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Falling panels above garbage don't chain

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Assessment

Difficulty
1/5
Estimated time
Under an hour
Newbie friendliness
90/100
Issue type
Documentation
Clarity
Clearly specified
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
lua
Domain
game-dev

Research direction

Locate the existing game mechanics documentation covering panel chaining and garbage behavior, typically stored in the project's docs/ directory. Add a concise note describing this edge case where panels above falling garbage do not chain, including the intentional design rationale to prevent exploitable extended hover chains. Verify the documentation renders correctly if a local preview step is available.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

engine priority: 3 - wishlist wontfix
Image

In the above scenario, the panels above the garbage dropping into the horizontal match do not chain.

This issue primarily exists for documentation as this is not necessarily an issue we want to solve.

== Arguments for chaining ==

Panels that fell as a result of a match should chain if they fall into another match.

That is the general expectation for chaining.

== Arguments against chaining ==

Garbage is supposed to impede the player. Garbage stopping chain propagation seems natural. The only reason it may seem unnatural is that the given scenario occurs extremely rarely so that players aren't accustomed to this property of garbage.

Backslash tested for us in PdP and it does not chain there either.

== Why this won't be fixed for the time being ==

When no garbage is involved, panels above a match start to hover and become unswappable in the same moment they gain the chaining flag.
This makes it non-trivial to produce so called "hover chains" as the window for the swap is small enough (3 frames) that while somewhat consistently doable with practice, it remains slightly risky.

When panels fall alongside uncleared garbage, they do not hover at all. If the chaining flag would propagate through the uncleared garbage, all panels above would have the chaining flag and remain swappable for a free chain while the panel right below the garbage hovers, increasing the window of a swap resulting in a chain by the hover time (3+6 = 9 frames on level 10) so long as it does not happen via the top panel of the match (as the swapping panel would successfully stall loss of chaining state for the panel above).
That would make it trivially easy to get a free chain extension every single time in any scenario with a viable tier 2 match:

Image

Thus the "simple" fix is much more damaging to the game than not "fixing" it at all when it is not even clear that it should be fixed.

Any attempts at resolving this would have to be heavily scrutinized for unintended side effects and seems unnecessarily risky for such a minor issue that would even require an update to the engine version. For the time being any fix for this issue will be denied but the issue might get revisited at a later time.

Dominant language
Lua
Stars
30
Forks
20
Avg merge
7d 1h
Merged PRs (30d)
9

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First steps

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  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

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