/tg/Station 13

Bottom post of the previous page:

Wait you didnt even testmerge it

There already is a feature that is meant to use high amounts of power that's already invalidated by power being massively unbalanced: the BEPIS. Everyone forgets that it takes both massive amounts of power and money because power is so ridiculously abundant.

Jack7D1 wrote:Oranges is the best head coder we've had yet.

You're young

cacogen wrote:Why is it better off?

Pretty simple, because they needed zero brains, needed zero input after they were set up, and generated enough energy to power at least 4 additional stations at the same time, with the tesla potentially infinite. Not to say that the SM isn't particularly demanding and complicated either, as it also doesn't need any input either after it's set up properly, and I hope that this gets worked on now. The difference is that if you fuck up the SM, you planted a huge hole into engineering and got yourself an early shuttle call, and if you fuck up any of those other engines, which takes about two clicks, you'll have this unstoppable shit thing on the loose that is going to wreck the entire station, and if you're a non-antag, a ban to boot.

These two engines were born out of the mindset that it's ease to use and potential for power should be offset by incredibly high danger, but if every grey retard within seconds is able to trigger that high danger and fuck the entire station, then that "balance" becomes a giant detriment to anyone who just wants to play the damn game.

Instead of creating more engines that generate millions of epic KW and end the universe if you deactivate one emitter around it, the focus should be, as has been rightly mentioned a few times, towards creating engines that are an on-going process, that you can upgrade and that have some sort of mechanical complexity woven into them. And that's why I said that the game is better off this way.

pretty based

BONERMASTER wrote:

cacogen wrote:Why is it better off?

Pretty simple, because they needed zero brains, needed zero input after they were set up, and generated enough energy to power at least 4 additional stations at the same time, with the tesla potentially infinite. Not to say that the SM isn't particularly demanding and complicated either, as it also doesn't need any input either after it's set up properly, and I hope that this gets worked on now. The difference is that if you fuck up the SM, you planted a huge hole into engineering and got yourself an early shuttle call, and if you fuck up any of those other engines, which takes about two clicks, you'll have this unstoppable shit thing on the loose that is going to wreck the entire station, and if you're a non-antag, a ban to boot.

These two engines were born out of the mindset that it's ease to use and potential for power should be offset by incredibly high danger, but if every grey retard within seconds is able to trigger that high danger and fuck the entire station, then that "balance" becomes a giant detriment to anyone who just wants to play the damn game.

Instead of creating more engines that generate millions of epic KW and end the universe if you deactivate one emitter around it, the focus should be, as has been rightly mentioned a few times, towards creating engines that are an on-going process, that you can upgrade and that have some sort of mechanical complexity woven into them. And that's why I said that the game is better off this way.

tl;dr remove, don't improve

EOBGames wrote:There already is a feature that is meant to use high amounts of power that's already invalidated by power being massively unbalanced: the BEPIS. Everyone forgets that it takes both massive amounts of power and money because power is so ridiculously abundant.

True, but nobody uses that thing until late enough in the round that cargo can basically buy a whole new station.
Oh, and they can't do the tesla bounty now so slightly less money and variety for them

you say remove don't improve like it's a bad thing when our game is super fat.

oranges wrote:you say remove don't improve like it's a bad thing when our game is super fat.

Because it is a bad thing. It's a horrible design philosophy when designing any game unless you're in the unenviable position of being forced to cut things to make said game work.
Variety is arguably the thing that keeps people still playing this game for years. Because rounds can be so vastly different based on what people are doing.

Feel free to point me to other games that subscribe to the remove don't improve philosophy and then show me the community that praises the devs for doing it.
It's frustrating because now you get to sit on your hands and wait like a good boy until the devs finally put together whatever it was they were working on. However many weeks or months it takes to even have the testmerge for it.
What is lost by working on those things first then testing how rounds go with the other things removed?
The thumbs up/down on the PR speaks for itself. This was not a wanted change and I'm sure it would have looked a lot different if the change had anything of substance to show for what it removed.

Also before we ree about digg and try to brush it off, there were literally only 3 thumbs up. digg didn't change shit there.

That's still only your opinion.

The game has plenty in it, and a lot of it is unmaintained and not managed well at all, removing it is the better path due to the lack of people willing to contribute on reworking outdated content.

Mono wrote:fucking poof

Your opinion is "I liked the old engines, and I don't like the change that removes them!", yet you go around grandstanding about fucking design philosophy and the alignment of the stars, making it seem like an objective mistake and being a backdooring manipulative cunt about it, instead of just being straight up and saying that you personally don't like the change.

If you actually read my "TL;DR" which is like 5 fucking sentences, maybe you would get some funny ideas why that's not such a bad change, instead of lobbying for outdated shitty engines and calling it bad design to cut shit out of your game.

BONERMASTER wrote:

Mono wrote:fucking poof

Your opinion is "I liked the old engines, and I don't like the change that removes them!", yet you go around grandstanding about fucking design philosophy and the alignment of the stars, making it seem like an objective mistake and being a backdooring manipulative cunt about it, instead of just being straight up and saying that you personally don't like the change.

If you actually read my "TL;DR" which is like 5 fucking sentences, maybe you would get some funny ideas why that's not such a bad change, instead of lobbying for outdated shitty engines and calling it bad design to cut shit out of your game.

No, my opinion is don't remove shit with a vague promise that something will be added to fix or replace it afterwards. Actually have any of these promised power systems ready before removing things. I don't know where you got the idea that I wasn't open to the changes in any capacity, but let me quote something for you.

Mono wrote:The thumbs up/down on the PR speaks for itself. This was not a wanted change and I'm sure it would have looked a lot different if the change had anything of substance to show for what it removed.

That's the part where I literally said that if there was any of these promised systems ready to add the change would be received better.
The funny part is your post is literally just the opposite of what you said my opinion was.

oranges wrote:That's still only your opinion.

The game has plenty in it, and a lot of it is unmaintained and not managed well at all, removing it is the better path due to the lack of people willing to contribute on reworking outdated content.

And that's only your opinion.
Pretty easy to tell which opinion the playerbase holds and it would be just as easy to work around it if you literally just waited to have something ready to soothe the inevitable pushback when things are removed. But fruit is gonna fruit.

Oh so you're just wishy washy bitching about how the removal of those engines without an immediate replacement constitutes as loss and how this could have been handled sooo much better.

Alright, so what's the loss of not having a Tesla/Singu available? What did these two give to the game, that we are now missing? Because as far as I know, it ain't fucking much.

And just between you and me, I think a bunch of people sperging out short term and giving a thumbs down ain't a big deal in the greater picture, see taser removal, disarm rework, cloning removal, cobby chems and so forth. Still got these, don't we?

BONERMASTER wrote:

cacogen wrote:Why is it better off?

Pretty simple, because they needed zero brains, needed zero input after they were set up, and generated enough energy to power at least 4 additional stations at the same time, with the tesla potentially infinite. Not to say that the SM isn't particularly demanding and complicated either, as it also doesn't need any input either after it's set up properly, and I hope that this gets worked on now. The difference is that if you fuck up the SM, you planted a huge hole into engineering and got yourself an early shuttle call, and if you fuck up any of those other engines, which takes about two clicks, you'll have this unstoppable shit thing on the loose that is going to wreck the entire station, and if you're a non-antag, a ban to boot.

These two engines were born out of the mindset that it's ease to use and potential for power should be offset by incredibly high danger, but if every grey retard within seconds is able to trigger that high danger and fuck the entire station, then that "balance" becomes a giant detriment to anyone who just wants to play the damn game.

Instead of creating more engines that generate millions of epic KW and end the universe if you deactivate one emitter around it, the focus should be, as has been rightly mentioned a few times, towards creating engines that are an on-going process, that you can upgrade and that have some so:rt of mechanical complexity woven into them. And that's why I said that the game is better off this way.

So the problems with the tesla and singulo then are:

1. They don't require maintenance, but then neither does the SM
2. If someone makes a mistake, then the shuttle is called early. But that's also true of the SM
3. They generate too much power. You haven't said if that's true of the SM or not

My thoughts are:

1. Given the time it takes for engineers to repair hull breaches, I don't understand the obsession with needing an engine that requires maintenance
2. The destruction capability of the engines is what makes them so fun. It contributes to the 'metal death trap masquerading as a space station' that the game once strived to be
3. I don't understand why power needs scarcity

Also I keep seeing the word outdated being used against the singularity and tesla without it being explained how the SM makes them obsolete, other than the implication it must be so because it's the more recent engine.

cacogen wrote:

BONERMASTER wrote:

cacogen wrote:Why is it better off?

Pretty simple, because they needed zero brains, needed zero input after they were set up, and generated enough energy to power at least 4 additional stations at the same time, with the tesla potentially infinite. Not to say that the SM isn't particularly demanding and complicated either, as it also doesn't need any input either after it's set up properly, and I hope that this gets worked on now. The difference is that if you fuck up the SM, you planted a huge hole into engineering and got yourself an early shuttle call, and if you fuck up any of those other engines, which takes about two clicks, you'll have this unstoppable shit thing on the loose that is going to wreck the entire station, and if you're a non-antag, a ban to boot.

These two engines were born out of the mindset that it's ease to use and potential for power should be offset by incredibly high danger, but if every grey retard within seconds is able to trigger that high danger and fuck the entire station, then that "balance" becomes a giant detriment to anyone who just wants to play the damn game.

Instead of creating more engines that generate millions of epic KW and end the universe if you deactivate one emitter around it, the focus should be, as has been rightly mentioned a few times, towards creating engines that are an on-going process, that you can upgrade and that have some so:rt of mechanical complexity woven into them. And that's why I said that the game is better off this way.

So the problems with the tesla and singulo then are:

1. They don't require maintenance, but then neither does the SM
2. If someone makes a mistake, then the shuttle is called early. But that's also true of the SM
3. They generate too much power. You haven't said if that's true of the SM or not

My thoughts are:

1. Given the time it takes for engineers to repair hull breaches, I don't understand the obsession with needing an engine that requires maintenance
2. The destruction capability of the engines is what makes them so fun. It contributes to the 'metal death trap masquerading as a space station' that the game once strived to be
3. I don't understand why power needs scarcity

Also I keep seeing the word outdated being used against the singularity and tesla without it being explained how the SM makes them obsolete, other than the implication it must be so because it's the more recent engine.

1. The SM already has more interactions than singulo and tesla both pre and post setup, and it is simpler to build on them with future changes.
2. Flavor is good and all but this is a game, on a server that has a heavy history of putting roleplay in second place to gameplay. A feature that has good flavor at the cost of good gameplay shouldn't remain. (Plus, if i understood correctly, you can still trigger singulo SM failure, so the classic station-eating black hole isn't even gone)
3. Anything that has scarcity can be used as a balancing mechanism for other features, allowing a range of options between on and off. To make a comparison, if TC worked the same way as power does you could only have traitors with a full arsenal or traitors without one. The potential of having limited TC causes traitors to have to choose between options.

Also, it should be noted that singulo and tesla's shortcomings are probably fixable with some effort, but it's much easier to create a coherent power balance based on a single potential power input, instead of juggling three-to-five engine types added in different times, with different power generation potentials and scaling mechanisms, all of which are pretty much arbitrarily made since power balancing has been nonexistent so far.
The classic engines could (if someone bothers to) be re-implemented once we have an infrastructure to build them back on.

Remove SM! Solars FTW!

Armhulen wrote:the goal was to work on making the station have growing power needs throughout the round so engineering has to continually upgrade and maintain the engine, making power more than "it's on" or "it's off"

Who gives a shit about the tesla or singulo as engines, keep them in solely as round enders(or crushing disappointments when the tesloose goes flying off into space instead of destroying half the station).

Rejigger SM power numbers and gas interaction coefficients so there's a reason to try CO2 or whatevs and a risk to doing it. Even better, semi-randomize some of the gas numbers a la fusion so there's a need to experiment to get a perfect setup. Don't even have to bother finding well balanced numbers, let engineering figure it out every round. Boom, done.

There are legitimately a group of people who think even the SM was removed and solars are the only power source.

oranges wrote:There are legitimately a group of people who think even the SM was removed and solars are the only power source.

God, yes.

Solars are rather set and forget and produce enough power to supply the station on their own.

what if we just removed electricity entirely and replaced the station powernet with an intricate series of horizontal rods and rotating interlocked gears and it was chief engineers job to stand in engineering and crank the rotating lever that made the gears turn

I'll do you one better, no overly complex and mechanical horror-contraption is complete without a flavor of human sacrifice. Every 30 minutes, a living crewmember must be sacrificed to keep the engine running, producing just about enough power to keep most of the station powered. Every AI lawset is changed, with having the first law always be "1. The engine must keep running". If at any point the mark is missed, HORRIBLE THINGS WILL HAPPEN.

sound good?

BONERMASTER wrote:I'll do you one better, no overly complex and mechanical horror-contraption is complete without a flavor of human sacrifice. Every 30 minutes, a living crewmember must be sacrificed to keep the engine running, producing just about enough power to keep most of the station powered. Every AI lawset is changed, with having the first law always be "1. The engine must keep running". If at any point the mark is missed, HORRIBLE THINGS WILL HAPPEN.

sound good?

Further down development of the engine rework, I will make this for halloween.

Armhulen wrote:

BONERMASTER wrote:I'll do you one better, no overly complex and mechanical horror-contraption is complete without a flavor of human sacrifice. Every 30 minutes, a living crewmember must be sacrificed to keep the engine running, producing just about enough power to keep most of the station powered. Every AI lawset is changed, with having the first law always be "1. The engine must keep running". If at any point the mark is missed, HORRIBLE THINGS WILL HAPPEN.

sound good?

Further down development of the engine rework, I will make this for halloween.

make this an admin button where the supermatter turns red as well

BONERMASTER wrote:I'll do you one better, no overly complex and mechanical horror-contraption is complete without a flavor of human sacrifice. Every 30 minutes, a living crewmember must be sacrificed to keep the engine running, producing just about enough power to keep most of the station powered. Every AI lawset is changed, with having the first law always be "1. The engine must keep running". If at any point the mark is missed, HORRIBLE THINGS WILL HAPPEN.

sound good?

Sounds like lifeweb power

I think the goon engine can get grumpy and require sacrifices, although I don't think they're human

Megarop wrote:

XDTM wrote:Anything that has scarcity can be used as a balancing mechanism for other features, allowing a range of options between on and off. To make a comparison, if TC worked the same way as power does you could only have traitors with a full arsenal or traitors without one. The potential of having limited TC causes traitors to have to choose between options.

I don't think those things are equivalent at all, a traitor can still do plenty to sabotage the station kill people without TC whereas most jobs on the station can barely do anything without power. Power is the thing that lets people do their jobs and access the vast majority of the content in the game, it's way too important to be some scarce resource that people have to manage like TC, plus most jobs already have some sort of resource that they need to manage. The only machine in the game right now that would warrant power being limited is the BEPIS which we could easily balance around just money and not power anyway.

Yes, that's the situation because power is wildly unbalanced and can only be on/off. And it's likely that baseline power will not really be harder than it currently is to generate.
When power balancing is more defined, we can add machine overclocking, add high power costs to certain machines, maybe tie chemistry more tightly with the power supply it receives instead of only having its own counter, things like that. It will probably need a more granular management via the remote APC management console, so you can move power supply around, which would enable more interesting interactions. If a department gets uppity, their power budget could get cut until they behave; you could cut the gravity generation or comms to make power last longer if the engine blows up; station objectives could require a lot of power so you could see the station go dark to charge a bluespace artillery shot or to raise the meteor shields.

I feel like it's the ideal balancing mechanism for stuff that could affect the station as a whole in general (on the same scale as gravgen and comms). With power, you'd need ongoing cooperation from engineering as well as the actual supply, instead of a single hurdle in the building stage. With that, it opens the gate to powerful "power sinks" like, for example, a crew hivemind generator, or an engine that remotely charges equipment of people linked to it.

As a side note, i bet the singulo will be able to make a comeback once a balance structure is solidified; it's just that to replace the foundations it's easier to knock down the building first and remake it later.

that's the first "soul of tg" argument we've seen so far I think, everyone take a shot

Man, I'd rather talk about our new death-engine than going over what-ifs and up-down vote ratios, either you have made your peace with it, or you're going to eventually, it just is what it is.

I'm making a guess that some people remember these more fondly because they hardly dealt with them before. When I started playing, these engines were all I ever knew, and playing mostly engineering, after making it over the initial learning curve and after the novelty wore off, I quickly felt like the engine was just too damn easy and way too powerful, like a cheat. I always felt like engineering could take a very active role in managing and maintaining power, having something fun to do, you know, but these piss-easy engines that just blurt out millions of KWs when your station only ever needed 200-300 KW, they just take the game away from you.

And if you're blurting out now "BUT THE SM, THE SM DOES THE SAME THING" first of all shut the fuck up, second, yes, once you get the routine down it's also pretty much fire and forget, but the coders already said that they're using it as their starting point to rework the engine, and if it helps them to trash the other engines for that, then I won't mind it, and that's my last bit on the matter.

oranges wrote:that's the first "soul of tg" argument we've seen so far I think, everyone take a shot

Space Station Idle displays a better understanding and appreciation of the game and its culture. If I hadn't checked the GitHub recently I'd have forgotten that there's still people doing good things for the game. Have another (You).

cacogen wrote:

oranges wrote:that's the first "soul of tg" argument we've seen so far I think, everyone take a shot

Space Station Idle displays a better understanding and appreciation of the game and its culture. If I hadn't checked the GitHub recently I'd have forgotten that there's still people doing good things for the game. Have another (You).

holy crap, what happened to you?

BONERMASTER wrote:Man, I'd rather talk about our new death-engine than going over what-ifs and up-down vote ratios, either you have made your peace with it, or you're going to eventually, it just is what it is.

"think about the bigger picture, if we make this change to the game even though most people don't like it they'll eventually get used to it anyway" isn't a good argument for why this is actually a good change
also wait was the "what if you had to make human sacrifices to the SM" thing an actual suggestion i thought that was a joke

BONERMASTER wrote:And if you're blurting out now "BUT THE SM, THE SM DOES THE SAME THING" first of all shut the fuck up

you sure sound mad at whoever said "the sm does the same thing" even though nobody actually said that

BONERMASTER wrote:second, yes, once you get the routine down it's also pretty much fire and forget, but the coders already said that they're using it as their starting point to rework the engine, and if it helps them to trash the other engines for that, then I won't mind it, and that's my last bit on the matter.

you say you don't like "what-ifs" and yet now you're going "what if at some point in the future the coders did something that made this removal actually warranted"

BONERMASTER wrote:I always felt like engineering could take a very active role in managing and maintaining power, having something fun to do, you know,

i'm sure most engineers would rather spend most of their round building or fixing stuff than spend most of their round making sure power doesn't run out so the game doesn't instantly grind to a halt for the entire server
then again, most people who play the game would rather the singularity generator doesn't get removed yet and still here we are

oranges wrote:that's the first "soul of tg" argument we've seen so far I think, everyone take a shot

i didn't say tg i said ss13, checkmate

XDTM wrote:With that, it opens the gate to powerful "power sinks"

Speaking of power sinks, aren't traitor power sinks going to be obsolete if they can just overclock a bunch of machines or something and drain power that way without having to spend any TC? Do you think anything should be changed about those?

Poly has some input

its perfect

make the supermatter only generate energy if a male wearing clothes from a whitelist of girly outfits is nearby

>the supermatter is only boring because you’ve spent so much time around it

how is this possibly an argument against keeping other engines, variation is one of the most important things in a game that has always taken inspiration from d&d, one of the most massive settings in gaming history.

not only is this actual gameplay value you’ve removed but also roleplay, if you wanted the tesla fixed so badly you should’ve said more about it before since there are multiple people who will do shit on a whim for you, an issue on github in the thousands is not a valid counterargument since that shitpile is basically the us debt at this point.

also how was the explosions rework not an attempt to fix the tesla.

And dont' give me any bullcrap about "I could fix this with blah"

I'm not fucking interested, you had 9 years to do anything with these engines, and NOBODY fucking iterated on their mechanics.

fify

i think maybe i understand your point but do you not know how a line graph works?

oranges wrote:

And dont' give me any bullcrap about "I could fix this with blah"

I'm not fucking interested, you had 9 years to do anything with these engines, and NOBODY fucking iterated on their mechanics.

Do one where it's "cool black hole" vs "boring yellow rock" and then we're talking
In a battle of mechanically interesting you're right, absolutely, but as a spectacle the SM will never ever be as cool as the horror you felt when you stepped into engineering and realized the containment fields were down
I think, personally, the value of sheer spectacle is undervalued, but I can see how you might disagree. And you're right that somebody who has seen it a million times might not think a loose singulo was cool anymore. I guess it's kind of a moot point anyways

Stickymayhem wrote:i think maybe i understand your point but do you not know how a line graph works?

I couldn't be bothered changing it after I drew it in paint

PKPenguin321 wrote:

oranges wrote:snip

Do one where it's "cool black hole" vs "boring yellow rock" and then we're talking
In a battle of mechanically interesting you're right, absolutely, but as a spectacle the SM will never ever be as cool as the horror you felt when you stepped into engineering and realized the containment fields were down
I think, personally, the value of sheer spectacle is undervalued, but I can see how you might disagree. And you're right that somebody who has seen it a million times might not think a loose singulo was cool anymore. I guess it's kind of a moot point anyways

If you had taken even more than the 30 seconds you spent typing up this post you would understand that we know the spectacle is cool, which is why both are RETAINED as meltdowns.

I don't think the extreme warnings and alarms are nearly as good as a cold realization of error but again, moot point because it'll always be personal preference

I feel like so much frustration is being directed at engine loss but exactly zero attention is paid to just how dreadful our power system actually is. Power is practically a binary yes/no given how it never truly dynamically changes, or how power draw is utterly pointless except where someone is deliberately attempting to overload a single apc with high power use machinery, which isn't something that happens incidentally but something you need to go out of your way to do. The fact all our power usage is at the APC level and not at some grid level, and the APC magically powers the room via wifi or some shit, is maybe the entire systems biggest failings. It's fucking magic.

Power is utterly, utterly broken and lacks any actual depth whatsoever. You can power the station on fucking potatoes for fucks sake. That's not even hyperbole, that's literal. You can mass produce power supply out of botany and frankly that's just for showing off. The imbalances run goddamn deep.

I couldn't be bothered changing it after I drew it in paint

I was talking about tlat's abomination

NecromancerAnne wrote:I feel like so much frustration is being directed at engine loss but exactly zero attention is paid to just how dreadful our power system actually is. Power is practically a binary yes/no given how it never truly dynamically changes, or how power draw is utterly pointless except where someone is deliberately attempting to overload a single apc with high power use machinery, which isn't something that happens incidentally but something you need to go out of your way to do. The fact all our power usage is at the APC level and not at some grid level, and the APC magically powers the room via wifi or some shit, is maybe the entire systems biggest failings. It's fucking magic.

Power is utterly, utterly broken and lacks any actual depth whatsoever. You can power the station on fucking potatoes for fucks sake. That's not even hyperbole, that's literal. You can mass produce power supply out of botany and frankly that's just for showing off. The imbalances run goddamn deep.

There are plans on how to fix stuff like that too.