jackfractal

About the wiki guide, Jackboot has been after the lore team to update some of our guides rather that relying on the Baystation guides. I'll be looking to revise the guide over the next week or so, and I'll be looking for feedback. I like the Baystation guide but I think it's a bit dated and some of the advice is a bit strange (The whole thing with Dave stealing from the Captain has always felt off too me). I'm opposed to whitelisting the AI because I think it's an unnecessary burden on the staff. People have wildly different levels of ability, and none of us start off as experts. The AI is a tough role and it takes a while to get good at it. Part of the reason it's so tough is that 99% of the time, there's only one AI. There's no AI equivalent of the crusty old atmos tech teaching new players about pipe layouts because they're always alone. This is another situation where a mentor system might be useful.

Hmm... to remove the need to kill the AI you'd have to give the nuke ops a way of neutralizing the AI that doesn't involve murder... The AI is heavily dependent on vision. Oh! Maybe make it so that it's easy to shoot out cameras with guns, or let them buy something that shuts down cameras in a large radius for a period of time, like a cameras only EMP that blankets a quarter of the station.

Boom, approved.

Cool! All good, if you tell me the code phrase from the lore page, I'll approve this.

All right! Cool. If you tell me the code phrase from the lore page I'll approve this.

Cool beans. Approved.

It is very easy to create additional 'skin' categories for prosthetics. Right now we have two robotic looking limb types: 'paint', which is the IPC version and 'no paint' which is the really old school cyborg. Adding extra ones is like... maybe five lines of code if you have the sprites.

Hi AttyZ! This all looks to be in order. If you give me the code phrase from the lore page I'll mark you as approved.

Hi Voyd! Interesting looking character! You also have an unusually old IPC character. The current lore has humanity having acquired the ability to create true AI's about twenty years ago, so your character would either need to be of Skrellian origin, or else be younger. Aside from that, everything seems to be in order.

Hi Kaz! These look like interesting characters but the age on Ansible is quite high for a human designed intelligence. The lore we're using has humanity acquiring the ability to produce true AI's about twenty years ago. He'd work if he was Skrellian in origin, or if he were younger. I love the idea of speaking in clips, that's very clever.

Hmm... Expanding who can create drone requests might be interesting. If engineers had pda carts that let them create requests remotely that might see more play.

I think you can use your rods on your glass to produce additional reinforced glass sheets. Then you can use your one sheet of reinforced glass to pick up the newly created sheets. It's awkward, but it should be doable.

Meteors have been known to punch through the walls of the main tanks, venting all 50 000 tons of oxygen into space in like two ticks. Of course, being able to order canisters from cargo won't really mitigate that all that much, as refilling the main tanks from the portable canisters would take about eighty canisters for most gasses, except Toxins where I think it would take somewhere around three hundred. Seriously, we have an immense amount of toxins. It's hilarious.

There is the question of social contract. People dislike 'peaceful antags' because the expectation is that people in those roles won't be peaceful. This plays into the game modes that people vote for, and people's expectations for how they're going to spend their time. If people vote wizard expecting insane plots and not knowing right from wrong, and they get stealth-wiz who does nothing, or peace-wiz, who spends the whole round talking amiably to the Captain, then they're going to get annoyed.

Errr... yeah, by 'fake fire' I mean like just turf blocks that apply fire damage when yo're on top of them. They're not create heat or plasma, just 'burn' people on top of them. That makes it possible to invite everyone to your murder party on the holodeck, but it's not able to actually kill everyone on the entire station forever. Currently, it creates an an infinite amount of real tangible burning plasma, which is why everything and everyone dies.

A while ago we talked about having the holofire create 'fake' fire that only burn-murdered people inside the holodeck without blowing out the windows and murdering half the station. That's... probably more what it was intended to be used for.

And our Brig which is entirely surrounded by highly visible areas, and is mostly surrounded by more locked down areas even harder to escape from then the brig itself. Zid, the code side of this would not be that hard. You'd store the fingerprint data in one place, and then put a bunch of access flags on it. When the door needs to know if you're authorized, it reads your fingerprint hash, checks if the server still exists, and then checks if the doors access bits match the access permissions the computer has on that hash. It's a type check and a dictionary lookup. Maybe not quite as fast as the ID test we use now, but we don't do that many of them (maybe ten to twenty per second at the very highest), so it won't be noticeable. The real question is what happens if the authentication server goes down. Like, in a normal building, when you lose your security authentication server, the doors all unlock because it's assumed to be an emergency like a fire drill and it's more important to save people then to prevent access. In a high security building like, say, a biological warfare facility, if you lose your SA server maybe all the doors lock everyone inside, and the system automatically sends out an emergency alarm to your military backup. Personally, I prefer the 'bomb the biometric database and all doors open to everyone' because I am one of those people who love chaos, but I could see an argument for either option.

If you want to play a 'named drone' play an android. I mean, at that point, that's what you're playing.

Which OOC blurb? I'm talking about the part of the rules called "Antagonists Guidelines" the actual text is: "The primary goal of antangonists is to CONTRIBUTE TO OTHERS' ENJOYMENT." Misspellings and emphasis theirs. It's the second thing right under 'Being an antagonist does not exempt you from any server rules.' And, yeah, I don't see much from antagonists because I play cyborg. That's why I said I was surprised to hear what appears to be the consensus: Antags aren't following this guideline. What I meant by 'degenerate spiral' was to describe an escalating series of undesirable behaviors that reinforce each other. This creates a feedback loop where the undesirable behavior ping-pongs faster and faster between the two sides until you have complete dominance of the undesirable behaviors. If the metagame says to never give anyone an inch because they'll use it to stab a fork in your eye, then both sides will increase their play-to-win behavior because to do otherwise will result in an immediate loss. I'm not sure if that's what is happening, but it does seem like the state of play on this server is pretty far from the ideal most people seem to want. I mean, if I had to describe the theoretically ideal state of play for this server, it would be something like this: "Antagonists always come up with clever and interesting ways of creating fun and exciting situations while simultaneously never 'ruining someone's round' by taking them out of the round. Security, for their part, plays joyfully into those scenarios, likewise never ruining the fun of the antagonists or taking THEM out of the round. Both teams play hard, and their actions lead up to a satisfying crisis point involving the entire station in a dynamic final confrontation where one or the other team emerges victorious in a way that can only be described by the losing team as the other team playing better. Everyone involved understands clearly what is happening, and afterward, the losing team congratulates the victors in OOC for a job well done. Despite the highs and lows, it all wraps up in just a little under two hours leaving everyone satisfied and eager to do it all over again." That might sound silly, and impossible, but it is what we're ultimately going for, right? (Maybe not the two hours thing, that's probably just me.)

@Francis Ah, yeah. I totally read your previous post wrong. My bad. Reading comprehension errors. I thought you were saying pretty much the exact opposite of what you were actually saying. @Callabaddie OK, sure, but aren't antags who murderbone for no raisins already in violation of the server rules? Like, they are breaking the specific guideline I'm talking about. @Everyone In that case, I think we're all in agreement that those people can go screw themselves. I was asking more for people who weren't violating the rules, but it sounds like you're saying that this kinda thing is really common. That bites! No lie. I don't really get to interact with antags very often because of the character that I play, so this is news to me. Any idea why this happens so often? It sounds like we might have entered a degenerate spiral, where security plays hard because antags play hard, and vice versa.

@Callabaddie I'm not suggesting we hamstring anyone, but I do find your perspective interesting. You believe the obligation to consider the enjoyment of others to be hamstringing? If that's the case, aren't antagonists 'hamstrung' as well?

@Frances So the creation of interesting situations is entirely the domain of the antagonists and the crew should not attempt to do the same?

Killer & Caddie: I get what you're both saying, but that's not really the question I'm asking about here. It's not 'Why does security act the way it does?' it's "Does the regular crew, and by extension security, have an obligation to contribute to the enjoyment of people playing Antagonists in the same way that Antagonists have an obligation to contribute to the enjoyment of the rest of the crew?" Maybe they don't, and maybe they shouldn't, SS13 is not a symmetrical game after all. I'm just wondering what everyone thinks.

This has been rattling about in my head for a while, it's not in relation to a specific incident, but it occurred to me after ghosting and watching a changeling round a few nights ago. In the rules, there's a BIG BLOCK TEXT in the section for Antagonist Guidelines about the primary goal for antagonists is to CONTRIBUTE TO OTHERS ENJOYMENT. The other parts of that section fall naturally out of that one statement: don't gank, don't kill SSD characters, try not to murder the entire station with atmos or the singularity. The question I have is this: Does the crew, and by extension the Security department, have a similar reciprocal obligation to people playing Antagonists?

Kelenius has a cult rewrite mostly finished on Bay. We may be able to merge that.