Beef Row
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Basically what I'm hoping for here is two enhancements to the editor. Together their main value would be letting architect create player-placeable custom doubles. And for that matter to create puzzles using player placeable monsters, builders, etc.

1. The ability to call the double placement interface from within NPC scripting, allowing you to place that NPC somewhere as if it were a double.

So you could let players take a typical rotating sworded NPC and decide where to put it to defend themselves long enough to escape an oremite field.

Or let them place an NPC designed to charge straight forward, never turning, until it hits a wall. Give a player a chance to use five of these to eliminate 15 brains in a tricky pattern.

You could let players pick which location a slayer begins at (Let Player Place, Turn Into Monster), using the usual tricks that limit double placement to force them to choose between a few inconvenient choices. Or you could be kind, and let them place the slayer in various humorous predicaments.

There's no real reason this can't be used repeatedly to place the same NPC in diffrent places at several stages of a room.

I think this idea has quite a lot of puzzle potential on its own, but it seems prone to unpredictability, which is where the second part comes in.

2. Create a new potion bottle object. Don't give it any effect of its own, but allow NPCs to detect when it is picked up (and where it happened). There are any number of ways this could be done, and linked to the first idea.

If NPCs you can walk on are ever implemented, just creating a new NPC type that looks like a potion would do nicely, although it would fail to block monsters the way a ordinary potion would.

Otherwise, you could make them a new object linkable to NPCs the way orbs are to doors. Possibly NPC placement could ONLY be triggered in this way, making the reason for any placement requests much clearer and more obvious. I think with this control in place, and the HA system up and running, this idea has a low risk of abuse, and allows nearly endless possibilities.

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zex20913
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I'm looking at this from a player's perspective--not an architect's.

If this were implemented, the minute I saw one of these, I'd probably switch out of the room, never to touch it again, and rate the hold a zero in both brains and fun.

There are a wide variety of things that are...disturbing about this idea.

One: All information should be visible to the player. Some of this has been eschewed a bit with scripting, but all necessary data is still intact. I don't want to right click on the potion to read a really long and potentially inaccurate description about what the double should do when it's placed.

Two: Undo options. Without the knowledge of what it does, a restart is almost mandatory, before you can use what it does. More restarts would be necessary before you find an effective placement. I can imagine a room where one would need to place a double, but then 100 moves later, that double placement is what stops you from solving/leaving the room.

Three: The HA system. It is not in place to eliminate bad holds. It is only in place to check if the holds are possible, backtrackable, and to filter things like profanity and copyright. Sure, if the HA want to beta-test when the hold is in our lineup, that's fine. But that's not our job. We still have to play the hold, and I'm seeing a lot of "needle in haystack" or at least "needle in 38*32 grid" in this idea.

Four: It's just an invite to bad scripting.

Five: There's no way to make it everything you want it to be. I'd seriously doubt if you could make a custom decoy whose smell range extended 6 spaces.

Six: Basically, this is stemming from the fact of "placing" the double. That is a decision I don't want to make while delving.

If this was an NPC-activation token, I'd have less to complain about. I still wouldn't like it (step on the token on turn 57, room solvable, but turn 58 and you're screwed scenarios rush into my head) but it would be more manageable.

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Beef Row
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zex20913 wrote:
One: All information should be visible to the player. Some of this has been eschewed a bit with scripting, but all necessary data is still intact. I don't want to right click on the potion to read a really long and potentially inaccurate description about what the double should do when it's placed.

Ever played one of Neil's holds? Or heck, even that section of TCB he wrote? I would say you can give a description of your scripted characters via a scroll or whatever, but hey, usually the good uses I've seen of them don't even do that. You take a relatively intuitive behavior, and let the players work out just what it is. (Plenty of examples from other people's holds of course, geomatrx, Jacob, etc. But Neil likes using scripted mimics relatively often.)

The point of this isn't to make an incredibly arcane and obscure system it will take players ages to work out (which you can do with scripting anyway. This adds no new potential to do so.) The point is to take some of those fun odd little widgets people have made, and make them player placable. I don't think this will suddenly make an architect change their scripting from nice and neat to a obscure and ugly.

Two: Undo options. Without the knowledge of what it does, a restart is almost mandatory, before you can use what it does. More restarts would be necessary before you find an effective placement. I can imagine a room where one would need to place a double, but then 100 moves later, that double placement is what stops you from solving/leaving the room.

Place a scroll near it describing behavior. Put a checkpoint under it. Use open doors to limit placement options. Just like actual doubles, a bad choice of placement isn't always obvious until far later in the room. And plenty of non-double puzzles can become impossible in sneaky ways you don't know until later as well. Manipulation puzzles especially.

Three: The HA system. It is not in place to eliminate bad holds. It is only in place to check if the holds are possible, backtrackable, and to filter things like profanity and copyright. Sure, if the HA want to beta-test when the hold is in our lineup, that's fine. But that's not our job. We still have to play the hold, and I'm seeing a lot of "needle in haystack" or at least "needle in 38*32 grid" in this idea.

short of dropping NPC clones and then activating them, there's not that much potential for this to create new backtracking risks. And well, frankly, there's already a way to drop clones using a potion.

Four: It's just an invite to bad scripting.

It's an invite to use more scripting, and in more ways. Its another incentive for the 'scripting library' idea people have been kicking around.

I don't see any reason why it would encourage BAD scripting. In fact, if you don't know WHERE a player is going to drop your NPC, I'd think you're more likely to write an NPC that follows sensible rules. Bad scripting problems usually relate to NPCs that do something like 'wait until the player is in this random rectangle, and then move to this other random place.' And there'd be little reason to make an NPC like that placable in the first place.

Five: There's no way to make it everything you want it to be. I'd seriously doubt if you could make a custom decoy whose smell range extended 6 spaces.

Honestly, I don't even want anything like this. I'm just suggesting potions as a neat way to place NPCs that can already be created. You're taking my mentions of doubles too literally I think.

I keep bringing them up to suggest we have alot of what would be needed to implement this already in place. We have placement code. We have potion code. We have scripting. The groundwork is already very much in place for this. Thats why I mention doubles, to show the code and gameplay are already somewhat in place.

Six: Basically, this is stemming from the fact of "placing" the double. That is a decision I don't want to make while delving.

If you're placing something comprehensibly scripted, its no worse than having to decide for yourself how to place a mimic or clone. And if the scripting is obnoxious and unreasonable, treat it however you would treat other obnoxious, unreasonable scripting. Whatever scripting the NPC has would have been just as bad if it were placed by the architect in advance.

So if you don't like the idea, thats fine, but I'm not sure how any of these objections apply more to this idea than to either scripting in general, or to doubles in general. They all seem to be an objection to one or the other.

And personally, I really do think for those who decide to use this feature, it would encourage better scripting, not worse, though this isn't actually provable.

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Tim
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Beef Row wrote:
And personally, I really do think for those who decide to use this feature, it would encourage better scripting, not worse, though this isn't actually provable.

Dear sir, this is not your problem.

I can tell you that, from the number and contents of HA comments in the holds with "creative scripting" that I've seen, that new scripting tricks does encourage better scripting. In fact, some of them just made me cry.

The Hold Administrators can solve this problem easily by rejecting any complex hold immediately when scripting has one or more errors. I think I will suggest this fix in the HA group and see what happens.

As for your feature request, I find it immensely funny.

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Someone Else
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What you could do is allow the architect to write a description for it that would show up in a scroll when you stepped on it, or right-clicked on it. Not writing a description is just like not properly describing other scripting. Also, if there is a prompt to write it, then more people will do it.

I think that this is a great idea, allowing for more flexible holds.

Sillyman
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Yes! Stop saying "but people will do bad things with it". This goes to everybody who has ever said something like that to a feature request. Maybe the potion portion isn't necessary. But custom disappear-on-use items would be lovely. And so would player-placeable NPCs. For that matter, this lets scripts essentially give the player a potion without builders or having to pick the potion up. Just plop down a clone/decoy/mimic NPC, and say "Turn into Monster", and voila. But maybe instead of custom potions, just use the previously suggested "ghost" NPCs.

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Tahnan
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Sillyman wrote:
Yes! Stop saying "but people will do bad things with it".

Yeah, it's a terrible phrase. People will do bad things with it.

Beef Row
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Mr. Slice wrote:
Anyways, this can easily be done.

Did you actually read anything in this thread? Anything at all?

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Sillyman
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I don't think he did. We're talking about scripted doubles, not invisibility, speed, that sort of potion. And this can't be done yet. Not at all. Oh, fine, an extremely long series of questions might suffice. But that's far too much work.

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Mr. Slice
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Oh. Sorry. I did read all of it. But misinterpreted most of it. And then afterwards, I read the rest of it, and now I get the post. And in turn gave you a hold idea. But based on your opinion of the post, I think it's the worst idea possible and should be abandoned forever. Like I'm about to do with this thread. Bye.

Ok, you may mod be down now by -2s and -3s. If you want...

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[Last edited by Mr. Slice at 12-10-2007 10:31 PM]