Bay 12 Games Forum

I haven't actually played the game, but from what I have seen/read about it, what about a 9x9 square of electric floor, 9 walls below it, and then a solid row of more electric floor that turns on instantly when you step over it. Then set a dog off to the right and one either above and below, such that, as soon as you step on the grid, you must follow an *exact* movement pattern, or else one of the dogs will flip a switch before you can reach the safe, and fry the whole grid.

With the row next to the grid, and the limited inventory, there is no option other than to brute force it, but enough red herrings can be inserted into the pattern that it is next to impossible.

This is all assuming, and from what I have seen it is true, that when you move horizontally, dogs in the same column prefer to move horizontally as well, and the same for vertically.

[2 replies while posting]

If you start discussing bad admins, and then someone else argues against your reasoning of why they are bad admins, and that discussion continues to grow until it is the only thing discussed for 50+ consecutive posts, all the while most of the participants are making no effort to be civil, and insults are being thrown in every direction like the remains of a goblin army that just dropped 50 z-levels onto a rough granite floor? Obviously not.

If the discussions stay short and polite? I don't know, but it's more likely how the discussions proceed rather than the specific subject they relate to that would be the problem. Probably safer to avoid potentially problematic topics, though, unless you are certain that everyone who might reply is mature enough to keep it from spiraling out of control (a very hard thing to avoid on a public internet forum).

Hopefully, I'm just stating the obvious, but it's likely that exactly the people who don't think it's all that obvious are the ones who might accidentally, or even intentionally, start the sort of conflict that would likely lead to this thread being locked just like all the others before it.

Did you know that, from DM, you can export a file containing all of the resources that people have to download when they connect?

Then you can host it elsewhere, so that it downloads faster, and doesn't use any server resources while downloading. Or, at least, they only need to download the parts that changed.

Javascript?

I might be doing this wrong, but pasting it into a plain text document, renaming it .html, loading it in Firefox, then bringing up the error console, I encountered a few problems.

It didn't recognise those as function definitions until the "void" was changed to "function", and the semicolons between that and the function body were removed. Then, of course, they weren't being called, so to get anything to happen, I added an extra call to each of them afterwards. It still had an error, though, with the array declaration, and googling about it brings up a completely different way to create a two dimensional array.

Then, finally, it would run.

The player also gets to use sound, though. So, for two features that could justify sounds: Player hearing (listen closely at a door, and you may hear a zombie moaning on the other side. Or around corners. Or perhaps a distant wolf (in an open above ground setting) that signifies both relative lack of zombies, and a possible risk of encountering more dangerous creatures), and "sleeping" opponents (could just be distracted or inactive) (wake when they hear something loud enough)

It would also allow for more stealth-type gameplay, as you could throw a rock at a distant wall, drawing attention in that area, and then quietly pass through another route, where the now-distracted zombie would have noticed you.

But as a simple "reasons to introduce this feature", sleeping opponents and an additional sense for the player can be added long before there is any sort of decent AI for enemies, and both of them would have effects clearly visible to anyone playing.

P.S. People don't need your permission to take the code change it a bit and call it their own after you have put months of work into it. Im just saying that you guys should be cautious about how you handle your code and resources

In that case, it's far better to have it clearly visible online, so you can easily point at your copy, and compare timestamps. If someone comes in a month later, with no existing online presence, and claims that half of the assets are actually theirs, that they created for their suspiciously similar game, which just happens to play almost exactly like a version from two weeks ago, then the commit log and timestamps in the public repo will clearly show that theirs is the copy. Unless they have undeniable evidence that they had the full code long before the repository was public, the fact that it *is* public will ensure that they are unable to claim it as their own.

One thing that would be important, I think, would be a way of representing key features of what is above you, if it was 3D. Simply being able to tell where there is a roof directly overhead, or a hole that requires further inspection, without having to constantly enter look mode (or whatever), and check a level above.

It could be handled as simply an extra bit of shading that distinguishes whichever is less common/more interesting, without interfering much with the presentation of whatever is being drawn at that space.

Another consideration would be something like this:
(side view)

#_@_               __$#
#  #                z #


Where the @ is the player, the $ is some interesting item, and the z is an enemy which is rather important to know about.

This could be handled by showing interesting stuff that would be obscured by something drawn on the current level as a transparent image. Or perhaps DF-style switching between the current floor's object, and a symbol that represents "something visible above/below that is rather important", the way dwarves get an extra state that they flash to when hungry, thirsty, or tired.


Of course, all of this only matters in a fully 3D world.

I think I once (many years ago) found that the RC2 editor did not allow some rule combinations that were present in some of RC1's scenarios. I think one of them was allowing for both an entry price at the same time as charging for rides.