Fox McCloud
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Posts posted by Fox McCloud
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Novus Lem.
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2: Add "Chemical Beakers" holding 120u to Chemistry.
Discussed before and turned down. The reason is that 120 units beakers become problematic for chemical reactions and balance---this isn't an issue for buckets (which can't be used in grenades or the likes), but for beakers? It becomes a big problem
Add a Omnizine Bottle into the Chemistry chem lockers.
It's a chemical meant to be worked for with a semi-decent amount of effort and convolutedness involved in acquiring it. It's not something medbay is entitled to nor should they be handed.
Make the Pinpointer beep if the target disables his suit sensors / gets them disabled.
Absolutely not. Suit sensors, crew monitors, and crew pinpointers are already ridiculously powerful for full time crew-watchers. This just makes it all that much harder for antags. Reaching the point of "everyone effectively has a death alarm" is not a healthy state for the game
Put an Extra Donut Vendor into Medbay. With all kinds of different flavors.
I'm assuming this is some kind of joke--either case, we want more dependence on the chef and more co-operation, not less.
Replace the Stationary Crew Monitor in the Medbay Reception with an "Advanced Prototype Crew Monitor"
We do want some level of triage, guesswork, and dependence on multiple people in multiple spots in medbay.
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Zipties exist for 2 major reasons.
One is because of beepsky. If he has cable-cuffs or handcuffs, then he becomes a source of handcuffs for the crew--people can abuse him to farm handcuffs, both for their own advantage and for metal+glass. This isn't just theory, either; we actively saw this happen back when beepsky used actual cuffs.Another reason why they exist is so when you remove them from someone, they can't just turn around and insta-table/push you and cuff you with your own cuffs. Not re-usable, but has an advantage.
They fill their niche, and for officer use, they have their own niche advantage. They really don't need to be buffed.
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the normal syringe gun has one shot and that's it; it takes time to refill; likewise, it's quite obvious when someone is carrying one (and it's likely to raise an eyebrow if you're carrying one outside your workplace).
Contrast this with the epipens, which are harder to see, there's far less suspicion for carrying them, are easier to deploy, and they pierce hardsuits and biosuits.
refillable epipens were removed for a good reason; medical hyposprays completely remove the point of refillable epipens, anyway.
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This is going to be horrendous for security to deal with.
If there's multiple assailants, then keeping them down and being able to get away in time is going to be very very difficult.Likewise, it's going to lead to a lot of situations where stun-cuff-dragging someone off is just going to result in said person getting caught.
Also effectively kills off blocking of projectiles tactically---and uh, mining would be even more slow until you got the bluespace satchel.
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From experience, this is usually more annoying, since you have to contend with a window (that'll have to be close and/or moved around) and the chat, simultaneously.
It's easier to scroll up/down (and faster), than it is to deal with a pop up, constantly. -
Game mechanic wise, or lore wise?
Lore wise, science--it's a science research station; that's their focus.
Game mechanics wise? Mining.
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It's recorded, but we haven't analyzed the data, so it's not something we have off-hand.
It would be nice if we compiled it, because it could put an end to "eughh, antags are too overboard and always win!" or "security always wins!", and instead we could say "well, actually the data shows X".
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Just putting it out there that us going back to ZAS is firmly in the category of "never going to happen".
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If you walk, they're passable.
Clicking on a barrier with the projector will get rid of that barrier.
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On 8/6/2018 at 12:50 PM, ID404NotFound said:
"fun"
It might be fun, if you weren't marked as 'valid', and instead people would RP it, rather than beating you to death on sight.That's the entire point of Cluwne though. You're a gibbering overweight, brain damaged, clumsy abomination. You'red allowed to defend yourself if people get violent against you---it's just hard to actually win an engagement becuase of your many disabilities.
Cluwne is about creating chaos and giving the player a litlte bit of a fighting chance (and the opportunity to be a complete dunce in their short life), versus just getting turned into gibs outright.
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Brig physicians role is to treat minor ailments for prisoners, not to be a fully out medbay replacement for officers.
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This was tried out for a time on TG.
It resulted in officers essentially being unkillable in a permanent fashion without extreme measures (sudden gibbing, etc). It gave incredible power to the AI and Warden to effectively know where all their officers were at all times, and quickly know exactly where they went down. The retort was "lol just EMP them", but this just arbitrarily forces every traitor and their brother to have to buy EMPs, which generally negative effects how traitors play their side of the game.
It gets even worse once it gets rolled into the meta; eventually it's realized that just giving these to any person important enough is a valid tactic for effectively keeping them safe from all but the most extreme forms of permadeath.
Needless to say, as realistic as I think this would be, it's not healthy for the overall state and balance of the game, especially on Paradise, where a lot of the extreme permadeath tactics are just out and out barred from traitor use, unless you have hijack.
tl; dr. It's a realistic idea, but it has a very toxic impact on the overall flow of the game, and horrifically upsets the dynamic of antag vs station.
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One way to make regular mages a bit more ...well, chaotic and exciting would be to make summon guns and summon magic do what they were originally designed to do; be something other than "screw the wizard over completely".
Originally it was designed to basically entice the crew to kill each other, making it easier for the wizard to cause chaos.
As it currently stands, summon guns/magic is pretty much just this, for the wizard:
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it was a relic. You find them in maintenance. What they do though has to be discovered by the EXPERIMENTOR in science. What they do, however, is random, so you're never guaranteed to get the relic that does as you describe.
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17 hours ago, McRamon said:
Are we sure they have self awareness or they just were programmed to look like they have? And what is even more important, do humans and other smart asses have self awareness and not biologically programmed by nature to look like they have? Only after answering these two questions we will be allowed to classify anything
This is something that's probably going to be debated, endlessly, by both sides, with regards to strong/hard AI; is it really conscious, or is an approximation that only gives the impression that it is? Even if it's an approximation, is that still something worth extending the status of sentience (and therefore, right, perhaps) to? Who knows. There's no test for consciousness/sentience/sapience at the moment; we really only know that we, ourselves (as a singular individual) have it; we can't even be sure that anyone else has it (though thinking no one else has it could lead you to engage in some pretty terrible actions, and if you're incorrect, well...I think you can see where I"m going with this).
There's also the technical issue. Is consciousness even able to be replicated by a computer? We have few ideas how the brain works at the moment; we can pin things down to sectors of the brain, we can correlate behaviors and quirks and abnormalities to particular sections, but once you start delving down into the nitty gritty? We don't know. What makes a particular set of neurons behave the way they do? What causes a neuron to "decide" when to fire (what causes it to react its action potential?). Is it purely based on outside influence (ie: other neurons), or does the neuron have some internal mechanism that we haven't really been able to peer into yet, because it's on the atomic level inside the neuron? We have no idea.Hell, the neuron could operate on the quantum level, according to some neurological researchers.
So the simple answer is: we don't know. Hopefully we will find out some day, because it would be nice to know what is sentient/sapient/conscious, and what is just a mechanistic machine that has zero actual personal experience, even if it can output in some communicative way that it does.tl;dr. Realistically, who knows. That said, this is SS13. It doesn't have the same rules as our universe. Souls are objectively true and real, supernatural entities provably exist, farts can be weaponized, magic is real, flipping is physically easy, ghosts exist. We can just hand-wave anything and say it exists/is real precisely because it's a fictional world.
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You can. This has been a feature, forever.
Use a multitool on the cyborg suit item.
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(1) Not really possible, as antag selection happens before job selection now.
(2) Even if it were possible, the "screw antags; they ruin the game" crowd will actively latejoin as sec just to keep antag numbers low or stack things to their advantage.
There's far too many problems with this to even remotely be feasible, and that's assuming I agree with this notion to begin with (I don't).
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I've always been the biggest supporter of Rev. It's easily by favorite mode and probably in my top 4 antags.
The mode has been through various tweaks and iterations, but I've never been able to persuade enough over to my side on its merits.
I've always been confused by those who embrace, heavily, Shadowling and Cult, but are vehemently opposed to rev. There's wider conflict, but it's still, at its core the same thing: variations of TDM. Rev ramps up things quicker and makes the round progress faster into a more chaotic form, but, at its core, it's not much different from the others (especially Shadowling).
The only time I have problems with Rev are when it stretches beyond the hour mark; either side stalling forever isn't very pleasant; the game mode is meant to be high-stakes, bloody, and quick; not a long drawn out process of infinite turtling.
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An even better idea: actually having the department that has the responsibility of taking care of the problem their job was designed for to handle it.
I apologize for the bit of snark, but really, I don't understand, at all, this notion of "let's add an existing job to my department only it's loyal to my department alone".
No department is meant to be an island unto itself; no department is meant to be immune to the risks and incompetencies of having to deal with another department; security is no exception. Before someone brings up how ridiculous science can get at times; that's not an excuse for other departments to be just as ridiculous. You don't resolve a problem by creating another similar problem so they're both equal; you resolve the problem where it occurs.
I'm further perplexed why this mentality crops up specifically with regards to security as a department; what is it that somehow set security apart from needing/deserving their own special role within that department? (The only exception I can recall is a few very very brief suggestion for a mining doctor). If that's the case, why shouldn't medical get their own engineering job, loyal to medical? Why shouldn't mining get their own science researcher role? Why shouldn't science get their own security officer *loyal only to them*? What is it about security, as a department, that specifically draws people to want to make it self-sufficient?
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I can just about guarantee what will happen with the "Brig Technician"; invariably, he'd probably have basic engineering access, much like the brig physician has basic medbay access.
On the whole, much like the brig physician, there's not going to be a whole lot of pressure or responsibility except when things go wrong in a major way (ie: sec gets bombed or something). This gives them an incredibly amount of free time to do whatever he wants.
We already know what this leads to, with the Brig physician. The job was originally created to patch up beat up/hurt suspects/detained individuals, not security personnel. What the brig physician has become is security's private medical doctor, with setups like this considered something noble to aim for:
I can easily see things developing the same way for this job. The pitch is that it's to help security patch up/fix up things that go wrong. It may very well be that, at first, but having access and tools (not to mention a huge one; legitimacy via antag immunity and mindshield) will see said individual helping out security via other means. My best guess? The "gold standard" for a brig technician will end up being raiding tech storage and building security their own personal R&D lab. It also has another nasty feedback loop in that it makes it even easier for the Brig physician to do the above because it provides an easier method for acquiring various medical circuits.
Another issue is that it's also going to provide security with a dedicated, go-to, trustworthy hacker for breaking into just about anywhere.
This is what I'm getting at with self-sufficiency. Small, seemingly innocent additions can have large impacts on the behavior that develops within a department. Brig physician is a key example of this.
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Absolutely not.
One of the reasons science is so reviled is that they're not only strong, but one of the more self-sufficient departments. Making departments more self-sufficient is a step in the wrong direction. Departments are meant to have to rely on others when things go awry or mistakes are made. This self-sufficiency does exist, to a certain degree, in all departments, but that's not a reason to expand it. Overall, there should probably be a reduction in self-sufficiency, not an increase of it.
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Pop, definitely.
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Right. My two cents. Keep it off.
I've always been a strong supporter of this policy while at paradise; while I learned to play SS13 on an OOC friendly server and strongly favored it being enabled, once I started playing on Goon, my mind changed. While, yes, there are amusing conversations and tidbits to be had from OOC, on the whole, more often than not, it tends to be a distraction from the in-round events and going's on than an actual help. It also creates more administrative burden for the admins and one additional information channel we have to keep track of. While this may not seem like much to the average player (even then, I disagree here, but to each their own), but to an admin, the amount of information spewed at us is patently ridiculous. OOC, regular in-game chat, admin chat, mentor chat, dead chat, game event logs, attack logs, explosion logs, some extremely important debug logs that even regular non-coder admins need to see.
Adding one more bit of information here just exacerbate that overload. There's opportunity cost for everything. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Every moment that an admin spends keeping an eye on and maintaining OOC is that same moment they aren't spending on administrating the events or keeping an eye on the events, in game. While there may be some who disagree with me, as a normative standard, I think it's more important we focus on what impacts the players playing the game more than those discussing things on some level above the game (even more so when, again, we have a Discord).
From a player perspective, it's much easier to concentrate on in-game events and not have your immersion broken by huge blue text---which almost never has anything to do with the going's on's of in-game events. You know that person who starts blaring silly music in the middle of some role-playing game or who's phone goes off in the middle of a movie theatre with shockingly disparate music? That's OOC. Yeah, it may not be quite that offensive, but it does divide player attention (again, opportunity cost!), and ultimately pulls player's focus away from in-game action and in-game roleplay. You also have scenarios and situations whereby, if OOC is optional, it's your personal preference to have it off, but it's non-optimal (from a social maximization standpoint) to do so because of the lost opportunities from numerous important game-related discussion had within the game; ergo, more often than not people keep it on than otherwise would.
Community cohesion and unity can still be easily maintained if you have a central gathering point. Back when we didn't have a Discord, and the IRC was pretty much a hidden group of just a dozen or so people? Yeah, I could understand the argument for keeping OOC for the social benefit of the server. That's no longer the case though; the Discord is heavily populated and widely advertised.
tl; dr. Keeping OOC off is a great step towards integrating players better into the server from a gameplay and roleplay standpoint. On a lesser note, it means admins will be able to better focus on in-game problems (or events), rather than having yet another information stream that they have to monitor and oversee.
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Major Cloning and Revivability PR up on Github
in Public Archives
Posted · Edited by Fox McCloud
This is very well stated, and I'd like to echo this to add emphasis. It's always been a bit of a question of the nature of cloning, souls, and the like in SS13, with one side insisting that the SS13 universe is an atheist/materialistic universe with and therefore you're just making a copy of the person with copied memories---but at the end of the day, it's still just that; a copy. The original person is dead and gone.
The other side has claimed the opposite; that we live in a theistic/supernatural universe that has additional oddities about it and that, invariably, when cloned, you're just creating a new body; the spirit/soul leaves the original body, inhabits an in between realm and binds to a new body under the right conditions.
It's been a bit hazy on this front, but as more and more things get added to the game, one thing has become quite clear over time: the first interpretation of SS13 is incorrect. This isn't me making some larger statement about the real world in the slightest; this is taking things purely in the context of SS13 and that's it, and within that context, all of what @EvadableMoxie has said here rings true; the spirit world exists, there's supernatural powers, supernatural entities, literal magic, and literal gods.
This is invariably probably an unpopular idea for a handful of individuals, especially if one of their core traits for their characters is following a more atheistic/materialistic mindset (which ironically makes the materialists in this case the ones who get to stamp their feet and say "I reject your reality and substitute my own!"), but none the less, it's not ideology that determines the nature of reality on station; it's reality itself--and the reality overwhelmingly points in a particular direction.
Once you acknowledge that, it's really not so far-fetched that a cloner could detect when someone has passed---it's that weird sci-fi interplay of technology and mysticism (ala ghostbusters) where one can impact, in some part, the other.
My point is; making justifications for "pre-scanning doesn't make sense!", "it's a new person with copied memories, not the same one!", and the likes aren't very strong, because a lot of the games mechanics and in-game lore pretty much stand against this idea.
I'd also like to echo this; defibs have also been buffed a few times, with their timers lengthened. Take TG, for instance, where defibs are largely for unfortunate O2 deaths, or ones that happen within a minute from medbay because someone blew themselves up again and succumbed to it.
Our defib timer has been lengthened out to last about 10 minutes, which is enough to catch even deaths on the mining outpost. TG's is 2 minutes, which basically means it's a stopgap for "obvious body in obvious location with obviously treateable wounds", while cloning still bears the majority of the burden for revival.
Strange Reagent exists on TG, but is a bit harder to acquire.
I suspect moving more in the direction of "defib for obvious deaths, cloner for everything else" would probably put a bit more teeth on things and swing it back in the direction @Dinarzad describes here. Strange Reagent is likely to remain problematic (due to its easier to access nature on our server), but this could also potentially be addressed with time limits, much like the defib, or require more volume to activate (1 unit for a revive is pretty low).
Ideally, defibs would function more like their actual purpose, as opposed to just "revive literal dead bodies".