some thoughts on hallucinations

[captain sawrge]

i wrote this all in 5 mins:

door shocks happen so often it gets tedious to play with RDS. it isn't scary just really annoying. i'll have two-three airlocks shock me in a row regularly enough that i'm far more surprised when a door actually is shocked.

Nar-sie has risen happens every three minutes. it isn't scary it's mostly just immersion breaking.

Same with clock cult end noise but at least that's just a noise

The screams and whispers are really obvious tells that you're hallucinating for anyone not using RDS

Hallucinations can still call out gangsters despite it not existing

90% of the time radio hallucinations are unknowns. even just giving them some random name woulkd be far more convincing

meteor and blob alerts do not use the centcomm name. even if there's no easy way of coding this at least make it the normal centcomm name and not [x] Alert

door bolting also seems incredibly common and rarely phases me
same with ai going rogue

i think generally the really big/obvious hallucinations (round end sounds, announcements, alerts, etc.) should be made a lot rarer. they've fooled me a couple times when the stars align and other stuff happening makes it make sense but i've been incredibly dulled to them.*

the voices, people talking to you, fake radio callouts, noises (like the esword thing) should be more common.

*there's an argument to be made that this makes it more difficult to tell when they are really happening but you can just see people flipping out on the radio most of the time anyway and i think i'd rather not have my immersion ruined by seeing NAR-SIE HAS RISEN 8 times in 5 minutes rather than having to think twice about whether its fake or not

post thoughts itt!

[XDTM]

Speaking as the coder for hallucinations, i'm all for them being subtle. If a hallucination becomes predictable or boring it means i screwed up the odds.

Thing is, i gotta find a balance that
A: is effective; if hallucinations are too scarce odds are they will generally be ignored.
B: is not recognized instantly as a hallucination; arguably the hardest as any nontext hallucination is usually obvious to someone that knows them.
C: allows for as many interesting misunderstandings as possible OR spooks/unnerves the victim.

The spooky hallucinations (bubblegum, singulo, death) can be effective but they give away the hallucination status pretty much instantly.
The grand hallucinations (nuke, ratvar, etc) have great potential but can also fall really flat.
The hazard hallucinations (plasma, bolts) are hit or miss depending on if the target has knowledge of the hallucination.
Subtle hallucinations (text, sounds) have the best effect/noticeability ratio, but can't do everything by themselves.

I could use a hand in making up the odds of these categories, as well as the frequency of hallucinations themselves.
Since i don't play i can only get so much feedback, posts like these are helpful.

[Wyzack]

I disagree on your one point, I think that making the big hallucinations very rare will make them less ignored, not more. If nothing else it simply decreases the number of false call outs so you will be more inclined to believe them

[BeeSting12]

I'm not a huge fan of most of the hallucinations that stun you, especially the unkillable person hitting you. Making random sounds play are really the best ones. Voices on comms are hit/miss, I've killed an AI because another person hallucinated the "AI rogue" thing and told me the AI was rogue. Was an interesting conversation to have in ahelps. I think that's the kind of stuff hallucinations should cause.

Anything that simulates round end should be removed: Nar'Sie, Ratvar, etc. The simulated centcomm announcements are fine just make them come from Centcomm. The hazard ones are fine. It would be cool if singulo/bubblegum would only trigger in certain cases (SM caused hallucinations do singulo, bubblegum only happens around the mining shuttle or on lavaland.) Idk if thats feasible though.

[XDTM]

Singulo/bubblegum (as werll as other stun hallucinations) are supposed to elicit a reaction like "Oh shit why is that there what the fuck run", rather than deception. They do ruin all hallucinations after that. Maybe i should keep thse as "grand finale" hallucinations and only trigger them when your status is running out. But that has the opposite problem of telling you for sure that you're safe from hallucinations after that.
I'd be sad to see them gone, but it might be necessary since pretty much nothing remains surprising or spooky after it happens to you enough times.

Could you elaborate why the round end ones should be removed? The image i had in my head while adding them was people taking pods to lavaland to avoid the nuclear blast/eldritch god, and stuff like that.

[BeeSting12]

The meta ruins them. Unless it's a cult round then Nar'Sie rising isn't gonna do anything but tell you you're hallucinating. Unless it's nuke ops they're just gonna say "oh look another hallucination." Cult induced hallucinations could give their respective gods rising or other cult shit to elicit that effect.

Could even base hallucinations off the game mode but that would lead to people hallucinating to attempt to meta if it's ops. ie nuke hallucination will only trigger on nuke ops and cult hallucination only triggers on cult.

also nice quads.

[captain sawrge]

I don't think round end ones need to be removed but they need to be very, very rare to elicit that 'oh shit' moment. I have had NAR-SIE HAS RISEN visible three times without scrolling up, just in my most recent chat history.

I think the fire hallucination needs to be made a little more rare or tweaked. I like the idea but dealing real stamina damage makes it really frustrating as it can't be prevented or 'extinguished.'

Fake door shocks happen *incredibly* often and become far more frustrating than scary to the point that playing with reality disassociation syndrome starts to just feel like a phobia of doors.

Hazards like flooding or fires are really effective, I think. The plasma flooding has got me a couple times and made me ignore real plasma other times.

The small stuff is good filler and should be the most common, stuff like fake radio call outs, people saying things, those voices in your head, gun shots or e sword noises or other takeout sounds. The lesser visual stuff is good every...5-10 minutes? Frequent enough to keep you on your feet without being frequent enough to get annoying and lose its effect. The big stuff should be pretty rare, like round ends or nukes or whayever. Those can be *really" effective sometimes (I've had the door bolt hallucination and malf AI hallucination happen within seconds of each other, scared the shit out of me) but when they happen a lot it mostly just gets annoying to have the chat flooded with super big text of an obvious lie.

[BeeSting12]

sawrges vision for hallucinations is the best one. i elect him for design lead

[Armhulen]

beesting is right, yeah. and also i didn't play for like a month and hallucinations genuinely freaked me the fuck out, they're much better than they were before even if they still have some problems.

[captain sawrge]

There is a lot of interesting stuff to them right now. I think it's largely just balancing out the odds on all of them so that they can get the desired effect.

[Qbopper]

even if we just knocked down the odds of the big ones it would be a massive improvement

[XDTM]

Minor snag: 5-10 minutes is a hood timeframe if you have a permanent condition, but stuff like BZ probably shouldn't make you hallucinate for that long. As i said, the issue is timing the effects to not only be immersive, but also effective on a semi-short period of time.
That said, i'll put the suggested changes in a patch post freeze.

[captain sawrge]

Minor snag: 5-10 minutes is a hood timeframe if you have a permanent condition, but stuff like BZ probably shouldn't make you hallucinate for that long. As i said, the issue is timing the effects to not only be immersive, but also effective on a semi-short period of time.
That said, i'll put the suggested changes in a patch post freeze.

True, I've been thinking about this a lot more in terms of the trait over temporary bouts.

Is there a way to make hallucination rarity scale inversely to the amount of hallucinogens in a person? That might be some kind of idea.

I think even then at best these hallucinations should still be fairly rare. A few more "severe hallucinations" in a trip is a lot more convincing and scary than being bombarded with a bunch of random chaos.

[XDTM]

https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/37423

Any opinions/ideas?

[Nabski]

I rather liked the hallucinations that gave some kind of stun, because it gave hallucination sting a purpose that could somewhat compete with freezing sting.