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[celem]

Ok, a question appeared from snakemupagus yesterday in the modding questions thread about ways to increase the chances of a creature being hit by a boiling rock syndrome.  I had no clue, but wanted to know myself since I'll be playing about with these things myself shortly.

For those wondering what boiling rocks are...  Its the mechanism modders use most often for applying special effects via syndromes to your creatures.  A workshop reaction that produces a special stone that will boil at air temperature (instantly).  This stone is given a syndrome upon inhalation which can then do all sorts of wonderful stuff from adding interactions (creature can throw fireballs, raise undead etc.) to full on polymorphing (creature changes type entirely, sex changes, caste changes and so on).

  But it seems that theres only around a 50% chance of the operator of the reaction actually getting hit by the syndrome.

This thread will collate my test results.  I posted them in the modding Q thread initially, but like any good science it's throwing up more questions than answers, so theres more to be done here and I dont want to keep posting into the Q&A thread.  Please feel free to jump in here with any suggestions, wild theories, observations and just about anything relating to boiling rock syndromes.

I also plan to repeat my initial experiments in a more controlled setting and across a greater number of test subjects to confirm/refute my initial findings.

Test Schedule:
Confirm 50% basic chances
Confirm lack of effect of dropping multiple rocks
Confirm lack of effect of impassible tiles on the gas itself
Test effect of impassible workshop tiles forcing operator to wander through the gas as he leaves workshop, does this increase the chances noticably?
Attempt to map out boiling rock gas behaviour.  Spread patterns, durations etc.

The desired goal here is to find some system to reliably and consistently increase the chances of a creature being hit by your lovely syndrome

More to come....

[celem]

Original test runs and findings.  Barely scientific, quick n dirty.  To be confirmed
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=100707.msg3553549#msg3553549

[NRDL]

PTW, and I've never even heard of boiling rocks.  But I don't visit the modding board often, thouh 

[celem]

Good point, added a little to the first post explaining what im testing, those who dont use them themselves in mods probably wont understand exactly what im on about otherwise.  Its a little arcane and complex to be honest but is responsible for most of the coolest things we can do nowadays.

EDIT: Just setting up a decent test fort and so on before I start running the experiments.  I dont want to use a fatal test syndrome like I did yesterday since its an inefficient way to test, I'll tweak it so that its obvious but non-fatal.  That way I can reuse my guineapigs   Im also going to use vanilladf for the tests with just a few custom workshops, reactions and materials needed to boil the rocks.  This to ensure that nothing in my own mod is influencing anything (though its so simple it shouldnt be).

[spriksprak]

Intrigued to see if you find a way of making it better - good luck!

[Meph]

Definetly try density of the rock and molar mass (apperently not used). Both should in theory affect the size of the gas-cloud.

[i2amroy]

I know that as of 2010 density effected the speed at which a cloud would spread, though it didn't affect the size of the eventual spread.

[Xangi]

This could also apply to syndromes transferred by ingestion, I often find those to be intermittent as well.

[IndigoFenix]

This could also apply to syndromes transferred by ingestion, I often find those to be intermittent as well.

With all forms of ingestion, or just vampire-like blood interactions?  I recall that disease resistance can sometimes prevent you from catching a curse from corrupted blood, but I've always thought that syndromes from regular food worked 100% of the time (the disadvantage being that it is hard to control who ends up eating it).

[expwnent]

Posting to watch.

[Vattic]

Original test runs and findings.  Barely scientific, quick n dirty.  To be confirmed
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=100707.msg3553549#msg3553549

In relation to that last bit: might be worth trying a large custom workshop with a spiral of passable tiles to the centre. With the cloud passing through impassible tiles you might be able to get them to stay in the cloud for longer.

[celem]

Yes im working on the tests just now, RL been a bit bad to me last few days.  I do have a large (9x9) 'maze' workshop which meph suggested testing in the Q&A thread, though as Vattic mentions I can keep the dwarf in-range longer with a spiral.  Amusingly enough the design I ended up picking looks remarkably like a '?'.  Just running repeat after repeat.  I want some big data sets for this.

[celem]

Update: maze designs of impassibility are not working out.  The dwarf only gets 2 steps while the cloud is up anyway, but I built something to ensure he doesn't go 2 diagonally as that would dodge some smaller clouds.  Clouds however are very random.

I ran 100 tests in the maze and got 40% success.  For the record the dwarf was moving sw, nw for his 2 steps in the 'exposure window'.

100 in a completely passable 3x3 yielded 35% success. 

Going to try 1 more impassability design, a crosshair style thing.  Next up will be densities and molar masses, probably a 'locked room' run too so they dont path at all just to see what that looks like.

[smakemupagus]

great stuff celem.

another question along these lines that I've wondered about is, what's the best way to do a "random" effect?  does dropping multiple rocks with mutually exclusive results give approximately an equal chance of applying each effect?  I tried a reaction using probabilities like this

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[INORGANIC:ORC_CHAOS_STONE] produced in transmutation
[USE_MATERIAL_TEMPLATE:STONE_VAPOR_TEMPLATE]
[STATE_NAME_ADJ:ALL_SOLID:Chaos (m)]
[STATE_NAME_ADJ:LIQUID:Chaos (m)]
[STATE_NAME_ADJ:GAS:Chaos (m)]
    [SYNDROME]
         [SYN_NAME:chaos]
         [SYN_CONTACT]
         [SYN_INHALED]
         [SYN_AFFECTED_CREATURE:ORC_TAIGA:ALL]
         [CE_ADD_TAG:LIKES_FIGHTING]
         [CE_BODY_TRANSFORMATION:PROB:15:START:0]
            [CE:CREATURE:MINOTAUR:FEMALE]
         [CE_BODY_TRANSFORMATION:PROB:20:START:0]
            [CE:CREATURE:MINOTAUR:MALE]
         [CE_BODY_TRANSFORMATION:PROB:45:START:0]
       [CE:CREATURE:TROGLODYTE:FEMALE]
    [CE_BODY_TRANSFORMATION:PROB:90:START:0]
            [CE:CREATURE:TROGLODYTE:MALE]
    [CE_BODY_TRANSFORMATION:PROB:50:START:0]
            [CE:CREATURE:ORC_TAIGA:DREAMWALKER_MALE]
    [CE_BODY_TRANSFORMATION:PROB:100:START:0]
            [CE:CREATURE:ORC_TAIGA:DREAMWALKER_FEMALE] 
[DISPLAY_COLOR:4:4:1][TILE:'*']
[MELTING_POINT:9000]
[BOILING_POINT:905]
[SOLID_DENSITY:55520]
[MATERIAL_VALUE:1]

but results are crazy.  Specifically, it seems at first to nicely create a random distribution of transformations, but they changed again to different creatures when I save and reload the game 

[Mr Frog]

@snake:

There's a bug where the game doesn't properly save whether syndrome effects with a PROB of less than 100 have actually come into effect, and so will apply them all to the affected creature upon saving and loading.

I think this can be fixed by putting each transformation inside its own [SYNDROME] definition; each transformation will then be part of a seperate syndrome, which won't be applied to the creature at all if none of its effects come into effect. No syndrome to save, no bug.

E: There may still be weirdness caused from the game applying the transformations in the wrong order.