jackfractal

Splitting the history into chunks like this makes it a little confusing, as is the decision to treat AI's and robots as separate things. I also find the decision to call cyborg animals 'robots' a little confusing. Generally speaking, I've never heard something with a biological brain called a 'robot'. That being said, I do like the term 'tinning', I can see that as something that would catch on. I'm not keen on the idea of 'positronic brains' being an actual thing and I really don't like the idea here that there's just one type of them. In the version of this that I wrote, 'positronic' is just a human slang term people use to refer to microprocessors running AI software, and there are lots of players in the AI hardware business. The AI history doesn't really make much sense as you're sort of starting in the middle with the part where humanity acquires the graph-theory equations without having established the context for what that means before-hand, why the Skrell have them, or what they're supposed to do. I don't think this is bad, and I'll be the first to say that the big blob of text I created about the history of synthetics is indigestible and full of grammatical errors, but I'm kind of confused as to why you're doing this. Is there something specific you're trying to fix?

Hi Miffy! I like this character and their history is interesting, but remember, humanity has only recently acquired the ability to miniaturize artificial intelligence. Your character, for most of their existence, would have been questionably sentient, buggy, and enormous. It would only have been twenty years ago, when humanity acquired skrellian mathematics, that she could have been upgraded. If you're cool with that, everything else is fine and I'll mark you as approved.

It seems faaairly easy to get godlike in Fallout by the time you're in your mid twenties level-wise. I went all talky, some sciencing and crafting and by level 28 I'm doing... very silly things. Abusing drugs gets you there even faster. Psycho-jet is pretty cheap to make and it's naaaaasty.

Are you going to be able to smash these things until they stop working or is ordered deconstruction the only way you can get them off the door?

I expect that your proposed system would brutally punish new players who make honest mistakes. It would also death spiral people who are unskilled but want to improve. Without the opportunity to play as an antag, people would have no opportunities to practice and get better at it. That's without adding in the social pressures such a system would inevitably create.

The biggest issue, like Frances says, is processing time. Everyone knows it can take several orders of magnitude more time to get charged with a crime then you should serve for it. Adding in any complexity to that process is going to annoy everyone involved. I like the idea of community service or a mining camp kind of deal, but unless it were really easy then it won't be done. I've played on servers where there is the mining prison and it's almost never used, and when it is, someone usually griefs it by digging out into space. And Sue's right, if the station were in deeeeeep space, where NT is the only law for weeks of travel time in every direction, it would make more sense, but the Aurora is canonically within legal jurisdiction of Biesel, who are an actual government with laws and stuff. We have defanged NT to a degree where having them be 'da law' just doesn't work anymore.

Now I'm wishing we had functional headcrabs.

I think Carver's perspective is more common then you might think. The mind control aspect of cyborgization squicks some people right out.

I was thinking mostly of doing the interviews, that they'd be able to drop into the 'official case file' (read: the forum thread) so the other DO's don't necessarily have to do all the interviews themselves if the people they're trying to interview are only on during weird hours. That being said, I'm not a DO and I don't really know how they work, so it's possible that the idea is complete bunk.

I'm finding it very killy. The 'dungeons', especially the one in the first Minuteman quest, are too long. That factory is enormous, convoluted, and your success in that quest is based on killing everyone. I spent a good fifteen minutes just trying to find the last guy because I couldn't figure out how to get to him. It's not a good early quest. The enormous 'dungeons' also aggravate an issue I noticed in Skyrim. The issue is that the true owners of Skyrim weren't the nords OR the empire, it was the flipping "Bandits." The Bandits and Necromancers outnumbered the entire population of Skyrim. Like, remember the very first town? That town has a smaller population then the mine full of bandits nearby. In Fallout 4, I can say I've seen easily fifty 'raiders' for each non-raider I've talked too. The hydroponic robots are great though. Ten points for TV personality robots doing gardening.

I reeeally don't know why the chemical storage was left in. IPC's should not have weird bags of fluid inside them. That space should be taken up with robot bits. I'm not really sure what the point is, aside from wacky stuff like making yourself into a smoke grenade.

I'm all for keeping them fragile and giving them the ability to repair themselves. I like the idea that IPC's are fragile, but easy to fix. I'm also for giving the ability to 'shut down' when depressurized. While 'shut down' they would stop generating heat but would be unable to move or speak. IPC's would then have the choice of shutting down during a depressurization (trusting that the crew will save them) or trying to get to safety and risk overheating.

Hmm... ok, so what if we give the IAA role a badge. If you're a random greyshirt and you roll IAA, you get a badge that says "Nanotransen Official Internal Affairs Agent - Class 1". If you're someone on the DO team, you get a badge that says "Nanotransen Official Internal Affairs Agent - Class 2". If you have a Class 2 license, you're allowed to do Duty Officer stuff on station. We could even put it on a poster in the IAA's office explaining the difference between Class 1 and Class 2 investigators.

Yeah, the official borg lore has been modified from the rather odd 'it lobotomizes you and uses your brain as a processor' thing ever since the Shells update, as Shells were explicitly created to support characters with whole-body prosthesis and use the same MMI technology as cyborgs. So to be clear, while MMI's make it possible to control a brain using behavioral programming (Laws) they do not destroy the brain nor do they render the personality inside it unidentifiable. I think the old lore is still up on the wiki somewhere, if someone could link that too me I'll make sure it gets changed.

I'm having a little trouble understanding you there Delta. Can you explain how spending five minutes sleeping after getting hit by a taser is 'roleplaying' while, NOT spending five minutes sleeping after getting hit by a taser isn't? The idea that adding harsher consequences to damage to SS13 will make it more realistic may have some basis in fact, but SS13's level of simulation could not be considered realistic even in the best of lights. There are so many enormous gaps in it's simulation that focusing on this one should only be done for the purposes of improving gameplay. Arguments toward simulationist purity, when talking about SS13, are farcical on their face. Your suggestions would also do nothing to mitigate the fact that, to a degree, SS13 is a murder simulator. It's a simulator (a non-realistic on) that encourages murder. Murder is one of the tools in the toolboxes of both antagonists and protagonists. This has been true since the very beginning and it remains true now. All your suggestions would do is make murder easier and sudden and violent murder a more viable option. If you increase the lethality of combat, people who risk combat (see: all antagonists) are forced to assume more risk. Anyone who risks violence or capture if discovered will act to mitigate that risk in the most efficient way they can. The best way to mitigate risk in a system where you only need one strike is to be the one who strikes first. It will be quite a bit easier to be a serial murderer using your system as it will be easy to incapacitate your victims, and once you've hit someone once, they will be unable to escape you. Imagine the opposite idea. Imagine a version of this game where violence has fewer long-term consequences. In such a system, failures are easier to recover from, which makes people more willing to take more risks. As striking first is no longer an overwhelming advantage, one can take a chance on talking to an opponent rather then attacking right away. Maybe the security officer doesn't know your a changeling? Maybe he just wants to talk? Maybe he's just trying to interview you to see if you saw something. If he attacks you, yeah, you might be at a disadvantage, but your know you can recover from that disadvantage because combat takes a while to play out. You're going to be more willing to give them a chance because you're not terrified of instant failure. They're going to be more willing to give you a chance because they're not terrified of instant failure. Everything is less stressful and less likely to result in hurt feelings. That sounds a lot closer to the game that I want to play then one where instant-stealth-murder is the best option. On a related topic and mostly responding to Killerhurtz, I think it's important to remember that security should not win all, or even most of the time. The antagonists should have a roughly equal chance to achieve victory as the crew. That means that 50% of nuke ops teams should complete their objectives and escape, 50% of MALF AI's should survive and win, 50% of wizards should end the round alive, and free, and 50% of changelings, vampires, and traitors should raise hell, eat people, and get away with it. We are not even close to that. Security curb-stomps the opposition with plodding regularity. Signing up to play an antagonists on this server is a lot like signing up to be a jobber or a punching bag. It should be hard for security to beat antagonists. It should be easier for antagonists, with equal skill levels, to win, due to the fact that people are able to play security round after round and practice their skills, whereas nobody is able to practice as a nuke op, a wizard or a vampire due to how infrequently you get to play them. But what about rooooooleplaying? What about it? The primary mechanic for tabletop roleplaying games is weighted randomization. You think people don't care about balance in D&D or Pathfinder? You don't think they thought about niche protection and combat balance in Exalted? Vampire? Legend of the Five Rings? This is a game and, as much as possible, it should be a fun one. I can't see these proposed changes as doing anything other then reducing the fun.

I mean, sure, I think you present a reasonable argument, but it is going to have a lot of nock-on effects, most of which will involve boredom. Being crippled is boring. Losing instantly for a single failure in combat is boring. Being killed from ambush with no chance of success is boring. Waiting a long time before you can keep playing is boring. SS13 is a high-simulation game. In such games, accuracy of the simulation is important, but it's also important for it to still be enjoyable to play. I think doing as you suggest will exacerbate the issue of antagonists and security players not giving each other a chance during encounters. If you're definitely going to be crippled for several minutes for taking a taser shot, the correct response for a traitor surprised by security is going to be murder from ambush.

I think we should probably shelve the 'Why does Jack think removing aliens would be good?' part of this conversation. It's off topic, and like I said, I don't think it is either possible or advisable on this server.

Err... this wasn't originally a really a thread specifically to talk about the lore for these critters, it's a suggestion thread, so it's actually about whether or not including them is a good idea. I don't say yay or nay for that, I'm just pointing out that they're going to be expensive to port in terms of time, due to their associated mechanics not existing on Aurora. They're also going to be an ongoing drain of resources, as they can't share clothing without additional sprite work. While I know that I'm probably alone on this one, I found Jackboots assertion that removing the existing species was so out there that nobody would ever suggest it to be kinda funny as that's basically become my opinion over the last few months. The existing alien races cause problems. They don't work very well with all of the systems that pre-date them, and most of the core systems pre-date them. For example, they muck up the targeting system and surgery. Tails, for instance, do not physically exist in SS13, and neither do Skrell head tentacles. Dionaea don't work properly either, as you can't interact with the individual nymph's that make up their bodies. Aside from their poor integration with legacy systems, the alien species tend to cause interpersonal issues. Just look at all of the long, emotionally heated, threads full of angry people yelling about Tajaran. The attempt to fix the consistency issues using white-lists has created an ongoing management overhead to only questionable effect. They cause all these issues while not (with the exception of Vox) mixing up the game very much. As a feature, I feel that the alien species cause more problems then they provide value. Their return on investment is not very good. That being said, I am well aware that removing them would never fly here and would actually be a terrible idea. People are already invested in characters of those species, and even if that weren't the case, nobody likes having things taken away from them. Regardless of the issues I see with the aliens, I'd never really suggest getting rid of them.

Mapping and coding are different, but there's a lot of code work that needs to be done to support the ground map before the ground map will, like, work. To be honest, I would remove the alien species we have now. As you say, they're not sufficiently different from humans to justify their existence. I don't have a problem with porting stuff. Most of the things I've done has been ports from Paradise or elsewhere. I'm just saying that these guys are going to be a big port, because they rely on a bunch of ancillary mechanics that Bay has that we don't. To port them you have to port all of those mechanics in addition to porting the Resomi themselves, which would be a comparatively large job. Of course, as a side benefit, we'd finally be able to pick up and hug Ian, which may justify the whole project all on its own.

I think swat has a good point. These are not going to be cheap to port, and aside from them being cute (which they are) I don't really see the point. We're not exactly drowning in developers.

What if they're where the gravity manipulation technology comes from? We don't really have a lore explanation for Lord Singulo...

You're link it broken.

This is pretty marvelous. I don't have anything in particular to add to this due to it's perfection, but I unironically support this plan.

Hey Skull, I am almost finished the improvised versions of these. I've run into a really dumb byond problem and it's too late for me to finish it tonight. I'll polish these off tomorrow early and throw a pull request up to your repo.

The issue with having them be a species with technology that is superior to NT's is the issue we (sort of) have with Skrell. Why are they working for NT, a human-based company? Maybe we could go with a modification of the Lore that Bay uses for their crew-member Vox. The only fluffy space raptors on station are the rejects and weirdos who get kicked out of their perfect society for being defective and broken. We could say that 99.999% of their species lives inside an enormous dyson-sphere and they do not care about what happens outside of it. They're perfectly self sufficient, and their dyson sphere is effectively unassailable, so they basically don't interact with inter-species politics. Except for the weirdos who choose to leave, and once you leave, you can never go back. The real trouble I see with these doodads is antagging. Antagging as something who can barely see and hallucinates when it's away from people too long is going to be a challenge. Also, from a development perspective, they're an ongoing burden. Their unique body-shape means that all future clothing will need two copies, one for everyone except these guys, and one for these guys. In addition, their code will rely on a lot of development that has been done on Bay for picking up and carrying mobs, and all that will need to be ported. Our code is now so divergent from Bay's (we still don't have qdel for example) that this is going to be a pretty hefty task for whoever tries it.