed unless you are going to do this with your letters:
Which isn't that good.
If missiles can only come from the top/bottom (like in the top section of the level), only the following letters can be created from a solid block:
HLMNTUVWXY
hlmntuvwx
Obviously you can't really write much with just those letters. This means that you have to either Letter Writer your text (pro: arbitrary text/symbols. con: so much space.*), or, the method I used here, leave holes in the solid blocks where letters need holes (pro: high-density. con: only one or maybe a few possible characters). If you don't leave holes, some pairs of characters like B and D are going to be mapped to the same hole-less block:
Code: Select all
██ ██ ██
█ █ █ █ ███
██ █ █ -> ███
█ █ █ █ ███
██ ██ ██
*In theory this would be fine if you could just zoom out. However, we only have a finite TES world. (More on this later).
It's relatively easy to show that you only need at most a 6-tall rectangle for horizontal text like this. Since you can send missiles from both top and bottom, you only need to control three pulses*.
Edit: Actually, I think there might be some weirdness with characters like N, which needs 5 pulses from the bottom.
However, this would make the lower part of the level too obvious (I think there'd be 7 empty blocks if you use the "proper" c, many of them next to each other), so I spaced it a bit diagonally, and sent some missiles from the sides. (S and k being the notable issues.) I was running out of switches* then, so I sent volleys with 3, 2, and 1 missiles. In theory, this could pulse a total of any polite number of missiles from one direction if the required pulses are more than the max pulses per volley (since once a cannon starts and stops, it can't start again). I use the first volley to clear out the large areas, and cleared more precisely with the latter ones. However, there are some conflicts; for example, the upper-right section needs to be cleared before the S can be finished. In this case, it was a bit weird (that random missile there? conflict-resolution with the latter vertical missiles).
Part of the confusion was because I stacked multiple switch-controlled blocks on top of each other (something I rarely do; I only started needing to in The Ocean). This way it was hard to distinguish what was controlling what.
*I think I actually might be able to change the first section to use only 2 switches instead of 3, now that I think about it. One controls the 2 volley, one the 1 volley. Since 1 = 1, 2 = 2, and 3 = 2 + 1, this might work.
Edit: See edit above.
