Dragon Fogel wrote:
Build order would not impact the eventual suggestion other than "splitting" a door into two or more separate pieces before connecting one of those pieces, which is an impact of build order that is unavoidable no matter what the system is.
If multiple doors are connected, the set of connections that remain are the ones that apply to them all, regardless of what order the connections happen in.
No, in your last edit you said that "
any connection"
would conflict with "
no connection"
. A newly built open door has no connection. A newly built open door automatically conflicts with any door with a confliction. Case 1 fails. If the door being built is considered an exception, then a newly built door that connects another newly built door that is not yet connected would conflict, but would not conflict if the two doors were built the other way around.
I see nothing in your proposed ruleset that sidesteps this. I assume by the 2nd paragraph that the next part of the rule would be "
no connection only counts if the door is connected to another orb"
... after which this particular proposal of "
delete"
is quickly becoming more complicated than anything else proposed.
Dragon Fogel wrote:
But also, the plan is to add scripting to change door connections, so we're only talking about what to do with default behavior in situations where the architect decides not to use that scripting. Consequently, anything that gets decided can be overridden by an architect.
Scripting is difficult and finicky. Sure, in my contrived example, I could wait for "
no building markers"
in the rectangle and then painstakingly hook up the orbs as I wanted. I'd probably have to disconnect the orbs before building started though, or Beethro will have been happily toggling his way to some interesting results. (Interesting results are going to happen if he's toggling a door I'm working on anyways, but the point is that I can't trivially determine when I should finish hooking up the doors correctly if the game deletes them unless I take full control of everything here.)
I fully expect that if and when these proposed script commands go in, they will be used to just this effect. It's good to have them. If a bad edge-case came up, a good architect would just wipe the connections themselves and set them up correctly. But a good default is still desirable, especially one that isn't so destructive about existing information.
Dragon Fogel wrote:
So I think it would be a mistake to add rules that are complicated to deal with on the player end. Specifically, for this to be relevant to a puzzle, the player would have to have some degree of control over which doors get combined - otherwise they can just let the combining play out and check what the final door does afterwards.
This proposed system makes it much more complicated to find a "bad door", because every connection in the system is relevant. To me, this basically sounds like a worse variant of a "hit the orbs in order" puzzle.
This is one of those times where I don't think "
puzzle viability"
is a great argument. This is about building tools given to an architect and having them being simple and relatively intuitive to use without causing dire problems (multiple connections) if used carelessly.
The proposed solution has very few rules attached to it. It may be possible that someone may try to make a puzzle out of it... just as they might make a puzzle out of "
conflict->
delete"
. The merits of that puzzle will likely be judged on how it communicates itself to the player... in the meantime, I still prefer a simple non-destructive default that doesn't
require the architect to script everything up again (though they can if they want to).