jackfractal

How would you move the hologram then?

Application approved.

All of your examples are illegal. If the byond team released their source then we'd be able to do as you suggest but without that, you aren't going to be able to do it without breaking the law. Past the legal implications, it seems sort of rude to do that to the byond team, who are already treated rather badly by the SS13 community as a whole.

That would involve rebuilding the entire game from scratch, as well as a new client and a new server. The Baystation branch of SS13 we're working with has 282 528 lines of code in it. Depending on team structure, the average coder can write about 500 lines of code per week. That's 565 weeks of labor, or roughly eleven years to replicate SS13. Add in the server and client, which could easily end up being as much or more code then the game itself, and you're looking at, lets just round it off at two decades of work? Industry standard for programmers is starts at about $80 000 a year, so lets make that an even $100 000 per coder with licenses and supplies, totaling that all up and you're looking at a budget of about two million dollars. Hire ten guys and we can be at roughly where we are now in about two years. Anyone have a spare couple of million laying around?

That is a good idea. I like this idea.

This is not a command white-list, this is an alien white-list. The only criteria is 'can you portray this alien species correctly'. Thus far, nobody has any complaints about how effectively spacevoidagent plays aliens. Unless someone has evidence that's he's ignoring alien lore somehow, all he needs to do to complete this application is make the changes to the characters backstory we talked about (smaller number of robots, shorter time-frame), and tell me the code words from the lore page.

The latter is a little more tricky, as you can have multiple different types of skin on you at once. The other stuff is easy and I agree it should be done.

If they're a greyscale sprite, you should be able to pick their color just the same way you do Tajaran or Unathi.

The issue is with how long ago he was made. There are mass produced IPC's, but hundreds of thousands might be a little much, especially if it was a long time ago. For a mass produced police model like this, I'd say the maximum age would be fifteen years, and at that point, they'd still be fairly expensive, so they probably wouldn't be rolled out planet-wide. A more reasonable scenario would be having them be designed to act as a police force for a single city. The average amount of police per 100 000 people is about 400 in areas with limited civil unrest, lets say 300 of those could be robots, the others would be administrators and investigative staff, and we divide the number in three because the robots can work continuously. In that case, a medium sized city of say ten million people would give you about 10,000 robots, enough to fill two legions.

Gollee! Resize your images! That thing is like two and a half megs and impossible to see because it's too large!

I'm not sure what an IPC's heart does right now. Giving IPC's a real power cell would be doable, but it would mean properly implementing their power supply rather than the hack with nutrition we're doing now. As for extra organs... You could go with "serial bus", which would regulate movement. The more broken it is, the more random your movements become. It might mess up your 'selected hand' as well, flipping it randomly while damaged. I like the idea of pairing a fan with the radiator, making them regulate temperature together. With that added vulnerability, I do recommend that we let IPC's shut themselves off, so they don't overheat. This would let them 'survive' in space, but be unable to recover themselves.

Your character's background is inconsistent with working AI's in human-space being relatively new. At most, your character could be maybe fifteen years old, if he were an older line model.

Make the sprites and I'll put them in. They take about five minutes of work provided you've got the sprites for it.

Actually it's not that hard anymore! I built functionality into the organ code to do that kind of swap. Check out the 'exposed_to_world' function. You can swap the cyber organ for something else there. That's how you can pull posibrains and MMI's out of IPC's now, despite them not being organ objects. EDIT: And the fun part is, you could make the camera damaged if the eyes are damaged, 'cause it's a robotics component and those have a damaged state.

Sure, so solve the problems. How do you make playing the Target interesting? What are the Targets goals? How do they go about doing them? How do the Target and the Assassin interact with the crew? Is the Assassin an outsider like the Ninja or Wizard, or are they an infiltrator like a Cultist or Traitor? While answering these questions, you would need to focus on "Why is playing the Target fun?" and "How is playing with the Target as a member of the regular crew fun?" It's easy to see why the Assassin is cool, but to make this mode work you have to make the role of the Target at least as desirable to play, AND you have to make it more than just "these two guys fight" because that doesn't involve the rest of the crew. The best game mode is something that gives each and every job on the station an equal chance to get involved in the events of the round. None of our existing game modes come even close to doing that, but it's something to aim for. Right now, this sounds like a game mode that involves Security and the Captain, and that's it. Almost all of our game modes involve Security and the Captain, while very few focus on Medical, Engineering, Cargo, Service, or Science. Seeing a game mode that involved even one non-Security department in a major way would be really impressive.

Err… computers are already programming themselves. You need to look up Neural Networks and Evolutionary Computation. In fact, computers are already designing their own hardware, see this study and this. Computers have been rewriting themselves since the early 1950’s. Yes, most programs are fairly rigid input/output systems, but we’re not talking about simple programs, we’re talking about general purpose AI’s, who, simply by their design requirements, must be able to react dynamically to rapidly changing external circumstances. While our toasters still, generally speaking, just toast things, a better analogy for AI’s would be cell-phones. We have cell-phones right now that are super-computers, televisions, portable phones, mail servers, voice recorders, video recorders, cameras, GPS’s, data storage systems, radios, books, games, and flashlights. We’ve done that just by using miniaturization. On a more dynamic front, we also have things like FGPA chips which can, based on the software loaded, act as a modem, a voice-recognition unit, an audio processor, and pretty much any other simple component. Network a bunch of the n-th generation descendants of modern FGPA chips to an evolving neural network system and you have a device that can react appropriately to literally any situation (bounded perhaps by it's power supply and the availability of resources). We don’t have things like that in Aurora because they wouldn’t be fun to play against, but they’re likely to show up in the real world sooner than you’d think. Is God scared of his creations? In the Aurora universe, the answer is yes. The Skrell are terrified of unbound AI’s and runaway singularities. What humanity is doing with their massive proliferation of artificial intelligence is dangerous and short-sighted. The freaking idiot’s who have created this situation that, yes, could go off like a bomb under the seats of everyone within thousands of light-years, are the opportunistic greedy humans involved in the AI construction boom, of whom the universe has a nearly inexhaustible supply.

Perfect. Accepted.

I think the idea is that the hologram is over a robot. Like the robot is projecting a hologram to use as their clothing kind of?

Hi Garn! I think this is an interesting character and you have the unique position of being the first person to apply to play a shell cyborg. If you could tell me the code phrase from the lore page, I'll be happy to approve this application.

Err... I think it would look really weird if you just put a translucent sprite over a normal sprite. Do you have an example of what you'd expect it to look like?

I don't think it's hard, but I do think it's important.

The existence of the Target, as a specific playable class, is an interesting one, but to make it work in an rp heavy environment, the Target and the Assassin would have to be on the same page as to what the target is on Aurora for, and why they might be assassinated. Without establishing a context for the assassination, the Target is just going to faff about and abuse their authority, or hole up in high-security areas and not come out. I think if you want to figure out how to make this mode actually work, you need to focus your design on the experience of playing as the Target, because as has already been said, the Assassin itself is very similar to things we've seen before.

You have to slice them into limb sized pieces to make them work in game. You also want them greyscale if you want them to be able to use skin colors.

Cool. Approved.

Hi EJ! I've played with Patriarch a few times and you seem to know what you're doing. If you could give me the code words from the lore page I think I can give you an approval!