The Castle Doctrine Forums

No, currently there is no way to protect your family. Worse, as long as your family is alive, your house is not safe either.
The best you can hope for is a robber who kills your family a bit away from the door so you can build a nice shrine.

Ah, indeed, that explains.
Thanks

In real life I never know my own phone number, and I often have to think when asked how old I am... so not knowing my name in this game is actually not that strange

I'm not too sure about adding something to disable non-powered e-floors. It will just result in 9-deep floors instead of 1-deep ones and once maps are implemented you can see their workings any way so there's no need to disable 'em any more...

We can combine those two: If you die again in 5 minutes, you instantly reincarnate, but you have to wait 55 minutes before you are allowed to leave your hose.
This would give those people some time to build some defences with that $2k they've got.

An hour seems a bit steep. We could start with 20 minutes, and add 10 for every death. Every hour 10 get removed again.

A lock-box - The lock-box is a small version of the vault and has 5% of the money/items of the house in it, and 1 random painting from the archive if the house owner has more than 4. The robber has to choose which to open, the lock-box or the vault. Opening the lock-box does reset the house (unlike opening the vault) and you can watch the tape.

Why?
* You can make a trap with two levels of deviousness. After solving part 1, they can choose to take the 5% and live, or attempt to reach the real vault and probably die .
* If someone robs your vault, at least you have the money in the lock-box left.

Hmm, optionally having 5 to 10% of your cash on you would indeed be nice. That would allow you to fix your defences when you get robbed. But if you die, your victim gets it.

- A tool to un-stick sticking pressure plates.

The electric grid defences don't really use walls at all, except for keeping the chihuahuas on the buttons. If dogs only follow you if they can see you, those walls can even be replaced by glass and they would still work, since you can't see further than the little screen you're on. I guess to fix that you'd have to remove the visibility-distance limit and allow the user to pan around the visible area. That way, if a dog can see you, you can see the dog (and thus the buttons that the dog walks on)

That would also fix the "nothing but 9 pit-bulls" defence.

For replay-checking of robberies and house-provings the processing and delay are not really an issue. It doesn't matter if it takes a minute or 10 to prove you a cheater, you'll be banned all the same. This first check type is also easily farmed out to clients, as mentioned.

Time-delay issues come into play with server-side field-of-view checking, where the player is not sent the entire map of the house, but only the parts he can actually see. Here, after every single step, the player has to wait for the server to process that step, calculate any changes (family, dogs, cats & switches) and send back the now visible parts of the house.

Farming this second check type out to clients is very hard for several reasons:
* 95% of people are behind a (NAT) firewall, meaning peer-to-peer communication with them is simply impossible.
* Latency is most probably going to be much worse. Imagine that a client in the USA has his moves checked by a client in Korea.
But that said, farming this out is probably not even needed, since there is not that much processing required. The grid is only 30x30. It would be interesting to see how many clients are actually in the act of burglary at the same time.

I think the main reason is that it would require a total rewrite of both client and server, and introduce a host of new bugs and problems.

- A simple button:
What I miss, and surprised me that it wasn't there, is a simple button. One that is only on when someone/thing (you, cat, dog, family, brick) is on it and turns off again when what presses it moves.