boodog
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What would be some good methods to create rooms that are "solved" by merely stepping into them and waiting for a really long time until the room clears by istelf, using no scripting.

One obvious one wold be a room full of roach queens, Beethro in one corner protected by a wall and a single puff vent in the opposite one. The queens slowly get converted to roaches, then the roaches slowly die.

Another way might be to set up a nearly stable system of adders, spike traps and queens that will keep going for a long time before slowly degrading.

Anybody got any other suggestions for an extremely long room solved by doing nothing?

Zaratustra00
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Several snakes trapped in circular paths, with a single pressure plate on each path.

The snakes have different periods such that all the pressure plates are only un-pressed at the same time after a very long number of turns.

Then the doors open and an evil eye is lured onto a hot tile.

Lucky Luc
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File: Eternity 51 unfinished.hold (2.8 KB)
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Long, loooong, or looooooooooooooooong?

If it's the latter, you might be interested in this topic. I haven't looked at all of them and most of them require doing other things than waiting, but if you want to create something ridiculously long, the method of choice seems to be a binary counter.

I've gotten curious after reading your post, and the 5.1 5.x engine allows for some pretty cool optimizations. I've found a pretty space-saving mechanism with roach queens / force arrows / pressure plates / fire traps. Note that I haven't done all the pp connections yet, because, let's face it, that's almost as boring as solving the room. However, if I were to do so, this room should take over 10^75 moves to complete. Ctrl+5 allows you to pass about 7000 moves per minute, but even so, this would result in waiting for over 10^65 years. In your face, Doctor!

(Note that, because I was so lazy, the room isn't currently solvable, but the concept should be clear)

If you just want annoying but realistic amounts of wait, your suggestions seem fine to me. Briar is another idea that comes to mind.

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[Last edited by Lucky Luc at 03-07-2016 01:16 PM]

boodog
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Lucky Luc wrote:
Long, loooong, or looooooooooooooooong?

If it's the latter, you might be interested in this topic. I haven't looked at all of them and most of them require doing other things than waiting, but if you want to create something ridiculously long, the method of choice seems to be a binary counter.

I've gotten curious after reading your post, and the 5.1 engine allows for some pretty cool optimizations. I've found a pretty space-saving mechanism with roach queens / force arrows / pressure plates / fire traps. Note that I haven't done all the pp connections yet, because, let's face it, that's almost as boring as solving the room. However, if I were to do so, this room should take over 10^75 moves to complete. Ctrl+5 allows you to pass about 7000 moves per minute, but even so, this would result in waiting for over 10^65 years. In your face, Doctor!

(Note that, because I was so lazy, the room isn't currently solvable, but the concept should be clear)

If you just want annoying but realistic amounts of wait, your suggestions seem fine to me. Briar is another idea that comes to mind.

I was looking for looooooong, I realised my ideas were at best looong.

Cheers for your input. I can't actually see it though as it's not compatible with my DROD.

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[Last edited by boodog at 03-07-2016 01:15 PM]

Lucky Luc
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Yeah, sorry, should have mentioned it's created with a 5.1 beta version. If you really want to look at it, I guess you could download the current release candidate patch. Though I'm not really sure if it's worth it

blorx1
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Somewhere in that thread of really long rooms I tried that idea of semi-stable adders and roach queens. It took on the order of tens of thousands of moves, which isn't great, but it was funny to make.

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Keiya
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Hah, that reminds me. The concept of long-but-technically-beatable came up elsewhere, and Linguica built a Doom WAD that should take 10^100 years. They're using 55 doors that have cycle lengths of 4*(the first 57 prime numbers other than 3 and 5) seconds, arranged so you can only go past when they all go up at the same time.

Given the limited size of a DROD room I don't think you can use that method, though.

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NoahT
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An AE hold based on this idea which used snake loops was posted in Architecture back in 2004.

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gregboet
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A discussion about rooms that take an incredibly long time to win, and nobody mentioned water skippers?

My most tedious victory ever was TSS, Darts, 1N2E, which has water skippers. There's a trick that helps you be reasonably efficient, but if you don't figure out that trick, it takes an incredibly long time, in my case over 2800 moves that I spent mostly just holding down the "." button. Of course it's not exactly the same as what you said, because I was throwing darts, not just waiting.

mrimer
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gregboet wrote:
A discussion about rooms that take an incredibly long time to win, and nobody mentioned water skippers?

My most tedious victory ever was TSS, Darts, 1N2E, which has water skippers. There's a trick that helps you be reasonably efficient, but if you don't figure out that trick, it takes an incredibly long time, in my case over 2800 moves that I spent mostly just holding down the "." button. Of course it's not exactly the same as what you said, because I was throwing darts, not just waiting.

That definitely sounds like a long time. However, this thread is about rooms that take a loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time.

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Personally, I think it would be interesting to build a room so that waiting around makes it done in billions of turns but the real puzzle is that the player can/has to "break" it so it takes less time to the point where it's solvable within a human lifespan.

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Jeff_Ray...
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Xindaris wrote:
Personally, I think it would be interesting to build a room so that waiting around makes it done in billions of turns but the real puzzle is that the player can/has to "break" it so it takes less time to the point where it's solvable within a human lifespan.

But how can you even be sure that waiting would even work, if it takes more than a human lifespan to do so?

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Xindaris
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Well, the game is 100% deterministic, so you can actually "prove" it solves after some time and in the process calculate how long it will take.

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Lucky Luc
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File: A Primates Eternity.hold (2.1 KB)
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Sorry guys

So I thought of a relatively space-efficient way to implement a prime timer today, and this is what I came up with. "Only" around 10^60 moves, so waaay beyond my previous effort, but an approach that hasn't been used in DROD before to my knowledge, so maybe still worth sharing. Also, it's actually (theoretically) solvable this time

This can obviously be optimized a bit, but I don't think it gets much farther than maybe 10^62.

Have fun!

(Also, I should probably note, inspired by Keiya's post, of course)

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[Last edited by Lucky Luc at 05-30-2016 10:21 PM]

uncopy2002
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Just making a guess, but maybe you can optimize it to place more briar passages if you place them diagonally instead?