Chaco
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File: Snake Movement Oddity.hold (985 bytes)
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Okay, here's a strange incident we were discussing in chat.

This room contains a brain, and a snake in an enclosed chamber in the northwest corner. If the snake goes North, it gets trapped and the room is unsolvable. If it goes South, it's solvable.

If Beethro doesn't take the invisibility potion, the snake goes North on unbrained horizontal preference turns (0-4, 10-14, 20-24) and South on unbrained vertical preference turns. So far, so good.

If Beethro takes the invisibility potion, and moves the snake via the brain, though, the snake goes North no matter what turn it arrives at the intersection. I would expect it to go South on some turns - either the unbrained vertical preference turns or the brained vertical preference turns (even ones, if I remember right).

After talking about it, Schik mentioned that in this *particular* situation - a snake that can't see any targets, but is told by a brain to move, the snake won't know where Beethro is but knows that it has to move, so will then just try moving N, E, S, W in that order.

Insoluble says "please, nobody make a puzzle out of this".

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bwross
Level: Smiter
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It doesn't seem particularly odd to me... I wouldn't assume that the adder would turn South there, while Beethro is invisible.

Maybe it seems odd that the adder moves at all? But I'm not really seeing that either, because of the fact that not finding a brain path doesn't mean that there isn't a way for the adder to get to Beethro, so it should still move when the brain detects that he's there.

Nuntar
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The oddity is that in the same situation (Beethro is invisible and in range of a brain, there is no brained path) every other monster makes its normal unbrained move. Snakes, and only snakes, exhibit a unique movement in this situation that's different from both brained and unbrained movement.

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Insoluble
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Chaco wrote: Insoluble says "please, nobody make a puzzle out of this".

Yeah, I guess I did say that. I'm going to back down from that statement and go with, "please, for the love of everything that is good in this world, don't use this in a puzzle unless you've introduced the mechanic to the player in a logical way first."

As Nuntar points out, this behavior is very unintuitive. One would expect brained snakes to follow similar rules to other brained monsters. For other monsters, if no brain pathmap exists and Beethro is invisible but in smelling range of the brain, the monsters will act unbrained, but still "know" where Beethro is. The fact that serpents don't follow this pattern is weird, but has been around since AE. There are apparently 70+ rooms that involve brains, serpents and invisibility, so this behavior is probably unlikely to change. But, like stalwart path-mapping, architects should try to use this responsibly.

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[Last edited by Insoluble at 12-15-2015 02:23 PM]

Banjooie
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serpent manipulation