dickman

awesomebill · 2013-11-01 17:08:51

someone wanna tell me whats going on with dickmans house? seems like complete bullshit to me, a full line of pwrd trap doors that open if you step one foot inside. No visible cats, chihuahuas, ect. I fail to understand how a trap like this works or is legit.

Last edited by awesomebill (2013-11-01 17:51:03)

joshwithguitar · 2013-11-01 18:09:33

awesomebill, it's not a bug, it's a clever use of electronics that lets something lose power after the first step into the house and I know exactly how it is done. I'm not Mr Dickman though so it looks like someone else has independently discovered this.

awesomebill · 2013-11-01 18:27:47

Well what you call clever, I call an exploit. There is no way whatsoever to get through something like this in a self test. All I can think, is that the this is another one hit kill pre robbed setup house, but that still does not explain how things are being triggered without any visible pets. Things like this should most likely be reported, perhaps jason already knows about this? Kinda seems like he would have to at this point. If not please by all means let him know whats going on.

I saw this trap coming a mile away, but for some reason I just assumed the game would not screw people like this. I thought that no unseen one hit kills were the only real rule of the game. Warnings like seeing dogs and such move off screen are clearly excluded in this assumption.

Last edited by awesomebill (2013-11-01 18:35:36)

nathan · 2013-11-01 19:05:19

Well, I guess you could say that he's a really... big... Forum-goer and wiki-reader, whomever he is (but I'm not him!)

joshwithguitar · 2013-11-01 19:20:01

largest herb hey, I knew there was no way to make that kind of money legitimately. so far I count 22 pits.

awesomebill · 2013-11-01 20:51:39

yep its getting old

largestherb · 2013-11-02 03:34:40

not me~

however i really wish i did have the name delmar dickman

i am currently between houses while i sit and ponder something new and masterful!

Last edited by largestherb (2013-11-02 03:35:29)

joshwithguitar · 2013-11-02 03:47:14

Hmm, well it is either a double account user or a couple of people collaborating. At the end of the hall there was a power supply intentionally broken to set the house up.

Nathan what did you mean by "...big..." forum goer if not "largest"-herb?

jasonrohrer · 2013-11-03 13:40:01

Ah... the old Dead Wife On The Panic Button trick.

You guys are supposed to REPORT these glitches to me, not quietly exploit them for personal gain!

And to think that I made a game about robbing each other blind.... I expected better things from my players....

jasonrohrer · 2013-11-03 13:42:19

Also, Josh, if this is NOT the "clever use of electronics that lets something lose power after the first step into the house and I know exactly how it is done" that you're talking about (I verfied the cause in the Dickman home), then PLEASE report the exploit that you're talking about to me.

joshwithguitar · 2013-11-03 16:18:49

Ah, I didn't realise that this house used a "dead wife on panic button" exploit like that and have known how to do that sort of this with just normal electronics for a while. You can see an extreme example in my disco house. You might have noticed that the lights never stop. I didn't really see it as an exploit as it is just a natural result of your electronics system. I'll send you an email with further details.

joshwithguitar · 2013-11-03 17:17:50

How to create Dickman's house without using a dead wife:
http://castledraft.com/editor/OvXaV9

To set it up you have to use a second account to kill the power supply before getting the vault.

ukuko · 2013-11-04 02:11:38

You could also do it with cats without using a second account.

http://castledraft.com/editor/dYzCFx

jasonrohrer · 2013-11-05 12:11:23

Ahem....

I've realized that all of this stuff involves the "state-ful" nature of electronics in the game.

After the robber moves, power propagation and transitions happen from the current map state to determine the new map state.

If there are lingering "powered-on" states in the current map state, those conditions may affect how power propagates and transitions happen to compute the new map state.

At the beginning of a robbery, everything starts "powered-off" before the first power propagation and power transition. That is the only time when electronics behavior is stateless: by looking at the map at that moment, it is possible to predict where everything will settle, power-wise.

But after that, since the next state depends on the previous state, you can't look at the map configuration (meaning, the positions of all animals and the states of all pressure switches) and predict what the state should settle to.

The simplest example of this is the "latch":

http://castledraft.com/editor/NbiTvc

By just looking at the map layout, you can't tell whether the light should be on or not. It depends on whether that button has ever been pressed in the past. Maybe 100 steps ago, it was pressed. If so, the light should be on. Otherwise, the light should be off.

This is because, if the button was ever pressed, then for every subsequent step, the voltage-triggered switch starts out closed, propagates power to itself, and keeps itself closed, whether or not the button is pressed anymore.

And this, my friends, is the basis of all surprising behavior in Castle Doctrine electronics, from latches, to counters, and now to clocks that change state independently of any switches being pressed.

Is this a problem? After all, latches are possible in real life electronics. Well, the problem is that it doesn't just stop at latches. As Mr. Morse's house demonstrates, the resulting house behavior is utterly confounding and seemingly inexplicable, and it completely violates the current rule of "if you never saw it on the screen, it can't hurt you." I want this to be a game of calculated risk and foolish luck-pressing, not a game of invisibly-triggered gotchas.

The solution is simple: at the start of every step, all objects are brought back to their unpowered state first, BEFORE power is propagated and power transitions happen. Kinda like electricity "starts over" at the start of each step. Switches still stay pressed, because they are not affected by being powered or unpowered. Essentially, this just affects the two voltage-triggered switches. They will pop "open" (or closed) at the start of every step. Just like they do at the start of every robbery.

With this setup, it's still possible to wire up paradoxical, looping electronics that settle down into inconsistent states. The simplest example is the inverted loop, which turns itself on and off forever, and settles down into an inconsistent unpowered state for all tiles involved in the loop:

http://castledraft.com/editor/zvRHo1

But electronics no longer have memory for what happened in previous steps. I mean, except if other physical objects are involved, like animals. So you can still build a latch, or a clock, but because such constructions must involve animals, some aspect of their operation must be visible to the player.

Thoughts?

ukuko · 2013-11-05 13:18:08

So, are you suggesting a change to the way power works to eliminate the nuances of sub-turn power propagation? It's certainly obscure and that obscurity is a good reason to change things. On the other hand it is electronics-based puzzles that I find fascinating (usually because the process of solving it amounts to more than a Monty Hall problem) and I'd be sad to see them go. Solving Mr Morse's house is probably the most fun I've had with the game (I suicided next to your vault as I didn't want to build a house at the time).

It's amazing that the engine is complex enough that these things are still being discovered nearly a year later. I'd be interested to know what was still possible after the changes that you have in mind.

Last edited by ukuko (2013-11-05 15:38:49)

jasonrohrer · 2013-11-05 13:35:22

No, not the subtlety of sub-turn power propagation. That would remain.

What would change is that electricity would "start over" from 0 at the beginning of each step. So, all voltage-triggered switches would go back to their starting states, as if the previous step didn't happen, and then we calculate a full propagation, with all subtlety, from there.

So, circuits would no longer "remember" the past steps. This would make latches, clocks, and counters impossible, because these all require circuits that have memory (a voltage triggered switch that ended the last step tripped starts the next step tripped---that's memory).

Furthermore, if you don't hit a switch, and no animal hits a switch, that trapdoor that you're standing on will never open. Circuits will become frozen and stable across steps, assuming that no switches are changed.

joshwithguitar · 2013-11-05 16:38:09

So along with clocks there will be no more bit storage or counters. This seems really sad, it will mean high level electronics are basically dead. There was a lot of interesting things you could do with that and still lots that is yet to be explored.

As I've said in an email I sent Jason I don't think clocks are necessarily game breaking. I actually think they could become a really interesting higher level element. At least I think we should see where it leads, what sort of houses pop up and whether it is interesting before stopping it from happening. So far my disco house and Mr Morse's house (which I helped conceptualise but didn't make) have been interesting and people have seemed to enjoy them. I would love to see what everyone else can come up with. For this reason I will put a post up on the forums soon explaining clocks we can see what happens.

John The Baptist · 2013-11-14 12:03:33

There is a really easy way to fix this.
Dead things have different tile information from alive things, so we just make sure that the dead entity cannot activate switches...

jasonrohrer · 2013-11-14 12:44:47

Actually, for now, I've decided to leave it. A dead family member pushing a panic button by lying on top of it isn't that strange, and it's kind of a weird little twist.

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#1 2013-11-01 17:08:51

dickman

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