Locked room...

[miguel]

Locks like the one StrangeVisitor mentioned in the picture are very easy to unlock, all you need is a piece of metal that is hard enough to bend on the tip and not brake. That's a good solution for a locked door part of a game.
StrangeVIsitor: Yes I meant Mul-T-Lock, it's damn hard to pick and as I said, I messed with the pins and jammed them, the result was 2hours locked inside my house!!!!
I now bought a ABUS Cylinder D6 wich I haven't been able to unlock even watching all the videos from the guys at Bumpkeys!
I bought the Southord C2010 22pc set from them.
Cheers

[Play_Pretend]

Ahhh yes, MulTLock and ABUS...I thought you might live outside the US.   No, I'm afraid I've never worked on either of those...if you go to www.lockpicking101.com, though, they have a forum there about opening international locks.

That's a pretty good set you got...I wish I had a wishbone tension wrench, no pun intended.  Not that I need it that much, but it's good especially for double-pinned cylinders, or for raking the Club open.   I can tell you right now a few of those picks are going to be totally redundant for you, like the extra ball picks and that super-long multiple-diamond rake that looks like a mountain range.  I've never needed mine.   I always try to teach newcomers the "If you can't do it with a single hook, diamond or rake, you're not going to be able to do it with twenty variations of each, so save your cash." principle, but no worries, you didn't go overboard, and those extra wrenches will all be useful at some point.

And just so we don't wander too far a-thread...one escape I would like to see in a game is someone locked inside a big standing floor safe.  Theoretically, if they had a light source and a screwdriver, they could unscrew the back of the lock panel, and then just line up the wheels of the combination lock, retract the latch and open the door from the inside.

Though telling that here does kinda screw up the surprise for a game, I guess.

[Emerald]

And just so we don't wander too far a-thread...one escape I would like to see in a game is someone locked inside a big standing floor safe.  Theoretically, if they had a light source and a screwdriver, they could unscrew the back of the lock panel, and then just line up the wheels of the combination lock, retract the latch and open the door from the inside.

Doesn't he kind of do that in Grim Fandango? Except it's from the outside...

[Play_Pretend]

Huh, I had completely forgotten that...I haven't played the game in ten years.  (Well, I just bought a copy, but it won't run on my computer. )  Well then!  Scratch that idea.

Okaaay...our hero is trapped in a tall cage, with vertical bars all around him.  He wets down a towel, loops it around the bars, wraps the other end around a short bar, or flashlight, or something that he can hold...and turns it over and over until the towel tightens up so much that it bends the bars together!

[Andail]

That was done in A-team. And a dozen other cheap action movies/stories.
Usually with a chain though, or something at least slightly more durable than a towel...

[Play_Pretend]

Jaysus...you mean to tell me I'm psychically tapping the minds of boring scriptwriters?  I wait 28 years for my bloody superpowers to show up, and this is what I get?  What a ripoff.

[miguel]

I guess you're right SVisitor, with this lock, I end up switching the tools around  as if it would help me and knowing that I only need a rake and some tension! But, like you said, I didn't spend all that money.

A nice puzzle would be:
    Hero wants to unlock electronic safe with digital numbers screen;
    Hero has in his inventory a discman and his pocketknife that comes with a screwdriver and nothing else;
    Hero finds some wire on the background;
    He unscrews the screws from the logo of the safe and finds a hole (they actually come like that);
    Takes a batery from the discman (you would need a more powerfull one but that would do);
    Wires the batery into the safe slot and when the wire touches the wires inside the extra voltage opens the safe!

what do you think?

[Radiant]

A nice puzzle would be:

I disagree that this would be a nice puzzle. Depending on the player's background, it is either way too difficult, or a cliche.

[miguel]

Accepted , but here is my opinion:
  a player's background has nothing to do with the reason people play adventure games, if one has a chance to be a thief and steal this incredible plan from a evil guy that wants to rule the world he will like to know how to open a safe ( more so if it is actually the way it's done, not with all safes, of course!);
the same is also true if you want to be a commander of a spaceship and be beamed-up and use laser guns (how cliche is that?) but people love it and like to play that kind of games.
the same with fighting orcs and use potions that grow plants!
  about beeing dificult, most adventure gamers will say first thing that the puzzles on game A or B were too easy and therefore too simple to complete the game.
cheers

[Play_Pretend]

That's the problem with most of the good ideas I can come up with for "technically accurate" lock puzzles...most of the techniques I know for b&e aren't known by most people outside the locksmith/burglary industries, so almost no one would have any idea that they could, say, open an electronic roll-up gate with only a screwdriver, or sometimes even a pair of thin nails, and everybody would hate the puzzle.  Conversely, it's always driven me personally nuts every time I run into a lock or safe or something in a game and find out that the owner of that safe apparently keeps their most valuable possession protected by a slide-the-boxes-to-make-a-picture puzzle.

It especially drives me nuts in TV and movies when action heroes open locks with forks, or listen really hard to a safe as they turn the dial.  There's a rule that real lockpicking can never be completely shown on TV in case the wrong person learns from it, so you always see them just inserting a pick and wiggling it around and magically opening the door in a few seconds, even though they never used a tension wrench on the cylinder.  And listening for the gates inside a safe lock is so freaking old, it's not possible anymore.  I loved "The Score", it's one of the most technically accurate safecracking movies I've ever seen.

[radiowaves]

Why make a lock-puzzle? Its old..
Why not make him invent a teleportation device. I see you want to be realistic, so make a realistic teleportation device that works, but make shure to patent it very quickly before military guys get you...