Doc

Binary is the privately held faux-radio frequency only accessible to the AI, station-bound units, and maintenance drones. It is completely inaccessible in any other way beyond a very obscure antag uplink item. You're probably thinking of Encoded Audio Language, which is just a language like any other.

I won't repeat prior feedback in detail. I think the rivets are too visually busy, but the spritework is otherwise good, if a little brighter than I'd like. In some places, the grass outline is a little- awkward. It'd be neat if the gold/rubber tile splines inhibited the grass overgrowth, but I'm sure that'd be a clusterfuck to code. These new untiled floors are sexy. I love them. They look perfectly like a space where there should be tiles, but they're missing, which old plating kind of lacked- it just looked like a different kind of tile, basically, no depth signifying an empty unused space in the floor. The dark tiles also work very well with the darker paint, there lining the edge of the hangar bay-- But I don't think they work very well with bright paint, personally. I really don't like these- but I don't think that's the spritework as much as the paint coloring. The uncolored sections of the tile look.. brown? Brown or dark-dark yellow? I think they'd look better somewhere on the greyscale like their predecessors. It also might be that they don't really work well with large swathes of the tiles because the kitchen and bar seating areas look fairly decent with them in small quantities imo, even despite the yellow/brown coloration. Didn't grab a screenie of those areas during the testmerge, whups.

I have been told to up the 'lore impact' to medium bc of its effects on Dominia's noble culture.

Doesn't this just make Vampire into Changeling, but with different abilities? Isn't Changeling also reviled for the way it encourages taking people out of the round?

I do not think lore should ever be a consideration in gameplay/balancing decisions, short of loredevs balancing canon factions against one another or something along those lines. I think suit sensors are a net negative in server gameplay, but I agree that it's incredibly strange to limit them specifically on code green, and I don't currently have any other suggestions for dealing with them. It worked with cameras because those are almost 100% purely for catching antagonists, and there is really no valid reason for security to be sitting on them 24/7 besides validhunting/powergaming. Medical's job though, ostensibly, is to keep crew healthy and alive, which is a very valid goal for the department and is only tangentially related to the fact that antags will naturally be hurting crew. Medical sitting and staring at sensors all round is obviously not validhunting, and not necessarily powergaming either. I do think it has two primary issues though. One, it's effectively the same as sec-lobby camera sitters in that it gives people a blank check to simply not RP, which shouldn't be something we encourage when we so obviously see it occuring. No sensors on green technically fixes this, but it's such overkill I really don't find it to be an appropriate solution. The other issue is that FRs will occasionally use it as an excuse to either frontline rush the antag bc "GOTTA SAVE THE CREW", or scream at security to do the same. This is the only valid reasoning for the suggestion imo, and honestly? I don't see it happen enough to warrant this. Overall, -1

Lore Impact: Medium Species: Human Short Description: An update and addition to Dominian geneboosting lore that extrapolates on the effects of the process on the person, helps clarify why the process remains exclusive to Dominia, and reinforcement of the themes of nobility and imperial superiority in Dominian Primaries that choose to use the procedure. How will this be reflected on-station?: Geneboosted characters may choose to take advantage of more depth surrounding their status and the procedures done to reach it, and the side-effects they may have, and may be able to provoke interactions with Zeng-Hu, Jargon, and other sources of genetic modification in the lore. Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: Geneboosting lore at the moment is effectively one-and-done with little depth. It is largely a footnote in other aspects of Imperial culture and Dominian society- geneboosted primaries are just better than others. Clarifying side-effects and the rationale behind the research into and actual decision to use geneboosting helps provide more depth to the lore that geneboosted characters can play out from. Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team?: Of course. Long Description: This is written as it would be on the wiki, which maintains most of the original structure of the section, but as in the last question, it is given freely to the lore staff to handle. A field of research dating back centuries, geneboosting is descended from colonial efforts to genetically engineer species adapted to the harsh Morozian climate. Geneboosting was originally used on humans by the Volvalaads at the behest of House Strelitz with the intent of improving the Imperial Army's officer corps before being further developed by House Volvalaad into a form of noble reward for the highest echelons of Imperial society, with a focus on physical awe and visible impressiveness. Geneboosting is done during the fetal development stage, attempting to enhance the natural genetic structure of the patient. While the process aims to remove physical flaws and emphasize strengths, altering such a large portion of the patient’s genetic makeup is an imperfect science and often results in chronic health problems that go undetected until later in life. Geneboosted individuals can suffer from chronic back pains, chronic migraines, forms of arthritis, and hormonal imbalances, among other non-threatening health issues. Due to the relatively negligible nature of these issues, few nobility take issue with subjecting their children to the process in exchange for the status and awe it provides them. This form of genetic modification is limited to the nobility due to the high cost and status associated with it. The effects lead to enhanced attributes and appearances: those geneboosted are stronger, faster, more able, and much longer-lived than their non-geneboosted counterparts, so long as there are no complications counter to this. Geneboosted playable species tend to be a foot or so taller than average (upwards of seven to seven and a half feet for humans) and are obvious at a glance. Geneboosted humans are often held as paragons of Imperial society, eliciting cultural memories of Dominia's feudal past where the noble class found itself taller and stronger than the peasantry as a result of better nutrition and access to health. Geneboosting carried out after birth, known as gene therapy, is very rare and generally dangerous in addition to being prohibitively expensive. Talks with Zeng-Hu to improve upon Dominia's pre-existing gene boosting techniques, potentially reducing the incidence of side-effects, have not yielded results. Editor in chief: @limette

I'm confused at what you consider 'smoking rooms' that are not the smoking lounges, then. Can you post screenshots of the areas you're considering removing?

I would rather we not remove any lounges. I don't care about this smoking reg thing one way or the other, but I see all of the lounges consistently used at least once or twice a round for splitting off conversations, meets, or small interpersonal events. If it's something about "smoking lounges" specifically, turn them into some sort of other publicly open hangout area.

Yes. Top right of your chatbox window.

If possible, I'd like to request the addition of the old Hephaestus jumpsuits as surplus uniforms, at least the engineering one, possibly the research one renamed for operations.

There is a specific condition for a suit being 'punctured', where it does indeed lose the ability to protect against vacuum (or provide oxygen from a tank, if you don't have a mask on underneath the suit proper). Logically this would happen any time you're shot or hit with something sharp enough to damage you through the suit, but.. that would be hell for actual usability. For 'balance' it only happens when you take large amounts of damage all at once, most commonly from explosions or falling down z-levels. That said, this actually sounds like a neat idea.

Could you elaborate on this point? You mention the Coalition in-depth in the app itself, but this implies issues with other factions as well. What other human factions do you see problems in, and what changes do you have in mind to fix them?

It's.. technically participation, yes. But is it really, effectively, any more participation than any other observer that sits in a ghost all round? There's also nothing stopping anyone from doing it at any point throughout the 2 hour round, then netting themselves a 'full vote' for the rest of the round after only spending a minute popping in and out of a maintenance drone. I definitely don't want to see the idea of popping into a maintenance drone briefly to become against the rules because of this. I use that to test if I'm suffering from lag, bugs, or to test mechanics, and sometimes will only need to pop in for a minute or so to do so, and may not play the round afterward, but may feel the inclination to vote.

Does this mean someone could observe, ghost-role join as a maintenance drone and spend a single minute to repair a single window or wall at 1:55, then get a 'full vote'?

This may be harder than it sounds, as I'm not sure how janky it would be to mess with shuttle timings in only specific cases, but an neat adjacent idea to help alleviate radstorms being impossible to notice after they're already announced is to perhaps make fire alarms pulse a bright green while they're ongoing. Like. Brightly, since it's kind of a deadly thing and all, and to differentiate from normal "code green" green.

I was going to post about how extremely impractical it would be for security to get the units out of the mining area, and that this would really just be the nail in the coffin preventing prisoners from ever even dreaming of using the robot link to break themselves out of prison- but I double-checked the map to confirm, and.. Well, it actually doesn't look that difficult at all. Really the only issue to contend with is venting the glass-case room, which is easily circumvented with a single inflatable or even just rapid use of a single shutter. None of the doors leading to the area start bolted, and they simply have warden access requirements, so even command staff isn't required. To make matters worse, if a prisoner ever tried this, it would immediately start an air alarm, instantly alerting security from the maintenance emergency shutters lowering if seen, or alerting them shortly thereafter if literally any attentive engineering staff are present, who would then immediately rush the prisoner's helpless meat-body in communal. So, I don't even think it's fair to say this would infringe on prisoner's break-out opportunities, because they hardly have much of one in the first place. Edit: Also, the mining warden has a full-on warden's ID, effectively giving two security members armoury access with no HoP/Captain required if removed from the gulag. Not sure if that's been ab/used yet, though.

One surgeon can do literally any medical procedure that can possibly be done, up to and including transplanting every single organ in the body, reparative brain surgery, and installation of cybernetic replacements of every single organ and limb besides the brain (the only cybernetic operation strictly restricted to roboticists). Conducting an autospy is hardly much of an additional stretch of ability, especially considering a "forensic" and "clinical" autospy are functionally the same on-server. This may be true currently in real life, but fortunately the real world's requirements, accreditation systems, and bureaucracies don't extend their reach into our 2D spaceman RP platform and no board of medicine is going send Aurorastation a court order for failing to accurately represent their policies. It'd be good promotion of cross-departmental interaction, and that's all that matters imo.

While it's all well and good to theorize about how the relay would somehow be better if everything was run by the same staff as the main server, the simple fact is that while it may be part of the community, it is not part of the server. It is auxiliary, it is optional, and it is not something that all players- or, all staff- participate in. Moderation staff are not required to be in it. Staff- including modmins- are not even required to be in the main Aurora discord, or lore discord, though they may get odd looks once in a while when it comes up that they're not there, and we have had at least two members that I can recall who exercised this for extensive periods of time staffing. At the end of the day, they're volunteers, and they volunteer to moderate the server and its directly related functions, like ban appeals and complaints- which relate to the server. They don't sign up to moderate a discord. Guess who does? The relay moderation team. Even if the relay moderation team was purged because they're """not real aurora staff""", and expectation was returned to the modmin staff who happen to be there to handle everything, it would simply return to the status-quo as of before the relay moderation team being formed- nothing happens, the server is effectively abandoned by staff except by those relatively few modmin staff who actively utilize it themselves, and requests and moderation are either handled by those handful of people who effectively have full control of the server with no real oversight because no one else is involved, or is handled by a non-present member of staff dragged in who has no context for the environment or the history of the members involved, and probably doesn't care at all given they weren't participating beforehand. This is the same logic by which CCIA refuses to handle IRs based on relay content, and the relay team and server lore team formed Bubble instead- it's simply not their responsibility, and they have no obligation to overextend their responsibilities. New members who actually want to can handle it. Is the lack of unban appeal system a problem? Yeah. I can see that. But that's a problem that can be solved by far simpler means than purging a volunteers for not being "real" staff and forcing disinterested modmins to take their place- Borealis integration is the most obvious solution that comes to mind and that I've already seen floated. This is the nuclear option for a very small and only potential problem. Is the lack of """real staff""" oversight an issue? In my opinion, no- but mainly because, defacto, the relay team already is overseen by admins, they just rarely if ever have any need to step in. Could it be put into words? Sure, if that makes you feel better.

i love you ferner

The checkpoint blast doors automatically close on code red or blue, but there is no guarantee that there will be Odin sec, ERT, or CCIA to open it unless admins open their slots. Unfortunately, I attempted to have this changed or for Odin security to be a guaranteed spawn in those circumstances for exactly this reason, when the Odin changes initially went through, but it was overruled by head staff at the time. I'd love if one of those two things were implemented, though.

AntagHUD removes the ability to join the round at all, so that is.. very much just flat out incorrect. Its function is to let an observer who knows they're not going to be joining the round, and is therefore willing to forfeit the ability to do so, instead observe the round's action more easily. That's the entire point of revealing who the antagonists are; to observe them. It just currently fulfills that function very poorly because it is broken in several circumstances and otherwise neglected in terms of features because no one uses it- which results in a nasty feedback loop where a majority of players forget it even exists after trying it out once or twice, if even that, because of its state. I don't think removing the respawn-disabling is a good idea, but it should be patched up to actually do what it's supposed to. If that's really too hard or there's just no-one willing to do it, then it should be removed altogether until someone finds the motivation to work on it, instead of being left sitting how it is now.

If that's how it's going to be looked at, then antagHUD might as well be removed, since from that perspective there is no reason to enable it. All it does is bait people into losing their ability to respawn once or twice for nothing, until they learn it's useless. I would rather it just be reworked to actually do what it's supposed to, though, and that's to facilitate ghosts easily observing the antags of the round so they can keep up with the action.

I don't even know if the antagHUD actually works for nearly half of antag types, honestly. I think only one or two antag types have HUD icons besides the ones that are visible to the antags themselves in the first place. It has been a long broken, long neglected 'feature'. Alternatively, actually flesh out the thing to make it worth activating instead of something someone ticks once experimentally and locks themself out of the round only to realize it's functionally broken. Maybe add a "follow antagonist/ghost role" option to the ghost tab, like following mobs?

Unlike merc, nuke, or any other team-comp antagonist, the revenant players are not a unified group. They aren't selected at round-start- at least the majority aren't- and the role can be taken by any random person dropping in at any random point throughout the round. This makes even OOC coordination through AOOC neigh impossible, because even if the current roster of revenants all manage to come to an agreement on a unified theme or course of RP (which sometimes won't even happen with the unified team antagonists), that roster could be literally entirely different players within 10 to 30 minutes, and any form of cohesion will be lost. Revenants are now faced with the choice to either make up an entire gimmick on their own with only 25 health or however little they have, or just attacking the people that are attacking all the other revenants. One is so much easier than the other, and still completely allowed by the rules and circumstances the gamemode will inevitably generate, despite the near-complete lack of RP it promotes. There's a few options I see to fix it, but I honestly don't particularly like any of them. One, admins start enforcing more coordination in general and bwoink revenants who wildly deviate from the initial plan for violating Rule 1 or something, effectively maintaining the cohesion of the round as it goes on in the place of players actually sticking around. I think the problems with that are obvious, but primarily it'd just put a lot of work the staff team really shouldn't have to do on their shoulders for the sake of the gamemode working. Two, write up and code in more defined instructions for the players as to what the revenants are and how they should be acting- it completely eliminates the issue of inconsistent players equaling inconsistent RP and play, at least to as good as an extent as we ever could, but also severely gimps the freedom they have. Three, allow the first initial-spawn group of revenants to somehow write the spawn-in instructions that future revenants spawning in will see, so that the initially readied antagonist players have control of creating a unified direction for the rest of the revenants for the rest of the round. Let modmins be able to easily access it to enforce late-spawn revenants purposefully flying in the face of it. The primary issue here being that it's a lot of trust both in the initial players being able not only to come up with an inalterable """good gimmick""" for the entire rest of the round (whereas most other antag types can, to an extent, curve their gimmick as the round develops), but also being able to write up adequately informational instructions for the following late-spawners to actually be able to follow along with the gimmick as intended after reading it. Also, presumably only one of the revenants would be the one to mechanically be able to submit this stuff, which either requires a "leader" role or random assignment of that ability to any of the first-spawn revenants, would could lead to weird power dynamics, although that's a relatively minor concern comparatively.

I would highly, highly, HIGHLY prefer that we looking a nerfing the disruptor before ever considering reverting back to a ballistics sidearm. Please, god, please. This seems like a massive overreaction given, unless I missed a bunch of PRs, nerfs have hardly been pursued against the disruptor at all since it was implemented.