WickedCybs

It's been a while now since the Horizon launched and there's been a lot of great contributions from the community when it comes to overmap content in particular. We'd like to make it easier to know what to in order to have your content approved as well as let you know what we expect to be present. This thread does expect some knowledge of strongDMM and mapping, so it might use terms that are confusing if you're not familiar. You can always talk to me to clarify something though. These guidelines are in effect for PR's made after this post was made. Stuff that was PR'd beforehand isn't beholden to it but we would like older content to be updated eventually. Away Ships Should consist of multiple "areas" (good rule of thumb is to do it per room). It's required in order to do stuff as minor as assigning ambiences or how the area will affect sounds to controlling local atmospheric pumps or emergency shutters. Needs functioning power and atmos systems. For the former that means some way to generate power and a SMES to relay it. For the latter that means a way to ventilate the ship by having a source of air present in case the ship loses any and a waste tank or some means to dispose of unwanted gas from the scrubbers line. Require multiple navpoints (landing zones basically) at the outside of a ship. This does not include a navpoint you would put at a docking port. One navpoint for each cardinal direction is good enough for most cases. If it's a particularly big ship or there's some other factor, you could add more than that too to keep an even spread. Make sure these are named so people know where they're going in relation to the ship they're traveling to. Something like "BLV LOVE MIRANDA - STARBOARD" would tell me I'm going to the starboard side of that ship. If the ship has a shuttle you will want to make sure that shuttle is also powered. Stuff like atmos is also easy enough to do but I wouldn't call it absolutely required if you can't seem to fit it in for whatever reason, but it should be a good reason because it's really going to suck for anyone using that shuttle if/when it vents. If the ship has a shuttle and this shuttle is expected to be able to go into space, you will want to make sure it has a functional airlock. Not an airlock as in a door, but the airlocks you would use to cycle out or in somewhere, like on the Intrepid. Something unique to shuttle airlocks is that they're designed to cycle into and out of different types of atmosphere, so you need vents on the outside of the ship too for that airlock. The Intrepid is the baseline for all of this and you can pretty much wholesale copy how it tags stuff, but you can also ask us over on the coding channel in the discord if it ends up being confusing. Need a good spread of weapon entry points (the marker that determines where opposing shots go if someone shoots a ship gun at you) distributed on the outside of a ship and shuttle. The minimum is four to pass the map checker but there should be more than that to ensure an attacker has options. Ships should face south. Shuttles can face any direction. Consult the maps/helpers templates when it comes to making shuttles and airlocks to see ideal size ranges and good placement. All airlocks should be using airlock markers. The Horizon has many examples of how these are used: "normal" external access airlocks, docking airlocks, and shuttle airlocks. Away Sites Should consist of multiple areas too. This becomes less important if it's a set piece site without power requirements or risk of venting. I'd still encourage its use and planning around it. Should generally respect power requirements (Always exceptions though. One example being having a turret room that doesn't require power in order to fend off would-be-explorers). Atmos becomes more optional here but if the place is obviously designed for habitation it should have it even if it won't actually be functional. You can do neat stuff like have an unpowered station engineers can fix up if they want. If it's a site that contains humanoid ghost spawns that are active roundstart, power is absolutely required and functioning atmos systems become required if it's in space. If the site is out in space, make sure there's at least one navpoint in each cardinal direction and be descriptive in its name so people know where they're going. If it's on a planet or some other location where that's not a factor then just try to have more than one navpoint. I'd say aim for three and have an expectation that the area could have the Intrepid and Spark present at the same time as well as one outside visitor. Add weapon entry points to these too if it's in space. Exoplanet Ruins Unless it's important to the ruin, use the turf passthrough area type on your ruin entirely unless it has a reason to have its own area (could be a building) and use the turf pass through type on any tiles that are just supposed to be a natural part of the exoplanet. This saves you the trouble of manually mapping in that stuff and works just as fine. To visualize that, a "ruin" could look like this and be intended to spawn on a barren exoplanet. Generally, use landmark/clear effects on parts of your ruin that you want free of exoplanet rock/decorations. Might be cases where you don't want to, but this is just better mapping practice. It's not quite the same, but all the points for away sites mostly apply to ruins too. Think of these as away-sites in miniature and with less work involved (usually) in making. On Ghost Roles A ghost role should have a good reason for existing. Some clear goals they can accomplish that don't rely on others being present all the time is a good idea as there's no real guarantee the Horizon or a third party will come and find them. Last thing we want is a role people spawn in where they do nothing for half an hour and then inevitability ghost. In the description text you would see when picking a ghost role make sure you are descriptive. People shouldn't really need to know anything from the wiki for anything not whitelisted. That means outline what group they are, what they're doing, state their nationality, who they should listen to if there's a leader and anything else that might seem important. If the role has some important info/lore that can't be conveyed in the selection text before someone selects it, make sure you're using welcome_message on the role itself (check out the ERTs for an example of that) to better explain who they are, what they're doing, their faction and anything else that seems good. It will show up as a message in their chatlog when they spawn. That is the essentials but I might come back to add more in case I forgot anything. If you approach stuff from the angle of "What if I was adding something to the Horizon/Intrepid?" you probably wouldn't cut corners, so the same expectation is present with overmap content even if it won't be seen or used by as much people. Feel free to ask questions on the coder channel of the Aurora Discord or to me if anything seems to be missing here or if there's some confusion.

ghosts like in destiny

Given that it's preventable and will be to an even greater extent with Gem's PR, I don't really see a reason to remove consequences like this and it doesn't make sense to be intact afterward. Would be like surviving after having an entire ship land on you after you walked onto a hangar pad.

The big problem is that we want people to roleplay with each other. The idea of the Horizon and an EE ship "coexisting" on the overmap sounds nice but in practice the Horizon doesn't need to care and the third party ship just siphons pop that gets bored and comes back to the Horizon anyway. That's fine for the factions that aren't diametrically opposed to the SCC but it's going to be a problem for those that are and EE were the worst of that lot even when they ignored the spy concept they were introduced with. I'd also say we have enough extensions of Sol (and EE certainly is when it comes to the narrative) present at the moment. If they were to be added, it would work if approached from an angle of actually being independent rather than scenery for an overmap. A medium sized ship with a small research lab despite its purpose isn't going to cut it. The ship should be on the bigger end of what we have like the TCFL or Kataphracts. It needs RP spaces for its crew. It needs RP spaces for the people who visit them. It can't exist as the typical overmap ship does at the moment. I don't think it should exist at all until we have more overmap content though. Adding it prematurely would only see its old problems resurface and wouldn't give it anything to do.

nop

It's been a year so I think it'd be fine to unban you, but keep in mind if you end up having a perma again it's going to be very unlikely at that point for another appeal to be accepted.

I banned you roughly a year ago for that. I'll lift the ban but do be mindful not to do something like that again. The reason stuff like this is a perma is because new ckeys or people with no history on the server sometimes join just to fuck around. Will leave the post open for a day if there's anything else you'd like to say.

I don't really like the idea of having crew that effectively never really existed, dead and in the morgue. A Horizon crew member should be a player.

It kind of seems like you haven't really read much about the PRA, especially when you say that in accordance with its ideals one of your characters was discriminated and sidelined due to being a woman. The PRA was the reason behind the enfranchisement of women on Adhomai and at the government level they are treated relatively equally. They were not affected by the drafts but they were able to volunteer and many did fight and die for the People's Republic. That aside, like Ping said, Kosmostrelki are specialized troops and the title doesn't mean they were sent on the ship to play the role of service staff for the rest of the crew. They earned the position like everyone else and would be seen as some of the most loyal soldiers of the state due to the risks and expectations involved with space. It'd make more sense to have a bit of a disloyal footsoldier or something.

The vast majority of our away sites were added by the community with little dev input? I wasn't even on the development team when I added most of mine as well. How can you say this when you haven't even talked to any of us or even brought up potentially needing help with a map or something on the maincords coder channel? Others have and surprisingly, one did get their map in after a bit of help from me and Gem. That's just a recent example out of many. It's very strange reading this thread and seeing what people imagine when it comes to the lore and development teams. The server is the result of collaboration, not competition. We would do well to remember that.

As long as there's an indicator. I can see sec or an antag getting lit up by people thinking they're active otherwise.

I'm not really sure how me saying you can help out medical has any relation to the latter part of the round where you ran into the middle of a gunfight, caught a rifle burst and yelled "MEDIC HERE." I don't really define help as breaking rules on self preservation. That would have gotten a first responder warned or banned too, depending on their history.

"I switched topics" is an excuse, it's effectively the same conversation and I noted along with the strike (where staff can read the background) that you were dragging it out. This isn't a strong point to hinge anything on. You're just reframing what you did here, which is pretty dishonest. Trying to say "It takes two to tango" when I'm essentially making it known there is no "debate" anymore and that it should be moved while you two still don't stop at all. Let me be clear. I didn't want to deal with you or the other person at that point and was cognizant that this excuse would be used. On the discord we're not going to waste time trying to get a second staff member in while someone keeps going off in the chat just because they're invested and unable to drop a topic, or want to disguise their indignation with "criticism" over a staff action. They commented mid-conversation there and dropped it promptly when I gave them the heads up, then thumbs upped my comment to presumably let me know they acknowledged it. So not only did they not keep continuing the conversation, they were far more courteous and respectful overall. It's absurd that I have to deal with the dogpile, Ben shitposting in response to me repeatedly saying to just move things elsewhere and then you haranguing me after for dealing with it as if I deserve to get put down by either of you in a conversation that initially had far more polite people that I was talking to. Ultimately it was your choice. You just reasoned that there would be no consequences.

You leave out the part where after I had to strike Ben for continuing and then temp banned them for trying to be funny about it, you got on my case and much like they did, began trying to get the last word in about my conduct. This was all the same situation. So. You were adequately warned. You saw how I had to deal with Ben. You then continued on to post weird criticism defending a guy who posted a funny gif (which was deleted) then said "uh oh stinky". I don't believe that wasn't you effectively trying to continue things by framing it in a different way, especially after I was practically begging you two to stop and reinforced that I wasn't trying to be an asshole, I just wanted things moved to a different channel. So like I said there. Please give me a break here instead of doing this, because I really shouldn't have to say "Do not do this thing" without striking you and then deal with the upset when you do that thing and I finally issue the strike. Dreampixl was also partly in that conversation, but they instantly stopped as soon as I said again to stop talking about it in the code channel. So they were the only one who went unstriked there. For the future if you want to be sincere, you can always DM one of us if there's questions regarding something that happened. In this case though? You were rude even if you didn't intend to be and you didn't follow the instructions.

I kind of forgot about this due to how much time has passed. Now that I've been reminded though and since it's actually being looked into now, I reexamined the situation. Not much has changed, though I would like an examination of Kyres's own behavior now as a staff member to be looked over rather than me needing to make a separate complaint on that too, because I don't think lore staff should be behaving the way they did. With that in mind, I do have more to say. In particular I'd like the third point Kyres raised to be looked into in that regard because it kind of links to everything else. The whole "Claimed to (up until the complaint's closure) have a bag of shit to drop on me from nondescript people in nondescript circumstances." or that I'm gathering a squadron of people that "paint themselves as my (Kyres's) number one haters" and trying to stir shit up among people who know Kyres among other things. As soon as I even mentioned I'd like to see if anyone else could comment, Kyres was immediately lashing out and fixating on it in particular. While on the initial complaint you can already see my thoughts in that regard I will just say again, it wasn't exactly a major point or something this complaint hinged on, but I did think it might be useful to just... ask those who have been present when I've had to deal with them, others and Kyres to affirm something? Kyres isn't really hearing about me getting the avengers together because I don't really care to slander or badmouth people to others and they likely still haven't heard of any real campaign to get people to start hating them or whatever. Most of us are adults and can come to our own conclusions. I'm never going to tell someone to not talk to a dude just because I have issues with them. It makes it hard to respond to these mentioned scenarios where I allegedly want the complaint to be a circus, a dogpile or that I wanted it public in an attempt to ruin a reputation rather than just being the usual complaint anyone can see like any other minus the confidential complaints. I'm unjustly shutting down a dchat conversation and bulldozing my way in and holding my "position" over people in a "debate" by saying "Hey, please ahelp so we can handle stuff rather than complain about sec/antags here, thank you." as if that's unreasonable for me to even say. They've said worse about me even in the first post they made that concluded in what I'd call the faux apology, but I'm not really going to stretch it and go as far to say this was a deliberate and heinous effort to lower my standing in a community I've been in for a few years because the fourms aren't exactly the place to go if you want to be heard or seen. Nonetheless it does turn complaints into the self fulfilling prophesy Kyres mentioned. Rather than just taking it as it is it turns into "Why did you make this public" and devolves from there because the issue is that I even made it to begin with rather than going about it exactly how they wanted it. It's not uncommon for someone to lie or assume something about us that isn't really right. We can't always mollify people though. It is just really paranoia that leads to stuff like worrying staff are specifically out to get you, colluding in msay or thinking we're putting you on our shit list if we see we've been ahelped just to name a few examples like that which aren't uncommon thoughts I think. Would be far too much time and effort even if I wanted to pursue a grudge if I had one and it can probably be seen even after multiple complaints made by me or focusing on my actions as staff that I don't try to get retribution.

If the name is exceedingly illogical or stupid we still ask people to change it generally, that's not really ever going to change even if someone pointed to some absence on a wiki page and used that as a reason to go overboard so no I don't really know what you mean. At most, there's been isolated cases of more whacky names that got through for whatever reason but It's never been common and it typically needs a good reason. It's not that rare of a ticket. When I say borgs should have guidelines, I think It's clear enough it it wouldn't be exactly the same as the humanoid races though. Just that there should be something written at this point if people seemingly need that. I'd give some examples and some "do not do X" and leave it at that probably.

It doesn't matter to you. To me, It does reflect on borgs overall and the lore given this was a canon occurrence in an event about canon consequences. We do have naming guidelines for people, so I do think borgs might benefit from this now.

I just find it hard to take borgs seriously, especially in relation to the borgification procedure. After the mutiny there'd be weeks of joking about borgings where the borg will still essentially have the same name but with numbers added, as if that would happen right? It would be silly. And then it actually did happen canonically. What they represent gets undermined by how the lore and people actually portray them and there's not really much lore there to begin with I suppose. Removal feels like a pipe-dream but at the least, I think we could try to support them better and set a better tone. A few things are uncertain and one thing that comes to mind is confusion lately on what exactly makes borgs in general tick. We did have circuit, MMI and "positronic" borgs. Apparently, there might only be MMI borgs canonically. The game itself always has a bit of a disconnect and I can't really blame people for not wanting to get into the borg code though.

I think it is kind of hard to say they had no place in research when they have even less of a purpose now that they've shuffled into ops. On paper sure, it's the "supplying" department, but science does that too on the technological end and roboticist players by and large don't really seem to be getting anything out of the transition. Should it lose Heph I'd pretty much see it as a necessary sacrifice given the whole justification of "Well robots are their thing" could be raised about stuff like Idris handlers and the like. If it didn't exit operations it would still need its location moved and additional things added to facilitate its interactions with the research and medical departments. I'll probably have to see the why on why it was moved to ops in the first place too.

They don't want to do this. If a megacorp is in a department it'd have to be in every role within that department, minus the SCC of course.

Will consult with the wiki team soon if that is the case, and staff in general to see if we're on the same page. That aside, I'm remembering now that changing its department would also mean Machinist would have new employers. I think in this case that would be Zavod, NT and Zeng for research.

What I've seen is good and I think you would be fine in command as long as you moderate the more extreme aspects to your characters. The executions as your HoS, or Erik being willing to "parole" someone with a mutiny charge are what comes to mind there for me.

You absolutely were told the overuse was essentially spamming the chat, which was the main reason it couldn't be overlooked. I don't really appreciate you trying to rules-lawyer or lie to me and other staff when you get into even the smallest amount of trouble like this.