Discuss the massively-multiplayer home defense game.
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Yeah, this was a balance between looking good and functionality. If I tightened up the edge of the black fog, it blocks what's on the other side of a wall, but doesn't look as good (sharp edge). If I move it in more, then it really obscures the walls that you're standing next too. I wanted it to be clear that you're standing next to a wooden wall, for example.
The idea is that you can kind of hear an animal on the other side of a door. Maybe you can "detect" a vault through a one-thick wall by knocking on the wall. Walls are thin! Or maybe there are cracks to see through.
There are a few reasons:
1) Each tape takes up room on the server. As it stands, the robbery log table is the biggest table, by about a factor of 10.
2) For each permanent, meaningful event (like reaching the vault), there are dozens of scouting attempts.
3) Watching someone scouting and leaving is boring.
4) When someone scouts and leaves, whatever damage they do is auto-repaired (to prevent chipping away through multiple scouting trips). This would be inconsistent for the house owner (seeing damage being done on a scouting tape, but then not seeing that damage in the house). This is already present to some extent, if a robber does damage and then dies---you see the damage on tape, but then it's auto-repaired (but the desire to see people dying in your traps overrides the concern about inconsistency).
I can see all tapes, as admin. So, if you see someone walking through walls, and then you die, as long as you've written the name down, I can find it.
Marking tapes, for review by admins, will be something that will likely be in place in the future.
The problem with the server reviewing robber move lists is that it means that all game rules and logic need to be duplicated on the server. That means that if I change the game (by adding a new trap or tweaking the behavior of a trap), I would need to change it in two places, which makes the whole thing really fragile and bug-prone.
Bottom line: there is NO WAY to prevent this from happening, whether or not the source code is available.
Yeah, I could modify the client to check properties.txt at launch, but then someone would just re-modify the client to "fake" that check! Same with signing the client itself. Ask the DRM people how that's working for them...
The only way to deal with this would be to do EVERYTHING on the server, like each and every robber step, and then only send the client what the robber can see after moving. As you can imagine, this wouldn't be practical for a bunch of reasons.
So, the way that I'm dealing with this is by recording everything and closing accounts of cheaters (paid accounts). If someone is walking through walls, the cheat is pretty obvious and can easily be reported (maybe they'll even be a REPORT button in the client for this, and some way to collectively "judge" a given tape as being evidence of a cheat).
If someone is simply turning the visibility shroud off, then it's a bit harder to prove that they're cheating. But I'm also tracking scouting counts, which helps with that. If someone breaks through a house on the first try without cutting anything or exploring, that's pretty suspicious.
There are other, community-based ways of dealing with this. Web of trust, voting out cheaters, etc. This will be explored more in the future, as the community evolves. Could be an interesting meta game!
Wow, your house is amazing! (Just took a peek as admin).
You're right, the off-screen triggered electric floors are much more elegant than 9-thick walls.
Yeah, and I think that this is a perfect example of a house that would still be really fun and interesting to solve with a purchased map. It's not like the map would spoil everything. There would still be a puzzle to solve.
Yes, house state is saved whenever robber kills a family member. That's permanent, and you're going to discover it when you come home, so the house state has to be sensible. For example, they might cut walls to bypass dogs that are guarding the family, in which case you might find the family dead in an seemingly-unreachable location (blocked by dogs?) if the walls were auto-repaired.
You've got a 5-bit lock that costs $1700 and has 9-thick walls protecting it? Yeah, I totally didn't foresee that as being possible. But, you know, players always do amazing things!
The problem with flux readers is that they don't give enough information. Lanterns wouldn't let you see off-screen (so builders would just put the hidden logic far away to thwart lanterns).
The problem with voltage creators (like, a battery that you can attach to something to generate a current) is that they are hard to "attach" to some things. Like, put a battery on a wire, okay. Put a battery on empty floor, okay. But put a battery on a door or on a wall? Players would just design their houses to leave no room for the battery to be attached. Or put electric floors there to auto-kill the player who placed the battery.
Also, I think that batteries would be a bit too powerful. I DO want you to have to think through some houses.
So, the buyable maps fix this. They'll only be available for houses that are rich and no one has yet been able to bypass (like, 50+ deaths or whatever). And, they'll be expensive (like, 25% of house value, maybe). So, they will coax the rich people back out into robbing (because only rich people will be able to afford them) and set a new goal for poor players (become slightly rich in order to take a crack at a top house). The map will only be viewable "offline", in your own house, in a static pan-around mode. You won't be able to walk through it or test it. So, a really good house design can still be tricky, even if you have seen the map. It will then be about designing real puzzles instead of stuff that can be brute-forced.
1) Why are combo locks allowed?
There's not a good way to forbid them, algorithmically. I originally envisioned that people would figure out how to do this eventually, especially after some players rose to the top and became rich. I didn't realize that it would happen so quickly.
In v6, buyable maps will help robbers deal with these kinds of houses.
2) How are we supposed to keep our family alive?
This is a major weakness in the design of v5. Since they walk ceaselessly toward the door, the door is a pinch-point, and the robber can just wait there (creepy, yeah, but everyone is doing it). Dogs don't help either, because dead dogs block other dogs but not the family.
I'm working on ways to fix this in v6 (probably by having the family pause whenever the robber is close to the front door, and start moving again whenever the robber moves away from the front door).
3) Why are concrete walls more expensive than steel but easier to destroy?
These weren't strictly cost-power design decisions. There was also common sense involved (explosives are cheaper than torches). But also, concrete walls do no conduct electricity, so they are more useful in some situations.
4) Why do steel and wooden wired walls cost the same?
This may need to be looked at again. Especially since so many people are now using steel walls AS wires. That wasn't really my intent, so maybe they will become non-conductive in v6.
5) WHY DO PEOPLE KILL THE CHILDREN!
I'll let them answer for themselves on this one...
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