The Castle Doctrine Forums

Well the new dance is looking to be interesting - wish me luck on self test .

hmm, odd, as I think I remember you trying out Price's house before and doing a slightly different dance. Oh well, I'll make sure I change the dance tonight before your chills are up. And I guess I'll change the vault location . It would have been completely fair game to take it though - really my fault for just creating the same house.

What have we unleashed...

I think I agree with iceman here that single cycle steps would be too much of a change and quite possibly effect the game negatively. The ability to create tiny clocks with large cycle lengths would make the game a nightmare for new players and pretty much make stepping on electric floor without first cutting it far too dangerous. Timing puzzles would just become silly. Also, I think overall it would make the electronics more confusing for new players - they'd wonder why voltage inverted switches take a turn to kick in. Also, if you did this you would probably have to add sirens to self test if you want to preserve the idea that all houses are solvable - it would be quite easy to create a house that takes over 20 mins of button pressing to solve without tools (though this is probably already possible).

That's not to say it wouldn't be extremely interesting to play with, I'd welcome it from that side of things.  I don't think we've exhausted the interesting possibilities with the current set-up though. I also like traps that kill you as soon as you cut something .

My suggested solution would be:
1. Increase the cycle limit to as high as is reasonable. Make sure the code for electronics is as optimised as possible.
2. Purge to the (max cycle number)/2.
3. Localise electronics so that
  a) electronics topping out won't effect disconnected electronics.
  b) If one part of the electronics is unresolved not all other parts of the house need to be checked, hopefully reducing lag.

I think these things combined would make utilising time-outs entirely impractical.

Yeah, Hippasus and I discovered you could crash the house last year and Jason added the limit when we informed him.

My brother and I have been running experiments as well after reading iceman's first proposed idea of wireless communication. Basically it seems the whole thing is totally broken - you can have it so that things directly connected to power are unpowered. Sadly, it looks like Jason will have to fix this one.

Look at the example I posted earlier in the thread. That house did pretty much what your are describing, except using trapdoors and dog-doors instead of electric floor. It works through the player sending pulses through the house to the "crazy" electronics on the other side. And it was pretty effective.

A while ago now I created a house that relied the player sending different signals through the houses wiring in order to trigger core electronics to close the trap doors leading to the vault:
http://castledraft.com/editor/jyAZTg

In general it was pretty effective and there is a lot of potential for this sort of thing. For Mr Earl Wilson's house I used a similar idea of having different signals sent right through my house's electronics trigger the electronic doors to close.

The house above was made at a time when indicator lights were indestructible. To use it now the design would have to be modified a little to make sure the initial signalling electronics cannot be modified to provide full power to the trapdoors.

See if you can figure out how to get to the vault without tools.

I guess this is what happens when people who actually know about real electronics scrutinise our terminology .

redxaxder: Where did you get the term "D flip-flop" from?

From my standpoint the game population is still extremely healthy - it sure beats the average of 8 or so houses I was used to during the alpha run. There are still plenty of houses to rob and people playing, there is certainly no lack of content. It seems the thing being complained about is simply a lack of easy money - something that can easily be tweaked by Jason by increasing bounties.