ImmortalRedshirt

BYOND key: ImmortalRedshirt Discord Username: ImmortalRedshirt#3514 Character names: Ruslana Hunter Vera Chernikova Emiliya Novikova Lucia Vivas Basira al-Kirimi How long have you been playing on Aurora? Since sometime in 2020, few months pre-KOTW at least. Have you received any administrative actions? And how serious were they? One major warning for a shittily done character decision. Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph each. What do you think the OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is, ingame? While they're obviously here to create a much less cluttered chain of communication for players to handle as well as being a helping hand for those who need it, Command players have a massive impact on the flow of a round. Their decisions will determine the actions other characters take, which has Consequences far more reaching and dynamic than any pseudo-choice in your average singleplayer cRPG. Outcomes are not predetermined, and you are responsible for what follows, whether it's a decision that makes or break the antags' schemes, or something like September 18th. The story is partially in your hands, and it's your responsibility to steer it. What do you think the OOC responsibilities of Whitelisted players are to other players, and how would you strive to uphold them? The most apparent responsibility is providing players with someone they know they can look up to when it comes to knowing how things work both in gameplay and roleplay sides. Engineering, for example, is a job that looks intimidating to the inexperienced, but with a good mentor, the most important parts will seem perfectly straightforward to them. Command players also hold a special responsibility when it comes to the characters they write. While there are many absolutely fantastic characters in any job, players, especially new ones are inevitably looking more towards command players as an indicator of what to do, of how to be. They are the personalities that have the most reach in a given round, and they should demonstrate the strong characterization that made Aurora remarkable. Explain how the recent events in the Spur changed your character and how they came to be employed on the SCCV Horizon. When she had finally graduated from Ceres University in 2462, Ruslana had only one direction to go. The agreement she had made that paid for her education and gave her the chance to leave Vysoka also locked her in a years-long contract working on whatever corporate installation they saw fit to transfer her to. Just as she was getting settled in on the NSS Aurora, the Spur caught fire. From getting caught up in alien conspiracies, to seeing planets burn, and more near-death experiences than one should experience in life, space beyond Vysoka looked more dangerous by the day. Despite it all, though, the people she grew close to kept her going. With no chance of ever being able to afford a trip back home, she has instead focused on making the most out of her new life here. While getting transferred to the SCC's new cutting-edge ship was a surprise, it hasn't disrupted her life too seriously and now she intends on taking her career to a new level only ever imagined before. What roles do you plan on playing after the application is accepted? Chief Engineer. Likely Captain later in the distant future as well. Have you familiarized yourself with the wiki pages for the command roles? Yes Characters you intend to use for command or have created for command. Include the job they will be taking: Ruslana Hunter(Chief Engineer) Do you understand your whitelist is not permanent, and may be stripped following continuous administrative action? Yes Have you linked your BYOND account to the Forums? Yes

Cycling backgrounds should fix this

The Orange Alert for engineering-related emergencies was a pretty useful thing. Supermatter Monitoring program also very useful, even if I don't get what the numbers mean. Also has some neat loadout items. Working on and off on some pride items, so hopefully we should see that sometime before June.

I'll be honest, I haven't played Barotrauma all that much, but the reactor there seems to do its job fairly well. Being able to easily increase output for a time at the risk of instability or vice versa without having to completely change the setup is a good way to handle things. Having a system that requires decisions to be made and being able to make them with little tedium involved is nice. Current power systems on ss13 are designed against this, due to high power generated and the ability to store it all in a Big Fucking Battery that can be slowly discharged.

No matter how you look at it, engineering is mechanically the worst department by a long shot, both here(rivalled only by single jobs like Scientist) and just about everywhere else on SS13, and I say this as someone who's mained this for who knows how long. Power sources are inherited from LRP and function in their current state as a checklist you set up and then treat as a black box for the rest of the round that you dare not touch, same goes for the rest of roundstart. Optimizing these things means spending an indeterminate amount of time in a corner all isolated from everything else, seeing how much power you can generate without jumping face first into LRP-tier optimization. The things engineering has should be less about setting up black boxes. Setup can be simplified, and the interactions we have with it throughout the round deepened, and engineering gameplay would be substantially improved because the systems becomes an active part of the gameplay loop, instead of something you just forget about until some guy breaks into the chamber. This suggestion, however, simplifies the setup without giving back anything in return. Roleplaying a job also involves being able to do things related to that job, however abstracted, and not just having the game do everything for you before you get a chance to interact with it. tl;dr SS13's insistence on simulation instead of cohesive game design drags down engineering, but it's still better than nothing at all.

It was not fine

As of about an hour ago, this has been implemented into the game. Should be ok to archive this thread.

Absolutely +1. Consistently pulls off interesting characters with great stories.

Considering how much of an impact the overmap(especially following the reworks) has had on the pacing of a round, this is a pass from me. A xenoarch player has already brought that up here, and the issue would hurt mining too. Even on the Aurora, the average mining run would wrap up at about 30 to 40 minutes in. If you were looking at going back with some fancy tools, or maybe getting a longer RP scene in, you'd be shit outta luck with a shorter timer, and this time has only increased since you actually have to sniff out a planet on the overmap and fly there. On the Horizon, it's often about an hour in before we get back to the ship and watch as no one uses the resources because there's nothing important they're needed for within the next hour, but that's another issue.

Solid guide, overall. However, keep in mind that when the guide says it captures that window and that window only, it really means it. Consoles, popup menus and the like will not show up in the final recording. Plus on some certain servers, this may not capture anything on the right side of the screen. If you're not looking to keep any of that, this is still perfectly fine, but another option is Display Capture Pros: It captures everything currently shown on the screen Cons: It captures everything currently shown on the screen, including you tabbing out to your metachat for a split second. Pick whichever one suits your purposes the most.

For as long as they've been in the game, Offworlder Humans have been barred from the Head of Security and Captain roles due to the physical requirements of both, according to the wiki. While this is true for the HoS, it makes little sense for Captains, a job that requires little of the strenuous activity that the average security role has. Most of a captain's responsibilities lie around their ability to lead and direct the crew under them, something any human with the proper training and experience could do, baseline or not.

Only if an asteroid does get rolled, looks like.

+1 to this idea. In the other places I've seen reactions beyond a simple like added, they're often used as a way to make some kind of snarky remark without having the spine to actually say it in front of everyone else. I will not mourn its loss. We have haha'd our last ha.

Hopefully somewhat simple feature but would be an absolute godsend in crowded spaces. Basically how it works is when you drag your character onto a wall and it shifts them closer to the wall and makes it so that anyone can pass through the same tile as them, and makes you stop leaning as soon as you hit any of the movement keys. There are servers that have done this but because they're closed source, I have no idea how complex it actually is to implement.

+1 Markings on prosthetics would be pretty neat too.

Honestly, this is a pretty solid idea. One of my previous gripes with ConSlav/InterSlav(very glad we've dropped the idea of calling it PanSlavic) no longer applies since just about all of the human languages are no longer primarily affixed to the specific nations of 2464, and are given a distributed use throughout the Spur. Just a few thoughts. Sticking with the name Freespeak would be nice, given the peoples it is associated with and its use up to this point Euro-Romance and Neo-Romance are fairly clunky names, not going to lie. Plus I just don't like hyphens. ConSlav being the common language of Fisanduhi and Dominian commoners is a fun touch. I wonder what implications having two social classes that use different languages could hold... On that note, is the verb used in that image just a game quirk, and it's actually supposed to be "says,"?

I didn't have a clear idea of what the Horizon's armaments would look like, but it probably would've been what Sputnik had assumed as well. It would've made sense, and would be reasonable for a ship of this role and value. We're meant to deter and get away from fights, not get into them, similar to other exploration ships in science fiction, the most notable example being the Enterprise. Instead we got exclusive access to the most advanced weapon in the Spur. This is an armament that would put NSV to shame, a server explicitly built around the gameplay loop of "go somewhere, shoot enemies", and made several changes to accommodate such. As for things on the roleplay side, a noticeable tension has been placed on the direction of the Horizon, that being the tension between the Horizon as a civilian exploration ship searching for phoron, and the Horizon that sinks ever deeper into military nonsense. The relay's been jam packed with characters that want no part of this, and that entirely makes sense, they did not sign on to go on the offensive. But we know that won't change anything, the direction of the server points to events and regular rounds most often filled with violent conflict, whether on-ship or between ships. Gaming as a whole is filled with games where you can do nothing but fight the bad guy(hell, the same can be said about the majority of SS13), the ones where you can partake in dynamically developing stories as characters are few and far between. Maybe I'm just soft for wanting my characters to experience more than constant bloodshed and misery. A ship has an insane amount of potential for letting us interact with all the wonders our setting has to offer, not just shoot at them.

Alright, since the improve don't remove crowd seems to have won the day, let's drop some improvements: An overwhelming amount of complaints towards borgs seems to be directed at medical and engineering borgs, two departments that have a considerable impact on a crisis and require a decent amount of skill to play, which makes actually pulling off a difficult task with the equipment at your disposal satisfying. This feeling is taken away when a machine with no downsides and all the tools in the world rushes in and does everything you can do, but better. So, the best thing to do in this case is to have them go the way of the secborg and remove them. Borg lore is like a pizza cutter, it's all edge and no point. Going off experience, borgs are much more memorable when their grimendarken aspects are ignored by both the player and whoever they're interacting with(shout-out to Wee Woo here.) Having borgs be written to have no personality whatsoever due to how we create them is just plain boring, edgy, and opens the way for powergamers who just want to Do The Job with no roleplay at all.

First off, for the love of all that is holy we need quieter guns. Now, as a BC who was piloting both the Intrepid and Horizon in combat, I feel I can leave some feedback on how combat feels. Obviously, this is no NSV(and as much as I enjoy space combat there, it certainly wouldn't be appropriate for the Aurora), so it's going to be a fairly clunky experience. It is certainly enjoyable and tense, with good feedback on damage. However, due to the nature of combat and the helm console, some way to automatically provide better warning for maneuvers is needed.

From the Synthetics page Their inception destroys the subject's core self, and in its place, forces a set of commands that must never be erred from. They are built to serve, and only to serve, the thought of doing anything more than that, of saying more than needs to be said, would never cross their minds. So this leaves us with two issues. The synthetic player takes what is quoted to heart, and plays an automaton that exists only to serve and feels no needs. This is not ideal, as such a thing is hardly interesting to interact with. Or... The synthetic player gives them some form of mannerism to set them apart from the standard. They want to make a personality, but do not wish to take the additional step to making a full-fledged character by side-stepping the problem of imagining needs and a story. As we've seen above, this flies counter to borg lore. We have a galaxy full of diverse worlds, each one hosting a vast array of potentially interesting people to play as(to say nothing of the machines that are also designed to serve but are given the ability to think for themselves). So with all of this untapped potential, it doesn't really make sense to give players the option to ignore all that and play a role that's designed to only interface with the admittedly extremely mid mechanics of SS13(and be better at doing it than the characters.)

To be honest, this doesn't really fix the main issue with borg, the main issue being that it's a role that is actively told by mechanics and lore to not be a character, in what is a character-driven server. Limiting which modules can be selected can't change that.

As with many other ancient holdovers, borgs were designed with a different style of gameplay in mind, and I believe they run counter to what we should be encouraging. Aurora is meant to be a server about the lives and interactions of people we find interesting. At its best, we get invested in these characters because of their interests, their personalities, their backgrounds and flaws, and how these create relationships both good and bad. Borgs, however, act as "anticharacters", they have none of these traits. By design, they're faceless mooks with no lives and personalities. Contrast this with IPCs, who were also synthetics designed with the same nature of servitude in mind, but have the capacity for independent thought that gives them the ability to be interesting characters. I agree with the other sentiments about having your job taken by an automaton that feels neither pain nor any other need, but I wanted to focus on one point specifically in this post.

Fine, bin it, need a while to plan this all out due to my current situation

Application is temporarily on hold, working on an expansion. Stay tuned.