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#1 Re: Main Forum » Family psychology » 2013-05-22 04:37:17

jasonrohrer wrote:

Though now I've realized that it might be possible to overprotect the family....  put them down a long, snaking hallway with 9 pitbulls in it.  More thought needed here.

Make it so that when the pitbulls are enraged (ie. have had line-of-sight to the robber), they will go for family members as well?

#2 Re: Main Forum » An alternative to maps » 2013-05-14 13:03:51

jearr wrote:

I like the idea of building your own map rather than being given one.  Your idea would actually add gameplay.  Mr. Rohrer could maybe consider integrating with http://castlefortify.com/ and/or http://castlr.fonkle.com/  if fog of war was implemented.

I also like the idea of selective information rather than just a "here's the complete map, solve the puzzle", but couldn't think of any way to do it that wouldn't be overly complicated and a nightmare to present to the end user. Not to mention that people could easily still get the full map through nefarious means.

FWIW, I've not done any work on castlr in ages - castlefortify is a far better system - I can't even render tiles properly ;-)

#3 Re: Main Forum » Pitbulls cannot pass over pitbull corpses » 2013-04-19 06:42:44

The pitbull dam thing is something of an issue, and agree that it could be done better. I don't entirely agree with the concept of "dead dogs block live dogs", though.

Alternatively, something like the dwarf fortress implementation. 1000 dragons can fit in a single square so long as 999 of them are lying down :-)

In real life if you got 100 trained-to-kill pit bulls all together, they would attack and kill each other.
Also, shooting a dog should scare any other dogs away (could be done by temporarily giving them the cat AI, temporarily?)

#4 Re: Main Forum » CastleFortify: Save and share your designs » 2013-04-17 07:04:54

Hey segarch,

I've been a bit quiet on my editor of late, as I don't want to do any more releases until I've fixed that z-fighting rendering bug, I see you've made some very positive changes to CF!

One of the things I've also been working on is the ability to switch between edit mode and interact mode, with a view to making electricity work as it does in the game - tiles change colour if they have electricity flowing through them, buttons and switches will be clickable/toggle-able etc.

Have you got many more changes to your own code than what's currently in github? If not, I can probably try to make my changes reasonably compatible with your codebase.

Cheers
Ed

#5 Re: Main Forum » Is there a way to export your house layout? » 2013-04-11 08:07:30

Matrix wrote:

This is highly unlikely to be implemented in a way that would prevent getting the data. He can only make it harder but not impossible.

Like he already pointed out the only way to achieve that would be a server-side implementation of the game logic and a total rewrite of the client to only receive visible tile data instead of the whole house map.

You're absolutely right that it's not possible to stop someone sufficiently determined from obtaining the data via authentication, even if Jason encrypts the hell out of everything.

What is possible however, is to make it so that other people's maps aren't stored in the local filesystem at all.

Presumably he uses the locally stored file as a means of building the security footage.
It should be possible, on the server, to know what state a given person's house was at a given time.

The file that currently holds the local version of the other person's house could instead hold a pointer to a server-side representation of that person's house at that given time. ie. instead of the map data being encoded in the file, he stores something like house_id=99191919&timestamp=1234567890, which, for looking up security tapes, loads a historical version of the house from the server to replay the break-in against.

If he really needs to keep the other person's house in the local filesystem, make it so that they are encrypted using a key based upon something tied to the player's account, and keep it in a separate file from the actual player's layout.

Of course this is all speculative, we don't know what the backend looks like.

#6 Re: Main Forum » Is there a way to export your house layout? » 2013-04-11 06:20:14

Matrix wrote:

Well that "format" would be by authenticating the user and getting access to the layout of his house only. You can already do this now (although external user authentication is not supported yet afaik) but the problem is that when you authenticate you can access layouts of other houses as well.

Yeah, I wasn't talking about communicating directly with the server; I doubt Jason would approve if either of the map editor/viewer web apps used the official authentication mechanism to pull data from the server - that would likely be met with swift, sharp use of the ban hammer, and justifiably so; however, the game stores the (admittedly non-canonical) data locally as well.

I started writing a decoder for it but decided not to implement it in my editor because it would allow me to access layouts of other houses. If Jason can stop this file from storing unencrypted map data for other house layouts in the next version then I would reconsider it.

#7 Re: Main Forum » Is there a way to export your house layout? » 2013-04-11 03:02:07

Not export as such, but there is http://castlefortify.com/ or http://castlr.fonkle.com/ which allow you to effectively design blueprints.

The issue as I understand it is that while your house layout is technically available for export, it's in a way that, as pavram says, makes cheating trivially easy.
Hopefully Jason will alter this so that we can access the player's house layout in a nice format so that we can import/export from web apps such as the above without making cheating so simple.

#8 Re: Main Forum » Dealing with too-hard houses » 2013-04-10 07:33:52

Some ideas off the top of my head

- Make the power emanated from a power cell be finite, with each "powered" tile using some of that power
- Make power sources expensive (or limited to X per map, or, as someone posted above, fixed position)
- Make it so that power sources have +/- ends, and that if you connect a + to a + or a - to a -, you get a short circuit. Would seriously increase the complexity required to build combo locks.
- Make animals respect line of sight

#9 Re: Main Forum » CastleFortify: Save and share your designs » 2013-04-10 06:14:33

segarch wrote:

That would be awesome! Would love to get that code - and I'm totally down for collaborating.  Let's do it.

Sounds good!

I just made my first ever commit to github... the place I work uses SVN. big_smile
https://github.com/edwardoka/castlr/

Cheers
Ed

#10 Re: Main Forum » CastleFortify: Save and share your designs » 2013-04-10 04:45:17

@Segarch:

I wrote http://castlr.fonkle.com/ but never announced it properly, you beat me to the punch big_smile

I've already implemented some of the things on your roadmap on it - do you want access to the source code?
I'd be up for collaborating with you on this.

Cheers
Ed

#11 Re: Main Forum » Just a few questions » 2013-04-06 06:12:57

colorfusion wrote:

This would probably badly hit actual puzzle houses but leave combo-locks/electric-mazes as unsolvable as they are now, which is kind of the exact opposite of what I think he's trying to make the item do.

Your whole fragmented partial map system seems a little too complicated and strange, I think an expensive full map would work better. Also selling and buying probably wouldn't work that well; if people did a lot of work then they're likely to finish it off and claim the house prize, if people haven't done much work then people wouldn't buy the map because they could just do it themselves.

I've not really described the system I envisaged very well. It's complicated to describe (and, I daresay, complicated to implement) but would be quite simple in use.

The rationale behind it is like in the game Thief, when you are on a mission, you get a map of the place you're breaking into, but the map is usually sketchy and incomplete, based upon intelligence gathered from servants or the like, often times conflicting.

While a full map could potentially be available on the marketplace, it should be at much higher cost than stated elsewhere - as high as 75% of the house value - and shouldn't be a "live" view of the house.

Imagine the following scenario:

Player A visits House X with some tools, cuts through some likely looking walls, kills a couple of pitbulls and goes for a wander around the innards, automapping as they go. They then encounter something they can't deal with, so they leave.
They haven't got enough money to have another crack at it, so as their information is now useless, they offer their intel on the marketplace for a price (either determined by them, or calculated as a percentage of the house value divided by how much of the map was not already available. ie. rarity of the info)

Player B buys the map from Player A (either outright... ie. the map is no longer available for sale, or a copy... ie. the original remains available for sale, I'm not sure which would be better), and, forewarned by the map of Player A's runthrough, player B now visits House X with the tools required to bypass the obstruction that Player A couldn't get past. Player B then hits another obstruction that they can't pass, so they leave.

Depending upon how the buying was implemented, then one of the two following things can happen:
If they bought it outright, they can sell the combination of their map and Player A's map, with the same price calculation as above (with the various ages of the different sections highlighted by a colour coding or similar - see below examples)

If they bought a copy of the map, they can only sell those portions of the level that was mapped by themselves.

Player C buys a combination of Player A and Player B's map, has a playthrough, reveals another big area by cutting through some walls, and then leaves.
Through iteration, the map is gradually revealed.

Examples of combination of maps with colour coded "information age":
Player A puts his map on the market, and it looks like this so people can see what they're buying: http://i.imgur.com/0FwfN4y.png
Player B puts his combined map on the market, and it looks like: http://i.imgur.com/n1WUMrw.png
Player C puts his combined map on the market, and it looks like: http://i.imgur.com/Ta2he6K.png

colorfusion wrote:

As a separate thing that could work perhaps, like in some other roguelikes, areas that you've already seen but can't see at the moment are slightly darker but still visible.

Yeah, I like this idea too.

#12 Re: Main Forum » Just a few questions » 2013-04-06 04:53:48

Regarding maps, I think that
a) providing an outright, complete map of a level is a poor idea that would break the game.
b) If you scout a location and leave, you should be able to look at a map fragment of the area that you discovered, combined with those of any previous visits.
c) You would be able to put these map fragments up for auction/sale against the house in question, with the option of combining your map fragments with other people's map fragments.
d) The map fragments would have a date against them, and they would reflect the house at the time they were created. They would NOT reflect changes to the layout.

This would give the home owner an incentive to semi-regularly visit their house (to change things around to obsolete those map fragments).
In addition to allowing another way of earning money (by scouting and selling intelligence on the marketplace), it would also provide the home owner the ability to feed misinformation by making subtle changes to their layout after a key component of their design has been mapped.

What do you think?

Cheers
Ed

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