NewOriginalSchwann

I don't like the new bar very much. The fact that you have to go up into a walled-off room that breaks your vision to the bar to mix drinks now (your main purpose) isn't very good for talking to people, and is going to lead to a lot of dropped conversations. There's also, bizarrely, no Booze-o-Mat in the mixing room so you'll have to constantly walk back and forth between the two. It would, in my view, be better if the bar's drink machines were in the middle -- where both sides of the bar could easily access them -- rather than in the walled-off room up above. It also looks like the bar's going to be a really crowded space for (presumably) two bartenders, with how small the frontal bar is.

Like those above me, Boggle is my preferred candidate for the position. I very much want to see his ideas brought into the team, and think that he could do a lot of good if given the position.

While I've always been a proponent of a height slider menu this is, in my opinion, not something we should bother porting. Sprites look weird and squished, with short characters looking especially weird. A lot of the sprite accessories/clothes/etc. seem not to change very well with the size slider earlier, and shirt accessories (which most people use, I imagine) end up looking like extra-large shirts on short characters. It's not great.

@Boggle08 These responses are excellent, and answer all of my questions quite effectively. Your application has my support, and I hope that I'll be able to work alongside you on the lore team. Best of luck!

Hello, and thank you for applying! You're bringing a lot of good, interesting ideas to the table that I'd like to see integrated into our lore -- particularly your expansion of the Golden Deep, which I feel is one of our best IPC lore bits. You also play quite interesting IPC characters that I've enjoyed interacting with, such as Tankred. I just have a few questions, since you've already answered quite a few so far! Remember: There are no right or wrong answers here. 1). How to you plan to handle the management side of your maintainer position? The IPC whitelist is one of our largest ones and you may find yourself spending as much time working on its maintenance as you will writing lore! How do you intend to handle whitelist issues, up to and including de-whitelisting? 2). Do you have any plans for Konyang? It's a piece of lore that the human and synthetic teams often collaborated on during Nienna's tenure that is still -- at least in my view -- a place that has a lot of potential for IPC lore, particularly now that it is independent. 3). It's no secret that IPCs have a lot of "subspecies" in their frames, and that some are barely played. Do you believe this is an issue that should be addressed, or is it simply the result of having so many choices? If so, do you have any plans for specific frames?

Hello, and thank you for applying for the position of synthetic lore developer! Unfortunately, I cannot support your application due to several concerns I have with your past conduct as deputy loremaster. I won’t deny that you have an immense amount of drive and passion for our lore but you tend to burn yourself out, which can lead to non-ideal results. I’ll echo Nienna here and say that you left a lot of work half-done or abandoned when you resigned, and resigned on pretty short notice. You seemed to have two states during your tenure as deputy loremaster: the first was a state of euphoria, where everybody loved your lore and nothing was wrong, and the second was this fugue state where everybody hated your lore and nothing was right. You spent most of your final two (perhaps three?) months as deputy loremaster in this fugue state and we were much worse off for it. Events like the conspiracy arc were first neglected and then abandoned completely, and the scarcity as a whole fell by the wayside. We completely dropped the momentum of the King of the World and returned to sitting on our hands and being told “wait for the NBT.” Another issue that came up during these final months is your treatment of the lore team. Your fugue led into this state of paranoia where everybody was either out to sabotage what little good was left in our lore or out to get you as a person. You became confrontational -- even outright hostile at times to some people, particularly the diona team -- and began to see enemies everywhere. You also started being extremely negative towards additions to our lore, and particularly towards my additions. Accents became “bloat” that “only got added because I didn’t see it.” Everything I wrote became, to you, grotesquely overlong works that would be read by no one at all. It was both infuriating and demoralizing to deal with this. As a final note I find your responses to Nienna’s post to be unprofessional and, frankly, disappointing. The way in which you have responded to them, combined with my above concerns regarding your conduct as deputy loremaster, has led me to conclude that you are not the ideal candidate for the position.

Out of our current candidates you are, in my opinion, the person I would most like to work under. I've had no major issues working alongside you and you've proven to be amenable to cooperation between the teams, which is a good sign to me. But despite this I cannot support you if you wish to remain the unathi maintainer/developer while also being the deputy loremaster as it is (in my view) a potentially very frightening conflict of interest. My only question for your application is this: will you relinquish the position of unathi maintainer/developer if you are granted the position of deputy loremaster?

Hello, and thank you for applying for the position of human lore deputy! For better or for worse there have already been quite a lot of questions asked in this thread. As my colleague, Lain, has already gone over your responses to our questions quite thoroughly I won't be responding to your responses individually. Instead I'll be asking some questions of my own below in bullet point format. Remember that there are no right or wrong responses, and to simply fill out the question to the best of your ability. Please attempt to keep individual responses roughly one to two paragraphs long. A great amount of your writing seems to focus on "technical" aspects of lore such as economics, government structures, and the military with comparatively less space devoted to society and culture. A lot of our planets (for example: Luna, Venus, Silversun, NHP, etc.) tend to devote a large amount to society and culture or weave together society and culture with more technical aspects, such as how Silversun's cultural divide is intrinsically tied to Idris' economic presence. If you are hired as our deputy, how do you intend to balance the technical and cultural aspects of your written lore? You've mentioned that you have an interest in reworking/retouching the Coalition, a part of the lore that you feel is boring, but you don't offer a lot regarding the how of your rework instead if the why. Your response is also a bit too limited in scope -- the Coalition is one of our largest lore entities, and reworking it will be a very big prospect. Could you expand upon which areas of the Coalition you'd like to examine and focus on in order to achieve your goal? Additionally are there any areas outside the Coalition you'd like to focus on? Again, thank you for your interest in applying! I am eagerly looking forward to reading your responses.

Much like Nienna and Matt, I don't believe I can support this application. While you are clearly passionate, you're difficult to work with and -- in my experience -- tend to become confrontational in arguments over lore. You additionally have a past riddled with communication issues, particularly with the synthetic team. These negative traits became much more noticeable when you became a full maintainer, and I am concerned that they will be carried over to the position of deputy loremaster. While I respect your capabilities as a writer and maintainer, I cannot see you as a deputy loremaster.

I have no desire to see you as the deputy loremaster. Your attitude is often snarky/passive aggressive and you have absolutely zero experience in the lore team beyond two denied applications, some vague suggestions, and some administrative experience that I do not remember fondly. Out of all of these your lack of experience is, in my eyes, frankly the biggest reason as to why I am not supporting you. This isn't a normal species deputy position that simply writes lore: it is in charge of the lore's direction, and whoever holds it needs to have the experience, and attitude, to properly run it.

A color will be added in the near future, once I shake the coders enough to make them work. As it stands there is no chance that the verb will be changed back to "growls."

They're massive improvements -- I like these a lot and hope to see them in-game soon!

Accepted.

Thank you very much! That addresses all of my concerns, and I'm excited to see the new law set in action.

First, let me say that I completely support the idea of an AI whitelist. However, the current regulation on sapience seems a bit weird to me. Specifically, the exclusion of IPCs from "sentient" while golems and slime people (do we even have slime people?) are regarded as sentient (there's also vaurca drones, but I'm not familiar with the species so I'm not going to discuss them). It's a really, really weird distinction that just comes as unneeded complexity (also, doesn't this mean I can murder an off-station IPC antagonist with the AI's full approval or am I misreading this?). All player species should be considered as sentient, or as some other equivalent term like "registered employee species" if you want to avoid the "is X really sapient?" debate.

Having seen these sprites in-game, I have to say that I'm reversing my early opinion on some of them being improvements and would, frankly, like to see the old gun sprites back (at least, for security's guns). I'll be leaving my comments in a list below. General: The cartoonish style of the guns, combined with the white colors used, makes them look like toys. They look like they were made to shoot Nerf darts rather than things that kill people. The white color scheme of the guns makes them blend in really, really awkwardly with security's uniforms. I can't tell where my disruptor ends and my arm begins. The bright, bulky design of the guns makes them stick out like a sore thumb when they're on any tile. It's honestly quite jarring. Most of the guns are extremely chunky and bulky as sprites, which makes it feel like you're carrying around a brick rather than a weapon. This does not help them not look like toys. Disruptors: The disruptors have a weird combination where they are both too stubby and too tall, which makes them look like half of the gun has been sawn-off. It is extremely hard to tell where the disruptor's sprite ends and your arm begins on most uniforms, unless you're not wearing white. This means that officers in the default NT uniform, Idris contractors, and EPMCs suffer from this issue. Morphing/changing sprites are cool in theory, but you can barely see the changes on anything short of a magnum (which you will never see in-game). It is extremely hard to tell how many shots you have left, due to how busy and bright the sprite is. There's very little contrast between the blue and the white. Laser Rifle The laser rifle is extremely huge and clunky-looking. It seems like it's too large for your sprite when you're wearing it on your back. Meanwhile, the wielded sprite looks similarly chunky - it's exceedingly wide (vertically) and has so many details that it's hard to tell what is going on with it. The sprite, when placed on the ground, seems to be leaking out onto other tiles near it - it's really weird to see in-game. The white coloration (I know I mentioned this in general) looks really awkward and out of place when it's sticking over your shoulder or on your back. It feels like you've strapped a giant Nerf gun to your sprite. Carbine: The carbine looks like an oversized pistol. Despite this, the sprite on your character model still looks enormous - it's about as big as the old laser rifle was when one-handed. It seems to not have any on-model sprite? Old carbines were previously visible on your legs, which was a nice touch. Ion: I haven't seen it in use yet. Shotgun I haven't seen it in use yet.

Please allow me to apologize for any harshness in advance -I'm trying to provide my feedback honestly. With that disclaimer said, let's get into my opinions on these sprites. The new disruptors are an outright improvement over the current sprites. The new laser rifle is bad, the shotgun is okay, the ion is bad, and the blasters are a mixed bag. I'll go into more in-depth reasoning below. The disruptor is an improvement for one very big reason: readability. The previously tiny (literally 1x1) charge indicator is now much larger and can be more easily seen. They also change slightly when the gun switches to lethal mode, which is very cool. If I could bring only one sprite from this PR (yes I know it's three different guns, shut up I'm making a point) I would bring this one. It looks excellent. But the laser rifle does not. It's been horribly scrunched up to the point where it looks like somebody took an actual gun and compressed its stock and part of its barrel. This is kind of hard to describe so let me use an image. The above image is essentially what I see when I look at the two sprites side by side. This issue is also shared by the blaster sniper rifle (I forget the in-game name) and the ion rifle. The shotgun is fine. It looks less like a gun from 1897 and more like one from 2463 which is good. It doesn't pop as much as the disruptor does, but it still looks good. I have no comments beyond that. The ion rifle looks bad. It's committed the dual sin of being horribly scrunched up like the laser rifle is while also looking like a brick. It looks more like a toy than an actual weapon that's designed to kill exosuits. This is my least favorite sprite out of everything here. The blasters are a weird mix of everything above. The pistol looks good, and resembles the NT blaster (which is good, since they're supposed to be the same gun in a way). The revolver looks kind of weird: the cylinder feels like it's way too small and it comes off as being a pistol with some funny bits glued onto it. The blaster carbine is way too small and honestly looks more like a pistol than the actual pistols do. The blaster rifle (sniper rifle?) is way too scrunched, like all the other long weapons. In my conclusion I would like to state that these are, technically, well-made sprites. The person that made them obviously has an artistic vision for how these guns should work, and the ability to pursue this vision. But in my eyes this vision, as it currently stands, is not what I want to see as the Aurora's weaponry. I know Wezzy has raised concerns about their colors and general aesthetic clashing with security uniforms and I must agree with him. These guns - particularly the worst offender, the ion rifle, - look like they belong in a cartoon instead of in the hands of security.

Yet again, we (but mostly me, the Sisyphus of human lore) return to Dominia. In this case, the corporate regulations page finally marks them as "do not borg" in the event that they, somehow, commit an infraction that carries the penalty. More lore will come soon! https://wiki.aurorastation.org/index.php?title=Corporate_Regulations#Regarding_cyborgification

I don't support removing LOOC as an avenue for funny ha-ha commentary by characters in the round, but I do support its total removal from ghosts. Personally, I am sick of the phantasmal comedy brigade inserting itself into the middle of tense situations to go "LOOC Unga Dunga: Whoa this mercenary and security standoff is just like the anime I watched earlier, and you absolutely need to know about this!" Or, in a worst-case scenario, a dead officer/antagonist/whatever loudly screaming in LOOC at their killer (I have had this happen to me before (multiple times)). If you're an observer you've already decided that there are better things to do with your time than participating in the round directly, so why are you still allowed to give epic zingers in the light blue text that everyone nearby gets to see?

This has my approval as a human lore deputy.

Sent...

This is a pretty harsh adjustment to disruptors, considering that the rubber bullets they replaced do 40 agony damage (+5 brute damage, for a total of 45) per hit. It seems as if this PR will simply render them a weapon that is used used until an antagonist appears, then is thrown away for ballistic pistols. I'm fine with reducing the burn damage, but 25 agony damage while losing a third of the disruptor's shots just renders it hopelessly ineffective.

Disruptors feel both extremely strong and strangely clunky at times. Against crew antagonists they're absurdly powerful, as every security officer is carrying a weapon that can fire twelve stun shots without reloading (this is nearly a twofold increase over the earlier ballistic pistol). They're also primarily shooting unarmored targets, which makes it even more powerful. Against off-station antagonists (or cults) it's borderline useless aside from lethal mode, as armor (such as a voidsuit or cult robes) will absorb its stuns and make security instead opt for the easily-available lethal mode. Instead of having to call officers back to the armory to distribute the bullets that kill people, you simply press a button to enable an officer's eight lethal shots (which can also pass through windows). In a twisted way, disruptors have - rather than making combat less lethal - encouraged security to pursue lethal options more due to the ease with which an officer can transition from nonlethal to lethal armament. In short, it is my opinion that we should go back to our earlier ballistic pistols.

EMERGENCY NATIONAL BROADCAST - EMERGENCY NATIONAL BROADCAST - EMERGENCY NATIONAL BROADCAST A middle-aged man in the uniform of a Sol Alliance navy Admiral stands behind a podium as several other officers and a dour-looking man and women both wearing civilian suits sit on tables flanking him. The middle-aged man begins to speak from what is pretty clearly a teleprompter behind the camera. “Following the illegitimate secession of Konyang and its surrounding areas, the situation in our Outer Rim has continuously deteriorated due to a lack of fuel for peacekeeping forces and the presence of terrorist actors such as rogue fleets and Coalition-sponsored gangs of privateers. Authority has collapsed in many colonies as traitors to the Sol Alliance have shown their true colours in this time of crisis, instead opting to enrich themselves or outright secede from our great Alliance when unity is needed most.” He pauses for a moment, seemingly to let that last line sink in. “Due to a lack of available fuel for our fleets, and a lack of ships equipped with the more modern Lopez-Zhang drive, the Alliance Provisional Military Government has opted to perform a strategic withdraw from areas deemed “too hot” to keep under Alliance control in order to ensure that those systems truly loyal to the Alliance remain safe and secure in our Alliance’s darkest of hours. Traitors to the Alliance will be left to their own devices, while those that remain loyal to the true government of humanity will remain safe and secure as they have always been. While the politicians may shout that we have abandoned these colonies to anarchy, the Navy has done no such thing. We have not abandoned a singular system that wishes to remain in the Alliance. Those that have abandoned the Alliance, deserve the anarchy that they now dwell within.” He pauses once again, opening up some type of logbook on his desk. “I am pleased to assure the residents of New Hai Phong and Silversun, along with their surrounding Middle Ring colonies, will remain under the watchful eye of the Alliance as they have always been. Even if we must stretch our forces to protect these systems, we will. It is our duty as the protectors of our great Alliance. The Navy has opted to bring Senator Le Hanh Trang into the Provisional Military Government to serve as a liaison between the Navy and the sector New Hai Phong dwells in. Systems that have opted to betray the Alliance, such as Mictlan, will have no such aid given to them.” As the Admiral ceases speaking, the dour-looking man rises and mounts the podium. Anybody familiar with Solarian politics will recognize him as Senator Hendrik Strom, the creator of the Third Tajara Ban. “In this ongoing time of crisis I, as emergency provisional governor of the Sol System, call upon my fellow citizens of the Alliance to have faith in our great government as we navigate this crisis. The situation will be stabilized, no matter what must be done.” The emergency broadcast cuts off at this point, replaced with a static image of the Sol Alliance’s flag and the sounds of patriotic music. The wheel has begun to turn.

An update to these sprites has been, honestly, direly needed for some time. These look suitable evil to be the uniforms of our local somewhat-racist somewhat-autocratic empire, so they have my stamp of approval as one of two human lore deputies.