Persistence across rounds - Feedback and follow-up

[FabianK3]

2 minutes ago, maxspells said:

What if we expand on this instead by porting /tg/s cargo refilling? On TG codebases, cargotechs can order vendor restocking on the cargo shuttles and manually restock vendors

That is already possible AFAIK.
Don't know about the money part though.

[Maxspells]

Just now, FabianK3 said:

That is already possible AFAIK.
Don't know about the money part though.

Oh yeah I read in Fyni's reply after I posted mine lol. Could still leave some room to expand on though, like the PDA system they have that lets you see the location of every vendor and it's contents so you don't have to manually walk up and check each one to see what you need to order. (Unless that's already in the game too lol)

[KingOfThePing]

We already have vendor restock packs. Janitors get them.

 

Whoops, I wasnt on the latest reply. My bad.

Edited August 18 by KingOfThePing

[Owen]

4 hours ago, maxspells said:

Oh yeah I read in Fyni's reply after I posted mine lol. Could still leave some room to expand on though, like the PDA system they have that lets you see the location of every vendor and it's contents so you don't have to manually walk up and check each one to see what you need to order. (Unless that's already in the game too lol)

This could be neat to give some more stuff to do with vending machines. And as for taking money from them, as it stands now, any transaction at a vendor automatically is added to a specific vending machine account that the captain and XO can see. Could be neat to have that changed though where janitors and/or ops needs to come by and restock and put turn the money in somewhere (to the XO/OM/etc.) or potentially take the money for themself. 

[Nagito Komaeda]

Perhaps the smallest thing ever, but what about printer ink? Having printer ink be used up and needing replacement would be soulful, especially for areas that use the copier a surprising amount (the Bridge, for example.)

[FabianK3]

Persistent trash - Work in progress
https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/21217

Refactoring of notice boards and implementation of command notice boards - Work in progress - Thanks to @KingOfThePing
https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/21211

[FabianK3]

8 hours ago, Nagito Komaeda said:

Perhaps the smallest thing ever, but what about printer ink? Having printer ink be used up and needing replacement would be soulful, especially for areas that use the copier a surprising amount (the Bridge, for example.)

Might be small, but when you also add refillable paper trays, wrapping paper and so on, it suddenly becomes whole new task

[Jasorn]

On 18/08/2025 at 14:19, FabianK3 said:

Persistent trash - Work in progress
https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/21217

Refactoring of notice boards and implementation of command notice boards - Work in progress - Thanks to @KingOfThePing
https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/21211

Will this include expanding the amount of notice boards on the map? After interacting with the one in engineering I flew around as a ghost to see if any others had papers attached, but was basically unable to find anymore for other departments. There's the ops one, xenoarch one (legacy as it spawns with preset made up papers), and some in the public bridge area. Would love to see at least one per department

[FabianK3]

39 minutes ago, Jasorn said:

Will this include expanding the amount of notice boards on the map? After interacting with the one in engineering I flew around as a ghost to see if any others had papers attached, but was basically unable to find anymore for other departments. There's the ops one, xenoarch one (legacy as it spawns with preset made up papers), and some in the public bridge area. Would love to see at least one per department

Not quite! But I noticed as well.
The PRs should be stay as small as possible to prevent scope creep.
Somebody just needs to map in more of them but i think the last discourse in mapping was: Let's wait for the notice board refactoring.

[greenjoe]

Filing cabinets being able to save their contents

[DatSamTho]

On 27/08/2025 at 00:37, greenjoe said:

Filing cabinets being able to save their contents

I feel like that'd be somewhat problematic for Consulars and Reps, no?

[greenjoe]

4 hours ago, DatSamTho said:

I feel like that'd be somewhat problematic for Consulars and Reps, no?

That's true. It might have to be excluded from working in their offices

[FabianK3]

On 29/08/2025 at 03:42, greenjoe said:

That's true. It might have to be excluded from working in their offices

The moment we face some special conditions for "for this area" / "in this instance" persistence shouldn't be applied, we need to find a generic solution.
The issue is for example with filing cabinets, how can a player see that "this" specific filing cabinet is not included in persistence and why is it not included?

The moment we come up with arbitrary rules for excluding persistence on some things, things might become obfuscated/confusing quickly.
(This is a general problem and not directly derived from the filing cabinet idea.)

[CatsinHD]

58 minutes ago, FabianK3 said:

The moment we face some special conditions for "for this area" / "in this instance" persistence shouldn't be applied, we need to find a generic solution.
The issue is for example with filing cabinets, how can a player see that "this" specific filing cabinet is not included in persistence and why is it not included?

The moment we come up with arbitrary rules for excluding persistence on some things, things might become obfuscated/confusing quickly.
(This is a general problem and not directly derived from the filing cabinet idea.)

This is true to an extent. However, some of that comes down to the scrutiny of each location. In this case, the rule is quite specific:

If a persistent object exists in a room where confidential material may be stored, and that room may be occupied by entities not permitted to see that material, then it cannot be persistent.

If multiple interest groups can occupy a given area, and that area carries a level of confidentiality, then no persistence. Various nations are at odds, as well as various corporations. Given the offices are generic, it would be detrimental for them to be persistent. That also helps CCIA not have to deal with cases of John Sol seeing confidential details from Adam Biesel which is a mess to deal with. This rule should be applied universally, however the only instances where this exists currently are the rep and consular offices as they are unique in of themselves.

Adding an examine tooltip for whether an object is non-persistent would be useful regardless.

Edited August 31 by CatsinHD

[greenjoe]

11 hours ago, CatsinHD said:

Adding an examine tooltip for whether an object is non-persistent would be useful regardless.

Perhaps they could be labeled as "short term filing cabinet"

as well as a description addon that they do not save their contents between rounds

[FabianK3]

A little update!

Notice boards have been put in more places and their new functionality should be now more accessible to each department.
(Thanks to @MattAtlas, https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/21263).

Notice boards also received new sprites: Regular notice boards now can handle a lot more papers. Go fill it to the brim and get scolded for it by your local department head.
Additionally, we now have a command board type featuring a command-lock and glass pane for public announcements by command. (This one still has not yet been mapped in, I'll come around to that!)
(Thanks to @KingOfThePing, https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/pull/21211).

Last but not least, persistent trash is nearing completion and persistent dirt is still WIP on my end.

Edited September 8 by FabianK3

[Skull132]

i forget how i came up with this idea, but consider making all (most) consumables/perishables persistent. This basically means that anything that spawns inside lockers, vending machines, closets, etc. It would create idle activity for cargo, medical, security, etc. to get their gear refilled. And it has the potential of creating of creating bottle-necks when a locker from a high-usage round is needed to solve a matter on station.

It would make Cargo actually useful.

The technological way I'd make this work is by making lockers themselves track state. Anything that gets left outside of lockers at the end of round would be delet'd. It would also create the ability for things departments chemistry to pre-stock containers for future rounds. Not sure if that'd be good or bad. 🤔

Edited September 11 by Skull132

[Zelmana]

4 hours ago, Skull132 said:

i forget how i came up with this idea, but consider making all (most) consumables/perishables persistent. This basically means that anything that spawns inside lockers, vending machines, closets, etc. It would create idle activity for cargo, medical, security, etc. to get their gear refilled. And it has the potential of creating of creating bottle-necks when a locker from a high-usage round is needed to solve a matter on station.

It would make Cargo actually useful.

The technological way I'd make this work is by making lockers themselves track state. Anything that gets left outside of lockers at the end of round would be delet'd. It would also create the ability for things departments chemistry to pre-stock containers for future rounds. Not sure if that'd be good or bad. 🤔

That's very ambitious! Might be hard to implement! As a note, it would be a good idea to have the test merge of this make cargo's budget near infinite for the duration. This would set a new realistic budget for cargo to use before setting a new baseline budget for the account. I imagine this replaces the busy work of "bounties", to be actual useful cargo order.

[Skull132]

4 hours ago, Zelmana said:

That's very ambitious! Might be hard to implement!

Depends on how the exact implementation is done.

If you want to track every perishable on the map: yes, hard to do.

If you want to track the state of lockers and vending machines across the map: less hard to do.

[Shimmer]

Is making persistent resources even a thing that is at all possible?

 

Specifically when it comes to what mining makes. Obviously not keeping the entire yield because it can go into the insane thousands and thousands of sheets, but having a few diamonds and a little gold here and there saved over from the previous round might make mining feel... A lot more meaningful in the long term than just in the immediate here and now.

[FabianK3]

On 11/09/2025 at 10:06, Skull132 said:

consider making all (most) consumables/perishables persistent. This basically means that anything that spawns inside lockers, vending machines, closets, etc. It would create idle activity for cargo, medical, security, etc. to get their gear refilled. And it has the potential of creating of creating bottle-necks when a locker from a high-usage round is needed to solve a matter on station.

A great idea and already been mentioned to me a lot.

But for any kind of persistent resources, there are some issues to be resolved/discussed/test-merged: What happens if the resource runs out? What if it overflows? Should there be a limit on how much can be added or lost per round? Is there a way or does it need a way to "reset" the resource? - All very highly dependent on the use case.

When it comes to the implementation: Not that difficult! Be it a single locker/vendor or items laying all around the ship.
The "How" and "When" is more difficult when it comes to persistence imho.

[FabianK3]

Small update: Persistent trash is waiting for review and persistent dirt is next on my list.