jackfractal

Are duty officers having to do that? I guess I haven't understood the scale of the problem.

I like the civilian changes. The current civilian design is cool, but it places so much emphasis on the holodeck, and the costume storage area is a big unused lump in the middle. The port wing is still really unused in your design, and we've lost the changing room and the cultist training area (bathrooms). Your ideas are interesting ones, but how do you solve the problem of science not involving the players learning new and interesting things? That's always been the core issue with the science department: all the things you can do with it are known from round-start. There's no discovery, no refinement, no progress. Can you solve that?

I'm not saying it does anything 'for roleplay'. I think most of what happens in R&D is dumb, I've written quite a few words on why, and why it's not a good system. That being said, of all the dumb stuff that happens in that job, the dumbest by far are the lock boxes. I also think it's kinda silly that you think merging a ridiculous patch for a flawed system from another sever is more economical then, like, just telling them not too. They're already breaking the law for bringing weaponry outside of science without a permit.

It's possible to ban weapons research now. You do it by saying, as someone with authority over science, "Weapons research is banned." But that won't stop people from doing weapons research though! No, it wont, but it will stop them from doing so legally, at which point it becomes a matter for the DO's.

Those are nice. What do you use to get your inks like that? Is it just a brush or something else?

I oppose this idea. The protolathe is a silly nonsensical machine, but even for a silly nonsensical machine, having it create arbitrary impenetrable lockboxes is really dumb. Has there been a rash of protopistol wielding antag hunters? Is this something that is a persistent problem or something that has happened once or twice? If it's not happening all the time then it would make more sense to deal with the problem players directly rather then add this mechanic, as this mechanic is deeply silly.

There are a lot of interesting places we could take SS13 if we wanted to make it dark and horrible, but the consensus here on the Aurora appears to be that we don't want to go to those places. We trend towards Space Opera, not Sci-Fi Horror.

I suspect the troll who was posting in google-translate Chinese is what attracted their attention.

And just straight up objectively superior to the default radio. Not having coms is supposed to be a significant issue.

You'd have to dramatically change the context of the game to make this happen, but it would be pretty cool.

Coms being down is supposed to be a major inconvenience to security. That's pretty much the point of having that mechanic. Disabling coms is intended to severely disrupt people's ability to collaborate.

Cause the biogenerator to print spiders.

Why is 60 rounds important? Does something happen at sixty rounds? I'm confused. Yes, grinding for 60 rounds sounds dumb. Why would you do it? You're planning on having pay occur based on time served? That sucks for people who join mid-round AND for people who die or have to go SSD half way through a round. It sucks a lot. How do you explain resetting the economy every round from an in character perspective. You don't. It's an out of character thing we do to stop things from getting silly. We have tons of those. Extreme wealth for long-time players is going to give them a direct material advantage over newer players. If I have a million credits and I can go into cargo and buy something that helps me when I need it, while a new player can't, they are materially disadvantaged. This will alienate new players. Another thing that ludicrous levels of wealth will do is make the entire purchasing economy irrelevant for wealthy players, as they will have effectively infinite cash allowing them to buy whatever they want. The last obvious flaw in having no resets will be the rampant inflation. At the start of having this system in place, you might be able to bribe someone with, say, 300 credits. 300 credits is a nice amount, but in six months, when the average long-term player has sixty million credits, your 300 credit bribe will look incredibly silly! This will further alienate new characters as they won't be able to take part in ad-hoc financial interactions as they will all happen at a scale that dwarfs their meager earnings. These are real problems. Being rich is fun, but being rich in a game is usually a sign of a problem with the economic design.

Yeah, but your example isn't "He makes 100 and spends 100", it's "He makes 200 and spends 50." This means that if you play a lot of rounds and don't spend any money on station, then your character gets super wealthy creating the problem I mentioned, hence the need for resets. If someone joins and then immediately cryo's they also get paid and so there's more dysfunctional behavior you have to take into account. If you do the opposite, as you seem to be suggesting, where the default is stagnation, that means that nobody can buy things from cargo or the chef because it means every purchase comes out of your finite savings. In your first post you have nothing mentioning investments, and no way to 'plan' for anything because your lifestyle and pay-grade are outside your control. You seem to be implying, in your reply, that you want to create some kind of simulated banking system with simulated capital investments. If that's the case, this suggestion is way more complex then your making it out to be, and even MORE likely to lead to runaway wealth for long-time players, as they'll know how to game the system.

It's a cool idea, but I think you might be better off creating limited persistence over permanent persistence. If you keep your credits always forever, then anyone who plays for any length of time is going to end up very wealthy. Wealthy people will have the ability to purchase items through cargo that poor people can't, which means long-term players will have an objective advantage. I'd recommend a full reset of the economy every month or so.

This looks cool Skull. I like both the blood and anesthetic idea. What about programmable surgeries? Toss a surgical kit into the thing, then assign an order to the surgical tools. Once done you can just hit 'play' on one of the surgical macros and it does that surgery.

From the code:

It's code, not game-play. From a game-play perspective, wrenches are consistent (they wrench stuff when you click on them while they're in your hand), but from a code perspective they're 193 individual references across the code-base inside every object that can be wrenched. Hard-suits are a bit of a special case because they only indirectly interact with other items. Their primary function is to modify how another object (the wearer) interacts with some of the other systems (damage and atmospherics). In addition, they're already setup for variable efficiency because hard-suits and soft-suits have different abilities in terms of armor, slow-down, and inventory slots. They're one of the places where we do have some flexibility.

It's a good suggestion, but it'll be hard to implement. [rant] A lot of the issues we see with Cargo and Science are based on some underlying assumptions with the way that SS13 is coded at a very low level. Creating 'actually useful' items is very challenging because most items in SS13 work like keys. Screwdrivers don't unscrew things because they have an 'unscrewing' ability, they unscrew things because each item that can interact with a screwdriver has something that specifically checks if the thing interacting with it is a screwdriver. We can't easily make an 'upgraded' screwdriver because the code for what screwdrivers do is spread out over literally 124 files. It's the same for everything. That's why the only places where you see 'upgradable' items is in mining and weaponry, because someone specifically coded mining (the action of digging rocks) with variable efficiency in mind, and the health system is complex enough to handle a variety of weaponry. Would it be possible to create a better screwdriver (or mousetrap)? Sure, and someone might, but they'd do that by reaching into those 124 files and modifying all of them, making the web of connections more and more complex. I know someone will say 'but that's not what we're talking about, what about just slightly better hardsuits' and sure, ok, that's fine, but the reason we don't have interesting things to do in science is the same reason we don't have useful things in cargo. Most of the systems in the game are not setup to handle variable efficiency, which means creating better versions of objects is impossible. And yes, this has been annoying me lately. [/rant]

This is a good idea. Stunlocking is, in general, a horrible idea, and allowing it to be done from a distance at which you can't even see the person doing it, is even worse.

That is a pretty cool drawing Gollee and Kash. I realize I have never actually talked to Inis. I realize I have never actually talked to most characters. Hmm...

Like Raven's post indicates, AI's and positronic IPC's can have an enormous number of complicated origins that would result in skillsets that would be more diverse then that of organic crew. My personal philosophy in terms of designing the lore for synthetics has been to be as permissive as possible. Almost everyone who plays an AI plays some kind of advanced super-powered deep-black project ultimate learning engine. That's cool, it's a fun archetype to play, but if that's the character you also play as an IPC I encourage you to consider this: If your character were an omni-competent super-ninja, why would they have the job that they have, and not be out leading special operations squads for NT or taking over the galaxy? There are legitimate lore-following reasons for IPC's to have every skill at levels higher then their organic counterparts. They'd be enormously expensive and valuable, and they'd be at severe risk of being jacked and deconstructed for replication, but it's possible. That being said, playing such a character is not much fun for the other people you're playing with, so if you consistently play a character who is amazing at everything then you may find yourself contacted by the Duty Officers. They won't fire you, why would they? You're amazing. They wish they had a hundred just like you. That's why they will promote your character away from the Aurora to do tasks more suited to their incredible skills. In practical terms for job skills, just don't be able to do everything. You should need other people. You should ask for help. You should not have an answer to every situation.

And approved! Have fun!

One option would be that he could just eat people (like being locked in a locker) and then security would have to go and make him let them go. I'm just imagining the scene of security trying to heard an animate crate down the primary hallway with stun batons while it growls and snarls at everyone. Everything about Cratey is ridiculous and hilarious.

I will actually write lore for this.