Kaed

The problem is that doors don't actually react to 'on contact' effects. Codewise, what you're doing (I think) when you're running into door is running a check for the object in your active hand, then making some check to see if a valid ID object is in the ID slot if it can't find one. This is why it does not work if you have the ID in anything other than your active hand or ID slot, and why if you are holding an invalid ID in your active hand but not in your ID slot, the door will reject you, because it just takes the first ID object it finds and processes that. This is why throwing an ID (or emag) at a door is pointless. The effect of them is created by them being in your active hand when you interact with the door. However, it's worth noting that as far as code goes, being handcuffed is essentially like not having hands. The reason you cannot interact with most objects is (I think) because the game is treating you as if your hands are missing. This is important because if you do not have hands, it is impossible to open doors. You fail the check that is made to see if you can interact with the door object (or any other object you interact with using your hands) and it does not react to you. This situation is identical to actually having your hands cut off - it is a rare scenario where this happens, but during a certain tesla incident I had both my hands burned off, and the round becomes unplayable. It's functionally almost identical to being permanently handcuffed, unable to open doors or pick up and hold objects, or even defend yourselves. Checks to see if you have hands when you interact with almost anything happen very frequently and you don't even notice most of the time because generally speaking you just have them. Humantype mobcode is frankly a mess of barely held together nonsense, but what I'm really trying to get across is that you'd essentially have to rewrite restraint code and possibly even humantype code to make this work, and most likely it would have unintended side effects on the effectiveness of handcuffing.

Some of you might be aware I was planning and working a little on a cult rework in the distant days of yore, but I ended up dropping it because cult code was just such a confusing mess that I didn't know how to write it to be less awful. Some people told me at the time I would be better of rewriting it from the ground up. I didn't have any idea on how to do that at the time, but my resent fiddling around with meme rounds and abstract mobs gave me an idea I want to brainstorm here. So, let's start with what will mainly be changed for cultist before moving onto the new stuff (some of this will resemble old ideas of my last cult rework concept thread) The removal of runes almost in their entirety, at least as a major mechanic. There will be no more secret words, though it shouldn't be missed overmuch, since we haven't had to think about secret words for about a year now. A small number of rune effects may be kept as something like runes, such as the teleport runes and wall runes, though I may rework them into something slightly different. Painting blood on the floor will still be a thing, but it will be used where appropriate for a cult power, not as the primary means by which anything gets done. Most of the rune powers will be moved to being related to several cultist 'talismans' that all cultists will use: The arcane tome, the ritual dagger, and the bloodstone. What was previously considered to be a 'talisman' (a piece of paper inscribed with a blood rune) will be completely removed from the game. Henceforth, the term 'talisman' will refer to these three objects. All cultists start the round with a two abilities: 'Summon Tome' and 'Dark Missive' Summon Tome is a channeled ability (interruptable by movement, disables) and requires about 30-60 seconds (exact time to be determined), and conjures you an Arcane Tome of your very own, at the cost of some of your vital blood. (nearly all abilities will cost some of your blood). This will be telegraphed to nearby people that you are doing something dodgy, like mumbling in tongues and rocking back and forth. Dark Missive is identical to the old Communicate ability, and will allow you to pass messages to other cultists. It will also be channelled, telegraphed, and interruptable, but only for about 10 seconds. It also costs blood. Because of this, early cultists need to be secretive to begin their dark journey together. They must find secluded places to send each other Dark Missives, and are encouraged to arrange to meet early on in a place where they can all summon their tomes together while they chat in person using their Cult Tongue™. Once the arcane tome is summoned, they can begin doing shit. Each Tome contains within it knowledge and guidance on being a cultist, along with a mystical storage place for a Ritual Dagger. The dagger can only be retrieved from and stored in the tome by a cultist and it harms any non cultists who attempts to wield it against their owner, so can serve as an early game weapon for self defense in a pinch much like a weaker version of the Cult Sword. More importantly, you can use it for Rituals The most basic ritual of the Dagger is forming a bloodstone. Any cultist can form a bloodstone out of their own blood, but doing so will always result in an uncharged bloodstone. It is expensive and time consuming for cultists to charge bloodstones using their own blood. There will be a way to create bloodstones from willing (or unwilling) non-cultists, and they will be created partially or fully charged. Thus there is a valid reason to capture sacrifices instead of just trying to make everyone cultists. Fully charged bloodstones may also be sacrificed to feed the Geometer. More on this later. Now, this part is something that needs to be clarified: A blood stone, and its charge, is the focus for most of the cultists ACTIVE abilities, such as blinding people, draining blood from people's bodies to feed the bloodstone, or making people's blood set on fire, etc. The ritual dagger, contrarily, is used for most of the PASSIVE abilities, such as setting up cultist walls and teleport networks. Active abilities will almost always be instant and take bloodstone charge, whereas passive abilities will be channeled and take blood and time. Now, for the bigger change in dynamic: Cultist rounds will no longer contain only cultists. During these rounds, there will be a second (very important) unique role known as the Shard of Nar'sie. This person will become an invisible spirit lurking beyond the veil, unseen by all but the luckiest cultists. At the start of a cultist round, it's ability to participate will be sharply limited. The Shard is small and distant, and can essentially hop between any active cultist to see and hear what they see in their general vicinity. They will have some minor abilities and ability to communicate their pleasure or displeasure with the cultists, but speaking directly to them in words is generally out of the question. The Shard of Nar'sie is a fragment of an unfathomable cosmic being whose full existence would shatter mortal minds, after all. You don't chat up Yog-Sothoth and ask him what the plan is, guys. But what you do want, as a piece of the Geometer of Blood, is blood sacrifices. Your primary goal is to facilitate the cultists success and ability to feed your Shard the life force of sentient beings. Ideally, you work with your cultists, but you can be a fickle, flighty eldrich abomination if you want to be, allowing them to suffer at the hands of security for displeasing you. The more bloodstone sacrifices they make to you, the stronger the Shard grow. Eventually, it will gain the ability to affect the world around the cultists it watches over, with disruptive abilities like waves of insanity and pain, and the ability to become unbound from the cultists themselves, allowing them to move around the station and gather information, much like a ghost only without global omniscience, or being able to manifest briefly as a dangerous entity that can physically harm its surroundings. I'll probably also give the Shard the ability to place down some kind of location-based... thing... that will let cultists temporarily view and hear the area like it's a security camera/radio combo, and this will be how it alerts them of things they need to know that are going on. The ideal goal of the Shard of Nar'sie is to gain enough power to unfold its true self into the mortal plane, thus claiming this universe for the veil, which is exactly like the normal ending of the cult round is now, except that it doesn't require you to have nine people herded awkwardly into a square for an instant round over button, but rather will be something even a single cultist could theoretically do after a lot of time and effort and would probably involve some sort of terrifyingly bluespace distorting ritual centered around a giant bloodstone pylon that the Central command will blare warnings about because they can sense it from all the way over on the Odin and what the fuck are you doing over there in the Xenobiology lab, Aurora? Cue the countdown to the universe ending unless everyone gets there and stops it. Anyway I'm really tired right now so I think I'll poke at this more tomorrow, presumably after I get some feedback.

I don't really give much of a shit about the other stuff, but the lack of the crisp black security uniform with blue stripes going down the sides is an absolute no-sell for me. This thing you have made is an atrocity upon the identity of security, turning them into bland, grey-shirted losers wearing jeans, their only stylistic difference between them and an average civilian I would expect to see on the street being putting on a shitty beret and an armored vest. If this was all I had to wear in security roles, I would not even want to play it or interact with them. Though I will say that some of your designs for other departments just sort of look like vaguely colored blobs with little shading or character that you simply recolored a little for new departments. We don't need to make everyone look uniform, you know. It should be enough that they follow some thematic color schemes that are easy to identify.

While I don't disagree with you, I am fairly certain it was deliberately made this way so that handcuffed people can't flee through an airlock with ease, and then potentially close it behind themselves. Mind you, I think handcuffing is already pretty busted and could use a few nerfs, given that it renders a person completely helpless as long as you start dragging them.

That thread was intended as a question on what to do about player behavior in-round, I did not turn it into a screaming match. I specifically named no one because it WASN'T a player complaint. I'm also not going to name who started turning it into a finger pointing match, because it's not relevant here. The word you are looking for is 'unempathic', though, since we're literally in a thread about saying rude things about each other. Words like 'immaturity' are negatively charged, and you should probably avoid them.

I'm not sure I'd constitute my rudeness as malice. It's certainly a problem I've been repeatedly grumped at about, though I have to disagree strongly with your assertion that it takes a lot more effort to be abrasive than saying nothing. When I see someone saying something I think is... less than correct, or inappropriate, it's actually a lot harder for me not to say anything than to 'be abrasive'. Personally, I think my tendency to restrain myself to being passive aggressive and sarcastic has been a definite improvement over my previous open insults, but yes, when someone tells me I'm being a prick, I usually edit it out. It's nice that we can remove ill-considered statements from our posts, but I suppose in the end we still said them. I'll address the specific examples here, since they're all I have to work with here. My anger in that thread was not at being told no so much as that the IPC loremaster appeared to not wish to be bothered with actually doing anything. This seemed, to me, to be a poor mindset for someone who was volunteering to be the IPC lore dev. If he had said "no, I think it's fine that we have IPC heads, I don't think we should do anything', that would be a decision on his part to make that part of the lore. But what I am instead seeing is that he isn't sure he likes it, but he doesn't want to actually shake the boat and hurt the feelings of the current IPC heads. As someone who has, by your own testimony, 'frequently asked for stricter rules', this made me angry. I had figured, by pointing out the problem with this 'can't be bothered' argument (namely, that they were a lore dev and opting not to deal with a stated issue), and offering solutions, something of a compromise might be reached. When Jackboot posted that I was being a jerk, I removed the ruder parts and kept the actually valuable suggestion. I should also point out that you are using somewhat of a blanket statement as a logical fallacy when you point out that 'I break rules even while I ask for them.' Most of my demands for stricter rules have been in regards to lore or roleplay, not in regards to forum or OOC policy. I have never advocated for rules about being nicer to each other on the forums or anywhere elsle, and while I report open insults and have had my own reported in return, I don't think being a bit sarcastic is necessarily ban-worthy. I'm sorry if it demoralized kres (I don't know if it did, or this is just conjecture on Aboshedab's side), but when I was lore staff, I had certain players telling me my color scheme for the akhandi was absolutely atrocious and demanding that I accept their proposals for alternatives, but I managed to keep myself together. Feedback on your behavior as a lore dev is something you should expect, even if it is negative, passive aggressive, sarcastic. As for the captain character, the era where they were a 'spite' character has long since passed. They have been renamed to a more acceptable name and basically just function as a normal captain now. None of the behavior of the captain itself has ever been deliberately unconductive to the server or 'trolly', even when her name was 'Kawerii". The fact that they have pink hair still is the only real legacy of that period. The problem has already been addressed by admin staff and I'm not sure dredging up an issue that over a half year old by now is precisely relevant anymore.

[scrubbed] I guess I'm being too big of a meanie again, oops. How about a community poll about it on the server if you want to judge what people want, because most people sure as hell don't even come on the forum to read this thread.

It's fairly easy to recode it to instant kill monkies only and work more like a noose for brute damage/blood loss. I personally would like to see more psycho butcher antagging because right now the only way to actually cut up humantypes is via the gibber which is just a shitty black box that already instant kills, by the way, this isn't new, and has to be emagged I think to even let people be put in and then just deletes their mob and spits out some meat.

I'll work on it.

Can you support someone's body while at the same time trying to saw through a wire noose they're dangling from? I don't think we're large enough or have enough arms to do that, chum. And if someone is being executed by hanging, it seems like a fairly small chance someone is going to show up in the 20 seconds or so that being able to prop them up is going to matter. Also, again, you're kind of removing the bite of hanging by a noose if anyone can walk up and negate it instantly.

Personally against this. If anyone is hanging themselves it's either because they're roleplaying wanting to die or because they're trying to get attention by hanging themselves. In either situation I do not feel motivated to save them. I don't think we need to add in extra mechanics to make it even harder to die via noose if anyone is nearby.

If the ninja is close enough to see you, you might be still able to hear it, but you shouldn't be able to hear it from offscreen anymore. You know how you can hear doors opening and closing even from off your screen? That was the problem with ninja's noise level.

The swoosh sound of the stealth cloak deactivating was set to volume 75/100, which means you could head it from across rooms and through several reinforced walls. I reduced it to volume 10.

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/6372 Started PR

How about I buff up the powersink to make ends meet too, so it's a viable option? If it's loud and forces you to be stationary for a long time, it should be really good. The emergency power generator did a good thing and move ninja rounds away from standing in maint forever succing power. Well, nothing else was updated to fit the new dynamic.

I can get behind significantly reducing the cost of it to maybe half or less, but if you make it able to last indefinitely for free it's going to be impossible to find a ninja without getting a lucky EMP. You might think that you could eventually bump into them, but if for instance the cloaked ninja lays down it is nearly impossible to locate them unless you start spraying your eye on rifle everywhere. They could just lay down in some corner of security and wait for 10 minutes or more.

Seems reasonable enough, both things you say here. Again, though, what do you think should be added?

I would literally rather die than play cargo for the sake of doing bounties. I hate the idea of bounties and I hate playing cargo. But I recognize that they need something to fill their horrible lives as (one of) the worst roles on station, I just think it needs to be balanced properly and not be full of memes. That being said, thank you for your feedback, I'll listen to it even if I hate playing cargo. I'll take another look at values. Perhaps double al/mostly the current rewards I have. I might also redo some recipes, because if pancakes are so hard to make they cause your chef to cry, the pancakes haven't been coded right. They're literally just flour and eggs and milk batter you pan fry...

-Monkey cubes: You can order them already in cargo, so it seemed like a pretty pointless bounty. Why would you pay the Aurora more for monkey cube when you can order them cheaper from external shipping. Removed as such. -Earmuffs: Too goofy of an item to reasonably be ordered from a remote station. Also, irreplaceable and of sharply limited supply on the map. Removed as such. -Monkey hide: I feel like I've seen people make it. Am I wrong? Do you want me to remove it? -Chainsaw: I remember seeing this one and planning to remove it. Looks like I forgot. Thanks for reminding me -Honkers: It felt like somewhat of a challenge for cargo to go around gathering up all the cheese honkers, and they git rewarded a bit more than the total cost of 30 cheese honkers, and who is going to even miss them? So I left it in. Do you want it removed? -I overlooked the plasma thing. I'll change it -Revolver: Sure, I can take it off. -Frostoil. Not an illegal substance, hard to get, but possible to do. Rare enough to try and get xenobio/xenobot to make some. Acceptable. -Slime Jelly: This is 100% a poison. Why would they be asking for poison? Removed, along with cyanide. -Rezadone: Overlooked that. Will remove. -Kebabs: I don't think they're even in this code. I checked before removing it, but maybe I missed it. Also, you're right, I don't play cargo. I'm going off general information on what is feasible bounties. Do you have suggestions for things you want added/removed? Because 'put it back to how it was' is not acceptable here. It NEEDS changes.

You assertions here are very confusing and I don't understand how you can possibly compare anything I'm saying here to a vampire round. All you seem to be focusing on in how the changeling can fight. Fighting options are there but there's more to round progression and interesting mechanics than being able to murderbone and be loud. I think maybe you need to take a step back and read over the thread suggestions a little more closely, or perhaps spend your time thinking your responses out more. You aren't giving anything that indicates what you want out of this update, you're just disparaging the ideas in it as if they are stupid and awful and somehow this should be self evident to me without further explanation.

Because I've already got plans to make shapeshifting useful, with a number of abilities that allow you to simulate stuff that would easily give you away. For instance, the ability to get inert, organic simulacrums of clothing, IDs, and PDAs and belts. Granted, they won't actually be useful for opening doors, but it will keep you from having to murder someone just to impersonate them. I'm also considering some ways to make you able to cause false ling giveaways on perfectly legitimate people, so they get arrested in your stead.

I don't know what the many are, never played that game. But I had some more ideas. Changelings are not people. Irregardless of what they are looking like, they're only simulating for the purposes of infiltration and eating. As such, I'm going to make some things work differently for them, such as: They don't need any of their organs. Possibly even their brain ( like the idea of cutting off a ling's head and they just screech and scuttle away into maintenance without a head... but this also means it will be impossible to clone a ling, naturally). Organ damage does not cause them problems to the same level as normal people. I may even implement a way for them to pull out their own organs to use as tools, ala spying mechanics or tools/weapons. Imagine pulling out your appendix or liver (which becomes a generic 'mysterious fleshy mass' or something), and then you can stick it under a table and view/hear out of it later. Or amp it up to become a chemical weapon that explodes into clouds of gas. Some people really like the idea of head spiders and shit, if I can figure out how to make ghosts occupy a simple mob of a skittering organ that might be fun to just pull out some of your organs and make a little swarm of minions. Organs can be regained by using the fake-death regen Changelings will be rewarded for genetic diversity. Lings who gain vaurca DNA, for instance, will become immune to k'oi infections, they will gain increased heat/cold resistance from unathi/tajarans, etc. They will not overly harmed by a lack of air, nor will space be more than inconvenient for them. They will also be immune to diseases. I'm going to remove horror form I think, at some point. Maybe this update. It's a bad ability, and people will have alternatives by that time. The true horror is that you are a shapechanging, dynamic monster, not that you can turn into one.

I like it. Mysterious.

The cargo bounty system appears to have been lifted wholesale from another server with much lower standards. It's full of nonsense and memes and the rewards are all astronomically high compared to the economic value of items in cargo, which is the currently only benchmark we have for the value of items on the server other than merchants. In some cases, it was possible to make huge profits simply ordering an item in cargo and sending it to the ODIN. This is not balanced nor logical. As such, I have overhauled the bounty system. Summary of changes: -All values of bounties have been drastically reduced for sanity purposes. For the most part, all of them have been either reduced to 10%-50% of their previous value or retooled to reward a small amount based on the number/rarity of items in the bounty. Some more difficult to obtain items have higher values, but nothing like the old ones. No longer can you cut up a few carrots grown in hydroponics and make over half the value of the cargo account instantly. Items that can be ordered from cargo will always net you a loss in value, so you can't just game the system using the shipping. -Anything that was an antagonist or illegal item has been removed. Items in the bounty list should be possible to obtain by working with crew members, and not require a certain round type antag to be possible. Some items that encouraged illegal/questionable activity, like 'soylent green' or 'corgi meat' are also off the list now. The ODIN is run by humans who are not insane. They are not going to ask for human or dog meat, cyanide or night vision goggles. -All items that are unique and belong to command staff/security have been removed, due to a tendency for cargo to waste large amounts of time badgering them to give up things like their captain's spare or telebatons. These items should not be handed to cargo, nor should we be giving the cargo team a reason to feel they're obligated to it. The ODIN should not be asking high profile items to be sent back to them from a remote station. -Any bounty that was excessively silly or memey (talk of cow riots or tajaran uprisings, etc) has either been redescribed to stop being so, or has been removed if it is unsalvagable. https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/6359

I think it would be an interesting sort of week-event. Not sure if making it permanent would be wise though.