/tg/Station 13

As the crazy guy who took 5 months or something to make it , I feel like I should start the forum shitstorm about it.


Discuss. They've been testmerged a bit recently, anyone have thoughts criticism comments complaints ideas and suggestions?

So science can't make chem dispensers, and that's ok. But medbay doesn't have a circuit imprinter, and there don't seem to be department circuit imprinters anyway anywhere. Am I missing something?

The prolathes should definitely have sorting or categories of some kind, it's difficult to look through the giant list of stuff if you don't know the name of what you're looking for.

It's probably not possible with the current UI systems, but a visualized tech tree would be nice so you can see what you need for a certain tech without having to click through them all.

Put the protolathes within sight of the outside hallways so you can more easily upgrade them with bluespace parts exchanger. This is more a mapping issue but still.

Also may want to remove the ability for cargo to ship out ore for points, Right now they have no incentive to hand out materials besides the risk of getting lynched. Consider having centcom send orders for protolathe products for cargo points. This means cargo needs to spread out materials as well as collect items from other department's protolathes, potentially allowing people to steal stuff from other protolathes under false pretenses.

Also remove the RnD console from robotics, and consider making different research cost different amounts and not just have everything but weapon tech cost 2500.

Examining the protolathes says that ores can be beamed directly from cargo without the need to go there, but how does it work exactly? I saw no option to receive ores or to send them from the ORM

Wait, that is a thing now?
Why. Literally why.

DemonFiren wrote:Wait, that is a thing now?
Why. Literally why.

I remember that flavor text from months ago. I don't think that's actually a feature since i've never seen it used, just some dumb nonsense.

Imagine you're part of any department that isn't cargo or science, and you want to print something that needs anything other than metal and glass. Lets say, a bluespace beaker. Here's how a trip to cargo would typically progress:

1: You show up to cargo, no one is there and the AI won't let you in for some reason. No resources for you.
2: Oh, The AI is alive! But the ORM is empty, because science/robotics stole it all 5 seconds after it was delivered.
3: You go to science. No one is at the desk, and you can't get the AI's attention for long enough to open the three doors between you and the protolathe.
4: You finally get the AI's attention, they let you in, nothing's there. You go to robotics to ask if they have it.
5: "Sorry, we already built a Durand and a Gygax, we don't have any resources left."
6: The resource console beeps, and you rush to cargo. When you get there, the techs have already sent it all to Centcom.
7: You wait in cargo. A shaft miner finally comes by, and puts ores in the ORM. Finally, you can make that bluespace beakers!
8: Oh, wait. He didn't have bluespace crystals.

See, most people would give up around #2.

Preemptive responses:


"You're just mad that science is nerfed."

Science is already massively nerfed; science can now only make parts, they can no longer make guns or grenades or equipment or any of that shit. Techwebs is slower to progress and prevents them from getting everything quickly.


">>>>>>having to interact with people"

This implies that you can interact with people while they're running around searching for a wizard, or beating eachother to death, or building a autismfort in space. Interacting with other people requires that they want to and are able to interact with you, which is rarely true in massively chaotic low RP rounds. And increasing the number of people you have to interact with exponentially increases the chances that one of them is unavailable.


"You're just exaggerating, this situation will never happen"

I went through steps 1-3 and then gave up about half an hour ago.


"So what, no departments need science anyway!"

Okay, so I suppose that chemists just can't make grenades or use bluespace beakers anymore, since those are exclusively available through science. And genetics and cloning and medbay is just going to have to get by with shitty sleepers and slow and shitty cloning. And botany will never get floral somatorays, sucks to be them I guess. Engineering will just have to do without meson nightvisions or improved tools, and I guess sec never really needs those guns, not even during blob, right?



Want to nerf science? Okay sure, whatever. But this isn't nerfing it, this is removing it. You can argue "but just go get resources you lazy bum", but ultimately what people could do or should do is completely irrelevant. Let me give some brief examples before I continue:


Wizard can be extremely powerful and deadly, they get a plethora of insanely powerful spells. But, in practice? Half of the wizards die within 5-10 minutes and don't accomplish anything.

Nuke ops could be a force of destruction, carving through the crew to find dat disk. They get tons of guns and resources and even mechs to do this, they should slaugther the crew. But in practice? Half the time they fluke.


How something theoretically could be used, doesn't. Matter. In practice, wizards usually do terribly because they're so rare no one has any experience, even though, looking at their spells and abilities, you would think they would be extremely powerful. Nuke ops fluke half the time because of inexperience and poor coordination, even though theoretically they should be able to slaughter half the crew without much effort.

And, similarly, it doesn't matter that the crew "could" interact with cargo, get lucky, get resources, and make what they want. Because I'd bet a goddamn lot, that in practice people are going to get their department-specific shit about 1/10th as often as they did while science was centralized. Beforehand if you particularly wanted something, you could walk up to science and ASK them for it and usually they'd give it to you. Probably something like a 50/50 chance that you get it when you want it. But now, It's probably more along the lines of 10%. At this point, research has so little influence on the game that you've basically removed it.


There aren't a lot of options here. No matter what we do, we need to make it practical to distribute resources between half a dozen different departments without any of them hoarding it all. Even if departments could get resources, the uneven distribution would probably still leave at least half of them with no resources whatsoever.

The main idea I had was a sort of bluespace distribution system, potentially connected directly to the ORM. It could work in one of a few ways:

1: Resources are automatically and evenly distributed between department protolathes. Cargo gets a Bluespace Distributor Machine, which takes any ores that are put into it and instantly splits them up and teleports them to all functional protolathes. Optionally, this could be integrated into the ORM so that resources can be instantly distributed from within the GUI. The main downside of this is that departments don't use resources evenly; medbay and botany might be content with a few sheets, but Robotics needs a lot more than that if they want to make mechs.

2: Resources are universally pooled. Cargo still gets a Bluespace Distributor, but instead it teleports the resources into a station-wide bluespace storage, which all protolathes are connected to and draw from. Thus, anyone who needs resources can use them, so long as cargo bothered to share and some cuck hasn't printed 50 Adv. Eguns already. Downsides: anyone can steal all of the resources if they really want. Could be solved by preventing people from ejecting resources from protolathes, but you could still print a bunch of junk to use it all up.

3: Cargo has to manually distribute using the Bluespace Distributor, deciding who gets what resources via a GUI. Sort of defeats the point, because Science will demand it all and then no one else will have any, but it's at least slightly better.

Since scientists can't be expected to camp the console waiting for points, players need to adapt to a new concept of research and upgrades. The request console should be used much more often, to ask science for specific things to research, instead of simply waiting for them to eventually research the thing you want. That's why the tech tree desperately needs a "search" function, so that you can look for the item you want and the nodes you need to unlock, instead of having to scroll a single huge list.

fun fact
if supermatter blows up
you ARE fucked
since you can get magboots only there/maybe cargo idk about that
and gravity blows up
and engi blows up

Buggy wrote:your post

OR you could just beat the everliving hell out of science for hoarding the minerals? It's a new system, people will have to adapt to the new playstyle instead of making a "qol" change.

There's nothing wrong with a bit of conflict, and someone taking all the mats is the perfect non-antag non-admin conflict that people should be forced to either handle (which how they handle can chain react to more conflicts if not done correctly) or not reap rewards at all.

We're kind of stuck in a catch 22 of "nobody has any desire to interact with one another because there is no incentive to do so" and "we can't add any incentive to interact because nobody has any desire to interact"

If there's not enough minerals to fulfill the needs of every department by 15 minutes in, the miners are fucking awful and need to be slapped.

Or you could just shift click a dept protolathe and see that they're supposed to remotely receive minerals but it's not working at the moment

1. The interface is ass and handles like ass.
2. For some reason it still lists circuit imprinters and what not in the device link menu but it will not link.
3. It's confusing to find out what needs what to be finally unlocked.

1 and 2 will be worked on later (planning to refactor how departmental lathes work)

Explain 3.

Why was this even made in the first place? I'm confused because science has been "rebalanced" how many times now? I think when you made this you forgot to ask yourself a few questions.

1. What is the purpose of this?
2. How does this affect the player?
3. What are the strengths and limitations of this TechWeb compared to the last design?


The only thing science is good for is Xenobio and Robotics now, this isn't an improvement. It's on par with removing tasers and stun sticks from security and giving them only police batons, only to now see hem huddle on R&D doors and yelling at science to research them equipment.

Techwebs are pretty good
Easier to get to what you want

lol geist go home

Are more people going to post thoughts and feedback and suggestions or what? Just departmental lathe interface on my todolist isn't a lot.

Remove ore selling points so the chosen people in cargo can't starve other departments.

I partially blame the lack of resources going to the station on scientists researching whatever they can as soon as they accumulate the points. That's not how it works, if you just give away all the research, what leverage do you have over the miners?

~5 rounds where I played with other scientists who insisted on doing R&D and used all the points as they come: no materials came to R&D ever
~5 rounds where I hogged R&D, saved up points after getting high efficiency parts, advanced power, and advanced data before holding mining technology ransom: miners delivered.

Conclusion: researching from no mining tech to advanced plasma cutters + mining satchels of holding takes like 5 nodes for about 5 clicks total, or maybe 20 if you're unfamiliar with the system. There is no reason to spend points until mining delivers, holy shit stop spending points as they come, let them accumulate so you can be flexible. This isn't an RTS where every second counts, there's no difference between hovering over the research stuff button waiting for that 2500 point mark over the course of 10 minutes and spending 10 minutes fiddling with Integrated Circuits before researching everything at once, except the first option leaves you with no real leverage over the miners.

TL;DR: Scientists should hog points to trade for materials. All the materials in the world won't do you any good if you can't spend them on toys.

So how does selling tech disks in cargo work now? I tried selling a disk with some tech on it, and didn't get a single cargo point for it.

>The ai can do rnd now.
>Now miners and roboticists dont have to do rnd.
>All of science is doing xenobio.
Thanks kev, I mean it this time. Saving the time of good miners.
Since the ai can do everything else in science now... (go back to arrow meme post 3)

There is little incentive to do R&D beyond upgrade parts, mechs, cyborgs, power cells. and equipment for the miners. The Techweb system compounds this by making research progress time based and unlocked one-at-a-time, instead of parallel in the current system.

I do not expect a large number of players to dedicate the limited points to things that offer themselves no benefit.

Idea: Make a fucking wiki page kevinz.

Gun Hog wrote:There is little incentive to do R&D beyond upgrade parts, mechs, cyborgs, power cells. and equipment for the miners. The Techweb system compounds this by making research progress time based and unlocked one-at-a-time, instead of parallel in the current system.

I do not expect a large number of players to dedicate the limited points to things that offer themselves no benefit.

This is my issue. Techweb nodes need to benefit at least 2 departments at a time instead of just 1. That way you dont end up with just RnD upgrades and the rare robotics one and no others.

It also would spread around some of the power so one department doesnt get stupidly powerful before the others.

Schematics should indicate which protolathe produces them, so if I do research something that science can't make I know who to contact instead.

I still have no idea on how to turn bomb results into points or what deconstruction does.

Also lol @ every criticism Kev leveled against GBP when this has every problem, but worse. The only interactive aspect you could come up with was turning bomb results into points? Really?

The webs also need to be deeper, right now its really wide so you can easily tunnel whatever OP tech you want and have it ready within a few minutes. First time I used the console today I mashed a few random tech and had no idea what I was doing but managed to unlock Flight Suits within 10 minutes of roundstart.

The system is garbage in its current state but its the framework we need to reach a better one, hopefully I can be arsed to help.

Oldman Robustin wrote:The only interactive aspect you could come up with was turning bomb results into points? Really?

In fairness, there is another way to make points: build more servers. Income is equal to X*sqrt(100/X).

Or at least, there would be. If it wasn't disabled. And the only way I knew it was disabled was to dig through the code for 10 minutes. Which brings me to my second point:

newfren wrote:Idea: Make a fucking wiki page kevinz.

And enable the bluespace distribution system! And multi-server bitcoin mining!

Oldman Robustin wrote:hopefully I can be arsed to help.

I hope not

bluespace distribution system is not happening unless kor greenlights it.
multi server is not happening for the moment, as it'll result in "optimal builds" of combinations of coolers/whatever.
also i promised an update in a bit but i'm delaying on that to let the system settle in and give me time to get more fixes in.

Here is an idea, RnD servers act like heaters and heat the ambient air in the room they run in, if they are above room temperature they produce a reduced amount of points and eventually catch on fire.

here is the catch, the more servers running in a network the more heat, increasing exponentially.

Better partner up with atmos if you want to run more than the default 2 servers.

Or is that the plan already?

How would points for bomb potency even work? You can make a noblium bomb in 10 minutes, that would give you enough points to research everything at once.

my main problems with it are this

1. No real guidance or documentation
2. things researched don't appear in the research proto for creation for some reason? it was only a few items too, other stuff appeared fine
3. no real organization to the entire system, everything was a mess and it was hard sifting through different nodes and items in the proto to find the thing you needed

Qbmax32 wrote:my main problems with it are this

1. No real guidance or documentation
2. things researched don't appear in the research proto for creation for some reason? it was only a few items too, other stuff appeared fine
3. no real organization to the entire system, everything was a mess and it was hard sifting through different nodes and items in the proto to find the thing you needed

1. Blame Kev for not making a Wiki page.
2. It is sadly intended, and the worst part of this whole system. The only way to get around it is to steal the department protolathe boards from the locker of each head.
3. Designs were neatly (somewhat) categorized in the old (superior) system. This was removed to support the division, else you would have empty categories in the protolathe. I suppose Kevinz was too lazy to add categorization for the nodes, though.

I dunno what UI magic people can pull off but an actual visualization of the "techweb" would be stellar.

@Oranges

What does the mindless hostility get you here? If I'm going to work on it I'd rather see input than your usual cynical shit, RND's already been torn apart and now we have 5 minute flight suits for bombing toxins test - surely we can do better.

Best we can hope for is probably a png of the techweb that people can open in a popup

Oldman Robustin wrote:-= If I'm going to work on it I'd rather see input than your usual cynical shit,

I hope you don't work on it

Remind me what science gets now that you took their ability to make anything from the prototype?

Remind me what science spends time on since you removed two out of three major departments?

What does science even need minerals for now besides stompy mechs

Science can make slimes and will become full time slime herders, toxins will go to atmospherics most likely. If someone wants to step up and develop some new system to sit alongside slimes that's cool as well, but science as the sole controller of minerals, and new items is finished and will never again be the gatekeeper, that is kor's plan.

The next step is to move the techweb machine to department offices so each head can research technologies for their department, soon we will be democratising mineral access as well.

In an ideal world each department will get some way to contribute to tech points, so that it becomes a layer that sits across the entire crew and then we can use it properly introduce department specific items and improvements rather than setting up an unfair exchange where it's all funnelled through a single department into the rest of the crew, leading that role to get access in most cases to all the goodies just for stealing objects and putting them into a machine in the right order.

Yakumo_Chen wrote: Remind me what science spends time on since you removed two out of three major departments?

Science had research, xenobio, toxins, robotics

It now has techwebs, circuits, xenobio, toxins, robotics

oranges wrote:
The next step is to move the techweb machine to department offices so each head can research technologies for their department

I never said that and I am not sure how it would work but the rest of your post is more or less correct

Think about it Kor

scientists don't have the same reasons/motiviation to do research on the techweb anymore, it doesn't give them all the guns/items anymore.

The logical response is to move that aspect to where the demand is, each department head, who needs things for their own departments lathe

This is the same reason why every department needs to be able to generate points

Not really enough techs within each department to create a decent web/meaningful choice. Maybe after another five years of bloat

Needs to be more incentive to spread the points around though one way or another

It doesn't have to be per department webs, it can be the global web, but the ability needs to go where the demand is or it's unbalanced and people who used to main science will complain because they have to push the buttons but don't get the items instead of going and doing circuits or slimes or something

One thing that would be actually helpful feedback would be to brainstorm ways in which each department can generate points

toxins going to atmos so they can research plasma properties for points makes sense
RnD has slimes, so can redeem the extracts for points
Engineering potentially should get the servers, rather than RnD, since they're closer to atmos and have the tools to build heating/cooling apparatus
Cargo can export items, maybe we should have centcomm request certain packages of items and release techweb points in response to them being fufilled?
Botany/Bar can export food (maybe via cargo?)
Security gets points for every hit they make with a stunbaton

This might be controversial, but making the stacker in security's gulag machine directly send minerals to a point where they can easily be collected by the general public would be nice.

Engineering being able to make specific gas mixes to advance research- I believe Robustin either coded or came up with the idea.

Medical can use viro/genetics/maybe test how chem mixes react on humans in a specific machine that must be built.

Security could shoot guns at something in the firing range, achieving a certain damage/minute gives more points. At some point, dual wielding/using guns with higher damage will be required for more weapons research.

If we make things too autonomous for each department we are back to every department having its own private gunfarm instead of a stationwide thing everyone has a stake in

Also we lose the benefits of being able to balance around mostly predictable timegates if we let people solo farm past them and at that point we may as well have kept it all in RD

Going to be difficult to strike the right balance for both

oranges wrote:Engineering potentially should get the servers, rather than RnD, since they're closer to atmos and have the tools to build heating/cooling apparatus

you could put it next to telecomms so all the server stuff is in one place, could be neato

Qbopper wrote:

oranges wrote:Engineering potentially should get the servers, rather than RnD, since they're closer to atmos and have the tools to build heating/cooling apparatus

you could put it next to telecomms so all the server stuff is in one place, could be neato

Engineering has enough to do to be honest, with powering the station and doing repairs.A server farm seems directly related to RnD and if toxins moves that opens up a nice open area on most maps to put a server farm area. Hell the science department is closer to the station's IT department considering the RD's responsibility when it comes to the AI.

You could even flesh out the server management to make it its own minigame if you wanted to.

You could even flesh out the server management to make it its own minigame if you wanted to.

Maybe mso will finally take part in the game he hosts.

And maybe we could get him to code it