zha everything broken

cough... https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/22731

BYOND key: Batra Discord Username: batcountry Character names: Eliza Kolmstadt How long have you been playing on Aurora? ~16mo Have you received any administrative actions? And how serious were they? Have received small handful of notes/pings before, but nothing as or more severe than a Warning. Please provide well articulated answers to the following questions in a paragraph each. What do you think the OOC purpose of a Head of Staff is, ingame? Facilitate the round. Make sure antags are able to do what they do, and in the case of departmental heads, keep your own team in the loop and engaged in the round (as able and appropriate), help coordinate, etc. Reduce communication and activity friction; empower the people in your team to engage in the round with others. Help maintain the integrity of the department's role as it interlocks with the rest of the ship's crew. Increase Fun. What do you think the OOC responsibilities of Whitelisted players are to other players, and how would you strive to uphold them? As above, largely. The OOC purpose and responsibilities are largely coincidental as I see them; ultimately, everyone should be able to feel involved, or at least not feel excluded. That can take many forms, ranging from relaying communications and updates, to supporting crew-level initiatives and prompting command-level initiatives in-game (moving the ship to a salvage site; staging training programs; etc.) Give people the tools and authority backing to Increase Fun. Explain how the recent events in the Spur changed your character and how they came to be employed on the SCCV Horizon. My application character is Olivier Raukette, an Enceladian native and long-timer in the arms industry. His wealthy family's connections saw him educated in Ceres University, and from there moved swiftly into the middle management of Necropolis Industries. Although nepotism secured him a comfortable position, it was through his own mean-spirited intelligence and political acumen that saw him not only keep it, but rise more than a few rungs in Necropolis' corporate ladder. While quite reasonably skilled at his job- less concerned with the design and manufacture of weapons than in their contract negotiations and later PR- unfortunately for him, he made more than enough enemies during his long career that he was dangerously close to being on the receiving end during the next round of corporate ousters. The foundation of the SCC and the reorganization of the company into Zavodskoi Interstellar gave his rivals the perfect opportunity to be rid of him without anything like the expected fuss; Olivier was simply kicked upstairs during the massive organizational upheavals in 2462, landing the aging executive in the newly-formed SCC without any of his old connections or influence. Bitterly resentful of how events shook out during that tumultuous period, Olivier had no choice but to begin again. After some years attempting to rebuild some level of corporate clout saw little success and made him no friends in the SCC, he took another tack. His mixed background in logistics, finance, and PR eventually saw him in line for the Executive Officers pool, and his station on the SCCV Horizon was confirmed in early 2468. Raukette had just turned a spry 83, and his contract stipulated a period of time in cryogenic suspension for some routine medical remediation. It perhaps appealed to someone's dark sense of humor to schedule his thaw and cycle into active rotation for when the Horizon would have by then already entered the Lemurian Sea. What roles do you plan on playing after the application is accepted? Executive Officer (definitely), Chief Engineer (probably) Have you familiarized yourself with the wiki pages for the command roles? Yes. Characters you intend to use for command or have created for command. Include the job they will be taking: Olivier Raukette; Executive Officer Do you understand your whitelist is not permanent, and may be stripped following continuous administrative action? Yes. Have you linked your BYOND account to the Forums? Yes.

It absolutely won't happen largely for the same reasons at we won't port the server to Unity or Unreal (fundamental cost/benefit tradeoff and complete lack of developer interest). That's not to say that SS14 doesn't have a shitload of interesting and good underlying code that I'd cheerily kill to have here- my initial exposure to Space Station# was actually SS14, before I found and moved to Aurora here in SS13- but I don't believe you fully appreciate the scale of what you suggest. That said, it also does us no good to sit in place either- there's a lot of really exciting stuff coming down the pipe here! I have a dev diary coming out soon that talks a fair deal about modernizing a lot of our foundational code and (probably more exciting to most people) a lot of the features coming out soon that it'll enable!

Not at the moment! Right now there's a lot of unsexy foundation code that needs to be written to start with. I don't have any concrete plans for gas giants at all yet; I can't do anything with them until we have all the machinery in place to handle the sort of chemistry I described above. That said, if you or someone else can code "landable" gas giants, there's no reason they can't have deuterium in them in the absence of hydrogen deuteride. Tritium doesn't appear in nature outside EXTREMELY trace quantities though, and the richest source of helium-3 we know of is the lunar regolith- and that is still measured in parts per billion. None of these substances should ever exist in an atmosphere above even ~0.01%... but by the same token, no machinery should require the insane amounts they currently do. That's a longer term balancing act anyway.

I wouldn't turn my nose up at "landable" gas giants if someone pulled them off in a way that played well! My current thinking on them is for gas extraction there to be abstracted. One of my big desires for NBT2's engineering goals is developing interesting material refinement processes; that PR linked before is the first step in porting a lot of Nebula's materials code; this basically unifies solids, reagents, and gases into a single framework. This means that ships can- say in an abstracted gas giant harvesting scenario- fill a massive reservoir of gas, then decide how they want to process it. All the water vapor they can crack into hydrogen and oxygen, and sieve deuterium from the distillation of hydrogen deuteride. Break heavy organics into smaller ones, do all sorts of chemistry that we can't support now. If you're in a sector where substances XYZ are in demand, you should be able to mine for, skim, trade for, or steal the chemical precursors that'd let you synthesize a bunch of XYZ. That materials code also lets do a shitload of pretty foundational Other stuff, but uh. Yeah. I'm really excited about resource extraction and management lmao.

100% good subjects to raise! TLDR: they are intended to no longer be resource extraction targets from exoplanet atmospheres, and this is prelude to More Stuff. GAS GIANTS Way way way outside scope of this PR. Sorry. Neat in principle but trying to actually play on one in SS13 sounds like a giant pile of jank to me. RESOURCE EXTRACTION I was quite surprised to see this post; there are currently no mechanical applications for Deuterium, Tritium, or Helium-3 in-game outside the INDRA and BSD. Yes; they were intentionally removed as extraction targets from exoplanet atmospheres, largely because it was more than a bit of nonsense, and because I'd rather have more interesting means of extracting those resources in the future. I originally was going to type up a whole paragraph about the science behind it, but probably no one else cares lmao. PLANETARY FIRES Exoplanet atmosphere generation (/obj/effect/overmap/visitable/sector/exoplanet/proc/generate_atmosphere()) randomly picks from the pool of allowed gases; if a fuel gas is chosen, it disallows oxidizing gases from being introduced to the mix from thereon, and vice versa. In 0.1% of cases, it allows a flammable atmosphere. If this is not the case in-game, then that is a bug! Trust in the Plan.

https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/22352

This is on my to-do list (medium-term) as part of a larger rollout of remote monitoring systems available to bridge and command. I will probably PR a stopgap for this though in the meantime, once I'm done with Assunzione.

Reagent speedup/slowdown movespeed modifications no longer stack. I didn't implement a weighting system- the chem in your system that makes you move fastest overwrites any others. Speedup/slowdown can exist simultaneously; if you get drunk and drink coffee, they'll both affect you, but taking hyperzine on top of that will overwrite coffee's speed modifier. No arguments re: duffel bags or voidsuits, nudged those down (except for some voidsuits whose descriptions explicitly say they're heavy. Looking at you, GD voidsuit that says it is literally plated with gold). Drunkenness also has a bit less slowdown now.

This thread to address any lingering issues that may still be around concerning Movespeed Modifiers (ie slowdowns when you're carrying things like duffel bags, when you turn on magboots, or even speedups like certain chemicals). TLDR, Movespeed Modifiers were not working when we implemented smooth movement, but a recent PR has restored them. However, the original values felt really Not Fun with our new movement style, so a second balance PR has been test merged the last day or so that revises those figures. While it seems like the initial pass helped for most bad cases I observed originally, but just culling feedback to fine-tune the PR before it is fully merged. This feedback thread is for any movespeed modifiers you may have noticed within the last ~36 hours or so that still feel Not Fun after the balance pass.

I think NT has a stronger claim to fielding engineers on the Horizon. I think PMCG is a much more fun and interesting choice. The limit of three departments per Corp is, to me, a good rule of thumb to maintain; every single corp would have reason to employ people of just about every job we have on the Horizon, and the three-dept limit keeps things from turning into a free-for-all. So yeah. +1 for what it's worth. Were the powers-that-be to approve the idea (idk, maintainers? Modmins? Lore? All three?) and someone wrote up a little lore, I'd be happy to put together all the PMCG engi uniform sprites and write the code for this. EDIT: KingOfThePing dropped an excellent post while I was writing this; while I strongly agree with the idea in principle, I'm of the opinion that the three-dept still limit keeps dept and corp waters from getting Too muddy, but that is I think a pretty subjective call. I would be very much against 4+ dept corps, but the triad makes for a nice dynamic IMO. Especially with NBT2 in the pipe, I'm not As concerned about keeping megacorps siloed as I might otherwise be.

Hello; following discussion between Owen and myself, we are in support of the original decision made by K3Fabian in the round in question (that is to say, not intervening in the HoS choosing to open the armory when they did). We do not believe that anyone involved in this complaint were acting in bad faith. While the entire incident clearly did not go as smoothly as it could have from both antag and security's side, everyone ultimately plays here under the same constraints of imperfect information and communication, around which we have to improvise. It should be noted that K3Fabian's remarks to Oddbomber in the adminhelp were accurate, in that a waiver- even one implicitly endorsed by the antag's presence having been 'signed off' on by the SCC- may be a shield in the near-term, but it's never going to be bulletproof against any repercussion. No one involved here is psychic though (as far as I know), and no one seemed to act in bad faith. As always, ahelps in-round are always welcome, especially if we can try to help things go as smoothly as possible.

what the fuck this is metal +1

@Cash7800 Please share your side as well for completeness' sake at your next convenience.

+1. Very much like Izharek's vibe. They seem very visible and I see them engaging with non-sec crew.

Proterna Station (pop 8,615), Europa, Sol 2445-01-04-15:22:08 Pods 1,3,8 (every 15m): If cylinder of grey-blue liquid (upper-left) has bubbles, get step stool and tap cylinder lightly until bubbles clear. INITIALS:___ TIME:______ Eliza was on podwatch which was boring and also gross, but you had to put in station hours after school and this time she had podwatch. Medbay had a bunch of the big pods, spooky ZH coffins (barely-legible stickers peeling off the sides read "2337 CisLunar Cryonics Expo Winner") that they used for cold hold. That was when you were really messed up and the doctors didn't have enough medicine to fix whatever was wrong with you so you had to go to sleep until the next big supply sub docked which would be every few months (currents willing). The pods were supposed to be able to do a lot of fixing themselves but the station can't pay for the service tier and the fancy chem cartridges so they were just for sleeping. ZH were ghouls and corpse-eaters, everyone knew that, even if the cheery pod voice quietly insisted (in SolComm ugh) that they were eligible for fantastic discounts and coupons. She was pretty sure there were a couple newer fancier pods in the main medbay that were licensed and stocked but those pods didn't need watching and these ones did. There were a bunch of jobs on podwatch, but Eliza had a big checklist that made it mostly easy, just dull. A nurse occasionally poked their head in to check Eliza's little logbook but otherwise they were always busy in the other compartments. It was the stringy red-haired one today, who'd give you mean knuckle-taps if you missed anything, and she smelled like antiseptic and coffee and pungent medical waste. Her hands were always shaky. Eliza hated her. Sometimes a pod chimed while you were still ticking off the last one and you had to run over and your grease pencil would smear and then you’d look back at the minutes and they didn’t line up and it wasn’t Eliza’s fault. Venner knows that because he missed a loose heat feed cable once and somebody woke up with dead black fingers and they gave him a lash (death's teeth, they were serious!) and he'd went quiet for a month and now he doesn’t do podwatch anymore but Eliza doesn’t want that kind of 'lucky'. The pods did still do a bunch of things, even running Basic Mode. They would tick and beep and hiss and burble all timed to the minute. Eliza's big checklist was just to keep the pods honest, mostly. Pods 2,6,7,8 (every 30m): Check rear inlet feed hose connections for looseness; if loose, re-tighten gasket until secure. (Even little babies know righty-tighty lefty-loosey.) INITIALS:___ TIME:______ All pods (every 45m): Wipe condensation off the two square black sensor panels on front. If froze over, report. If mold growth, report. (Easy sneezy, swipe with glove. Humidity got extra-funky in the podbay though, it had this weird sour smell.) INITIALS:___ TIME:______ All pods (as needed): If a pod chimes twice, write down which pod and the status code and report immediately. (The nurses always praise you, even if only a tiny bit, for this one.) INITIALS:___ TIME:______ Pods 6,7 (check at 1hr): Re-warm saline feeds. (For these Eliza would drain them and coil them up and tuck them under her coat and squeeze them for a minute or three before plugging them back in. This was an important one, because if the line got slushy an alarm would sound and whoever the nurse was would burst in mad, that's what happened to Venner.) INITIALS:___ TIME:______ All pods (as needed): If a pod starts playing its unlockable features advertisements, skip/bypass immediately. (This wasn't on the checklist but everyone fucking hated them. Everyone on podwatch knew the fastest key combination.) You're not even allowed to do homework on podwatch. Eliza knew she could do homework and also keep track of the clock but the nurse would cuff her or worse if she got caught. So she sat on the step stool, kicked her legs, peered into the pods and watched various frosted blue-tinged faces twitch and tic. Or she watched the people walking by. The podbay was jammed between medbay and a big corridor and it had big windows out because Eliza thinks it used to be shopspace but the door frame was a bulkhead now. Some people avoided looking in and some people stared. Eliza would watch what happened on their faces. Interesting things often happened on their faces. Just remember to keep an eye on the clock. Never lose the time. Later Eliza wanted to hang out with Marin because they found a bunch of tossed vid-reels last night while poking around in the maintenance shafts and wanted to try playing them to see what they were.

At a glance, it does look like succumb still uses pointmed, not brainmed. I don't have a horse in this race but that will be bugfixed tomorrow, whether anything happens to the verb or not. EDIT: Oh Evandorf pulled a screenshot while I was looking at it and writing this post lmao.

oh god, why.

Server Moderator Application Basic Information Byond Account: Batra Character Name(s): Eliza Kolmstadt AI Name(s): N/A Discord username + tag: batcountry Age: ~30, if exact age is needed can DM i guess. Timezone: EST (UTC-4/5) When are you on Aurora?: Mid-afternoons to evenings EST. Occasionally flex other times, though not extreme late night/mornings EST. Experience How long have you played SS13?: ~11 months. How long have you played on Aurora: ~11 months. How much do you know about SS13 (Baystation build) game mechanics?: Reasonably familiar, but not to the point of robustness. Do you have any experience moderating for an SS13 server?: No. Have you read through the criteria thread; https://forums.aurorastation.org/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=4198 - and believe that you mark off all the criteria?: Yes. Have you ever been banned, and if so, how long and why?: No. Personality Why do you play SS13?: I am a huge fan of its mechanical complexity. Emergent, unpredictable gameplay of SS13's kind is hard to find out there; in a similar vein, I also play because this quality also means I greatly enjoy developing for it. Why do you play on Aurora?: It's very difficult to find 'serious' roleplay scenes that aren't full of and/or run by people who are >85% insane. What do moderators do?: It's in the name. Moderators are there to help keep rounds running smoothly by ensuring compliance with rules and norms. They remediate technical issues which can break or disrupt gameplay. They address issues with players, whether it's just trolls or more delicate flare-ups of the types of drama concomitant with every online role-playing community that has ever existed. What does it mean to be a moderator for our server?: Be present, helpful, and mindful. Help people have fun. Don't be a crazy person. Why do you want to be a moderator?: Fyni has been asking for more mods, so presumably we are currently running a little thin. I've done both development and moderation for servers before, and I greatly prefer the former. Quite frankly, I wouldn't have applied if we didn't Need more moderators, but I have the experience and value the community. What qualities do you possess that would make you a good moderator?: I believe I have the right personality for it- or more honestly, I have a personality adjacent to the right one. I can keep my cool when I need to and I can recognize multiple sides to complicated issues. How well do you handle stress, anger, or insults?: I can deal; people being salty online is just people Being People. It's fair to be mindful of the fact that people have emotions, and emotions can run hot, and I've always been willing to weather people getting that out of their systems (assuming it's being directed towards me; abuse of other players is a different subject). That being said, I also trust and expect people to be able to move on to address the actual issues After getting it out of their system. Anything Else You Want to Add: (Do not put words here) In addition to developing for Arelith for something like 14-16 years, I was also a Dungeon Master there for many of those years. Apart from running quests, this was dealing with all sorts of player issues, players outright trolling/griefing and breaking rules, players playing silly games to subvert the Spirit of the rules, and in some rather rare cases players getting up to Actually Kinda Heinous Shit. I've seen a lot of stuff. That also means I come with a certain level of jadedness. I believe I'm quite able to do the job, but it deserves to be said upfront that it's not my first pick for a secondary role here. While we need more Moderators though, I'd be happy to lend my experience if I would be a good fit.

Proterna Station (pop 8,781), Europa, Sol 2444-03-19-11:41:10 Eliza and the others eat in one of the maintenance trenches today. They squat in a row, backs against the sweating bulkhead, stubby thermos flasks tucked between their knees. Thin threads of steam, smelling of kelp-broth, gritty milk tea, dilute imitation chocolate, drift over their heads before being sucked sideways into a vent. They don't speak, just quietly work through fixed portions of algal hardtacks and leathery pressed strips of fruit paste. Their meals are identical to the gram. They eat like the tiniest arctic expedition team from the school-reels. Proctor said they were like the First Wave but they're not because they were Earthers and Earthers have food and air to waste. They used to get a little square of chocolate too but they don't anymore. Somewhere deep in the structure, the rumbling pump sound drops out with stutter-crunch, same as earlier. All seven heads tilt at once, listening, counting. It's one of the Old Dukes, they keep the air good, they're the chug-thump sound. It always kicks right back on but hasn't yet. It suddenly tastes like headache air, all gross coppery from scrubber coughs. They're all remembering escape routes and drill. Eliza trades worried glances with Marin and Venner as they hold, run through what they know to do. Count seconds, count all the sounds. Just the hull-tick, which is usually okay. The maintenance charms rattle (every panel has them strung, pretty fingerbones and washers). The churning black outside making teeth ache. But still missing the Old Duke chug-thump. It was only down for five seconds earlier. The same twelve-count then: still down at twelve seconds, you move. Already at eight seconds. Nine. Ten. Eleven. Marin is hand-on-rung. Eliza coils. Here comes twelve, they're all ready to fling themselves the Hell out of here (escape gradients, they remember from class, the colors make it easy, green out red in). But then there's a loud mechanical juddering and the pump pitch rises, wavers... and then steadies again. Chug-thump. The steam from their thermos bends the right way again. Jove alive, that's some shit! Stifled gallows giggles and a few nervous grins are passed down the line. An Old Duke putting a scare into them twice in one day? They have to tell proctor before the next rota comes up; twice ain't nice, tag it. Just don't waste lunch first.

Proterna Station (pop 8,781), Europa, Sol 2444-03-07-16:02:43 It's a Monday. Subdued electronic tones signaling the shift-change return muffled echos in stale, oil-thick air. Eliza sits atop a quietly churning circulator rig bolted near the ceiling of the vaulted junction, legs kicking lazily over the thirty-foot drop. It's a fun enough kind of vantage. All the little people in their insulating jackets and overcoats bustling around in every different direction, making graceful arcs as they switch tiers. She's not the only one on overwatch; a handful of other children have perched up in the high nooks and maintenance gaps. Her primary focus though she glowers at: homework splayed across the book in her lap. Eliza is the best at multiplication tables. Beckett is good too, she guesses, but he doesn't count, for ephemeral reasons that don't bear consideration. SolComm has always been stupid though. Her tongue sticks out unconsciously in focus as she tries and fails to remember tonal distinctions for fully two-thirds the vocab section. Marin's voice interrupts from below, a sharp-edged hush of urgency. There's a fight! It's Suri again, of course. Crazy ratfucker! It can't be missed. Eliza stuffs her schoolwork into tiny child's backpack and pitches herself from the high ledge. The others jump too. Europan children in their puffy jackets rain silently from the ceiling in exaggerated slow motion. They grab onto stanchions and support rods, slinging themselves to the front of the dash to the scene. Eliza lags near the back but the rush is very real because if she'd caught that last handrail she totally would have been in the lead.

Lore Impact (Small/Medium/Large): Small Team Purview: Human Short Description: Io is described as providing "upwards of 15% of energy consumed in the system". The surface implication is that Io is somehow a grid exporter of geothermal power, except that Io is an angry ball of dough being kneaded every 42 hours, and maintaining any sort of permanent infrastructure there (given our current knowledge of the conditions themselves) would, even with the advantage of sci-fi handwaving, be massively economically infeasible with the existence of more realistic alternatives. This LCA expands the three paragraph detail available on Io to four paragraphs that clarifies its geothermal infrastructure as temporary facilities dropped on-site for short campaign periods to perform high-intensity industrial operations that would be hugely wasteful of energy if performed elsewhere, before they are launched back into orbit for repair, refit, and redeployment. This re-frames its contribution to the Sol system's total energy budget not as a grid function but a conversion function; Io displaces marginal load (reduces demand on the grid that would otherwise be fulfilled by more expensive energy sources) on the overall energy economy (about 600% less insane). We still get geothermal plants in superhell, they just pop off to the mechanic's after a job. How will this be reflected on-station?: Won't be unless someone starts playing a Solarian economy wonk who's really that desperate for talking points. Does this addition do anything not achieved by what already exists?: Lmao. Do you understand that the project may change over time in ways you may not foresee once it is handed over to the Lore Team? Yes. Long Description: Full proposed replacement for Io's blurb: The innermost of the ancient Galilean moons is by far the most volcanically active object in the solar system. This has made Io a lucrative, if brutally hazardous, energy world. Early survey efforts were largely delayed by the moon's unpredictable tectonics and catastrophic vulcanism. Due to this the first colonization efforts on Io were made later than Jupiter’s other moons, and only began in the mid 2200s. This late start has, however, not stopped Io from becoming one of the main contributors to the Sol system's energy economy; it is estimated that upwards of 15% of the Sol system's total energy budget stems from Io, a remarkably high amount for such a small galactic body. Unlike traditional grid-export worlds that rely predominantly on direct long-range transmission of locally produced energy, Io is foremost a high-intensity (predominantly thermochemical) processing hub: almost the entirety of Io’s contribution to the Solar energy budget is embodied energy in its exported industrial products and intermediaries. These are produced in situ during groundside deployment of specialized temporary facilities, or 'dropsites'. These modular, robust geothermal installations are deployed from orbit in rapid campaign cycles, used to power high-intensity industrial processes in their integrated facilities, and before the moon's hellish conditions obliterate them, they are re-launched, stripped, refitted, and eventually redeployed as conditions and contracts shift. There are no official permanent settlements on Io due to its extreme vulcanism, and teams are cycled in and out with its groundside facilities usually on a monthly basis due to the extreme danger working on the moon poses, the highly traumatic work tending to damage crew as much as equipment over long periods of exposure. The hardship of life on Io has, despite its lack of permanent settlements, led to a the development of a somewhat insular, elitist culture in dropsite crews. This culture tends to revolve around the camaraderie shared between the men, women, and rare IPC placed in such danger, and the belief that the engineers of Io are the best anywhere in the Orion Spur. In the eyes of a worker from Io, nobody else could work in such a dangerous environment and hope to last a day. This is, at least, an attitude somewhat justified by prevailing economic attitudes: workers from Io are prized throughout the Orion Spur for their engineering abilities, and are highly sought-after by corporations such as Einstein Engines, Hephaestus Industries, and NanoTrasen.

While I don't have much I 'can' say in response to your direct questions (being that I'm almost 100% code-side and not lore), I did want to just call out that IMO this was a very considered and well-written critique/inquiry. I strongly agree with where you're coming from, though I don't Expect that final product will be as bleak as you might fear (internally we do tend to mock both the grimdark and HOOAH vibes, and their general avoidance is a subject that's been gone into at some length, and still touched on). So yeah. I don't have anything super substantive to add but I really really really like your post and wanted to call that out.

welcome to the fun zone

Absolute +1. Champ during an insane chaos round. Very well handled.