jackfractal

The complete inability to escape is something I brought up when the design was originally proposed. It's way more effective than the previous jail for preventing escapes, even escapes with outside help. That's what you want from a jail in reality, but it's not necessarily a good thing for a game. Especially with how incredibly limited maintenance is on the new map. Even if you get out, if you're being hunted by security there is nowhere to hide.

Hmm?

Sounds reasonable to me. If you want to do an actual code review, where I explain what the heck I was thinking, I'm available most of today and early tomorrow.

Nah. I'm sure Scopes will explain in a bit. Not worth getting stressed over.

Five rounds is an absurd amount of work?

I don't have a good plan for how to actually make this work, but wouldn't a kind of apprenticeship program work best for this kind of thing? Like, a command intern or something. An ensign maybe? You could join or get shifted to the intern role, and you'd get a command headset. Then you'd act as a second and shadow to someone in a command role. If that person dies or goes SSD, you become the head for that round. At the end of the shift (or when the command character ghosts) their player can rank you up or down based on your performance. Get enough up votes, not an onerous amount, like maybe five, and you get command white-list for that department. I think this would give a better result in terms of accurately gauging how well suited people are for this department, while also keeping the command slots filled more often. I wouldn't mind seeing this kind of thing done for the Security, Engineer, and Surgeon roles as well. Get rid of the minimum age limits and make people actually play as cadets and interns to learn the ropes. It's always a little scary when a Chief Engineer doesn't know how to turn off the particle accelerator, or how to filter a plasma leak. Could this system be abused? Yyyeah probably, but it might be interesting to try.

Pull request is up. We're doing this people. We're making this happen.

That was the lore until I rewrote it, and it was accepted by Jackboot as of last month. It's still not up on the wiki (I still don't know why), but the lore has been changed. Thought manipulation technology is independent of cyborgization technology. Both exist, but they are not the same. The lore about cyborgs using wetware only as auxiliary processors is not canon anymore, despite it still being up on the wiki.

So hey. MasterZipZero and I spent, like, all day working on this. Looks like it all works now. I've just got to make sure all my debug spam is gone then I'll make a pull request.

All right! MasterZipZero helped me with a lot of issues today regarding IPC construction. We got almost all of them ironed out except that IPC's who get their brained removed don't get hooked up quite properly. We're working on that now.

Thanks everyone! Looks like Skull just figured it out! The version of Byond I was working with was a weird old one. New one works fine! So. Phew! Glad I don't have to fix that. Now I just need someone who will let me cut off their head for science.

OK. So what I said before was wrong. I had not fixed the memory problem. I have no idea what's causing it, but it's really bad. It looks like the problem is related to the maximum number of types we're capable of defining in total? I mean, I'm adding about forty of them, but we have thousands of them in SS13. If I define some things, then I get initialization errors from the analysis machines, that seems to be related to some kind of stack corruption because it claims they're trying to write to protected values, something that they aren't doing. So something somewhere is screwing up. If I include more stuff, like my clothing datums, the whole thing just crashes. This is enormously annoying!

Fffffffffuuuuck. OK I tracked it down. It looks like the file where I defined all the different jobs preview clothing was very close to hitting some undocumented and unrecorded limit for the number of entities defined in a single file? I'm not sure. There were two functions that I eventually tracked the problem down too, but I'm honestly not sure why they were the problem specifically. Splitting those files into smaller pieces seems to have made it work, but dang that was irritating. Fixing memory leaks without a debugger is like trying to do surgery over the phone. OK. So I need someone to help me test IPC construction tomorrow, as that's the only thing I can't test on my own. After I do that, I'll put up a pull request.

So I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I am/was mostly done. The bad news is that getting up to date with the development branch has just started hard crashing. Dream Daemon just stops working. I have no idea what's causing it. The whole thing just stops working. Infrequently, it will spit out errors about the anomaly analyzer before crashing, but nobody's touched that junk in any recent changes, so it's just a reflection of some other problem elsewhere. I've reached out to skull, but if he can't think of anything, I'm going to have to laboriously merge each file across one at a time, testing each one to figure out when it breaks, then grope blindly as to where the memory leak is coming from because, of course, there's no debugger for byond. It's going to be incredibly time consuming and irritating. Fuck all the things. With a debugger, this would take literally ten minutes. Without it, it's going to take days.

OK! So I captured a bit of the process of painting an IPC. Please ignore the random squares all over. Those are the crappy temporary art for the paint cartridges. So here's my IPC roboticist character. This is what shells look like with no paint. They're the default cyborg right now, but I wouldn't mind if someone made a thin robotic endoskeleton sprite to replace it with. You can start with paint, skin, fur, or scales at round-start, but I decided to start with bare metal to show you what it looks like. Here's me half way painted. Paint makes you look like the traditional IPC model. Here's me fully painted with a TV screen. Note that the screen has a different colour than the rest of the body. I decided I would show you how the synthetic skin works too. Here's me half way covered in synth skin. A happy side benefit of the way the blending system works is that it's very tricky to exactly match human skintones with synthetic skin, even when you're trying. Most shells will end up looking like Data from Star Trek; a little flat and weird looking. And here's me finishing off fully covered in synth skin and wearing a jumpsuit. Taking too much damage to a bodypart will remove the coating. The amount of damage it takes to lose the coating is pretty low right now, but that can be tweaked later in play. The coating items themselves are pretty cheap, but to make skin you'll need one level of biology research, for fur or scales you'll need two. Cybernetic limbs on organic characters can also be painted or covered in synthetic flesh. If your groin is covered in fur or scales you'll get a tail. Your choice of hair styles will be determined by the coating type covering your head. If your head is covered in paint you get the IPC screen's.

Yeah, I wasn't talking about saying "Lets all vote extended! Hint hint!" I was talking about making Extended, when it happens, really interesting and cool. If Extended rounds are consistently the most fun, most interesting, most engaging rounds on the server then of course more people will vote for them.

I'm with mrimatool on this one too. If you want to play more extended, convince people that playing extended is the most interesting option so that they'll vote for it. If people aren't voting for extended it's because they don't want to play it.

If you want, I can put something together for that and host it with all my other Aurora scripts stuff Ah! That's a neat idea, but I was talking about an in-game item.

I'd show you guys. I would. But there aren't really a lot of visuals going on here. Almost all the work I've done is back-end. There's pretty much no way to take a picture of 'Hey! You can pull MMi's out of shells now'. Or 'the preview_icon's clothing code has been compressed from 800 lines of repetitive and confusing nonsense to 250 lines of data and eight lines of code.' I guess I can show multicoloured shells though. I'll look at getting some pics of that later. Also I finally tracked down the last of the preview icon bugs. It still only updates about every two modifications for some reason, but that's a problem with the way we're sending icons, not the preview code itself, and I don't have a good idea how to fix it.

It's a single charge of a single type per crime, last time I checked. So you don't give someone five minutes per tool if they stole a toolbox, but if they broke into a secure area and knocked someone over to do it those are separate crimes and should be added together. My plan is to eventually make a crime computer that just automatically sets brig timers and creates permanent records to avoid this kind of ambiguity.

Aurgh! I spent nearly the entire day trying to fix the damned preview icons. They are horrible. Let me tell you. I've nearly got it working but goddam. That was a mess.

Why is a gainfully employed young person such as yourself purchasing inadequate electronics from sketchy markets in the middle of the night? Surely there must be a story to that. ~Anonymous

Oooohkay. Little update to this. I've done the sprite work for IPC's. Their 'hair styles' now do not contain their head, and are now affected by the 'hair colour' option. This means you can have an orange robot with a blue face-screen. Hurrah! I have the paint objects working as well, so you can get repainted. That took a sizable amount of time and I still don't have proper sprites for those. I'll try to get that done tonight. Brain surgery now gives you a proper posibrain or mmi when you do it to shells, and it works whether or not your head is attached to your body. This was fantastically irritating to make work. The paint covering system still isn't linked to damage yet, and the preview images in the character creation window are borked all to hell when you're working on a machine character. I really want to replace that character creation window entirely because it is awful, but that's beyond the scope of this project. One thing at a time. So, to recap, the major things left to do are: fix the preview icon for shells and cyberlimbs (this is going to be annoying and tedious) create proper sprites for the spray can and the paint cartridges Aside from that... I'm almost done.

Morning! Welcome to Aurora. That is a cute Avian. I love your use of colours.

I was the other active cyborg that round with Dreamix. We had a third cyborg, but they went SSD almost immediately so it was the two of us and Murphy on the binary channel. I thought what SenpaiShadow was trying to do was a really interesting way of playing Traitor AI. A lot of the time, MALFs or Traitors will tell their cyborgs to act natural until they set their plan in motion, then they tell us to kill people or do other nefarious deeds. SenpaiShadow didn't, not even when being attacked. That means that we were acting completely normally, with an AI who was acting very strange. People were suspicious of us, but we really weren't doing anything wrong. I thought that the lockdown was understandable given that they blamed Murphy for the carp situation and I have to give props to the Tajaran roboticist, whose name I can't remember, as she spent quite a bit of effort getting us to robotics and having our lockdowns lifted. I was playing an engineering cyborg at the time, so, like Dreamix, my perspective on the command and security channels is limited. SenpaiShadow did something else which was interesting. When their laws were reset, something that has no mechanical effect on a traitor AI, they would act normally for several minutes and apologize for their previous odd behavior. This happened at least twice. It kept people, in engineering at least, very confused. Was someone hacking it repeatedly? Was the Research Director doing it? What was going on? I don't know if the specific thing with the carp was justified or not, but it did lead to some entertaining cascading consequences and, at least from my perspective, SenpaiShadow was trying to do interesting things.