There was a time, a few years ago, when coders were making odd changes that made things more complex and annoying, just for the sake of it. I clearly remember someone saying "What's next, giving PDAs a powercell?"
Well, lo and behold:
There isn't a PR for this yet, but still...PDAs would have a power bar that slowly drains when you're using the PDA flashlight/med scanner/various other utilities but would auto recharge on idle mode.
Now let's see what this PR is about:
Flashlights use default regular 1000 charge cells now.
They drain 3 charge every ~2 seconds when on, with an estimated lifespan of 10 minutes.
Not a big deal unless you're a maint crawler, and it will remove the ability to become THE SUN for the whole fucking round
Stun batons will slowly drain power when they're turned on.
They drain 5 charge every ~2 seconds, with an estimated lifespan of 10 minutes (stun batons/prods require high capacity cells with 1500 charge.)
That's where it gets tricky, if we're going to rework the stun system and force security to use batons as their primary stunning method, this will add a new layer of annoyance. Being disarmed is already a great issue when you're tying to subdue someone using a baton, now you have to turn it on too. I know there's a hotkey for that, but still.
Lanterns will require welding fuel.
They have a 25% change of draining 1 fuel reagent every ~2 seconds when turned on, and have 50 fuel total. They can be refuelled at welding fuel tanks.
Not an issue for me, I never play miner and miners are OP anyway, they can eat a nerf.
Now, about the proposed PDA change: I think that this is just being annoying for the sake of it. Or "realism". I don't know, I thought Paprika wasn't really into realism but whatever. The PDA has a really weak light, it's more like an emergency light. There are some departments where lights are poorly placed creating unclickable tiles of darkness, and now you'll have to turn your PDA on and off everytime you need to go there. I know that some medics use the PDA as a health analyzer to save storage space, they have the medscanner turned on all the time, now they'll have to juggle with the PDA to save power. Atmos Techs and Toxin Scientists keep their gas scanners turned on for long periods of time. That's all assuming that power is drained when the utility is enabled, not just used (like borg modules).
The question is, why? What interesting mechanic is added by this change? Is it for realism? Is it a balance issue, to stop people from spamming their scanners? Usually if they're spamming it there's a reason (medics dealing with infected people, scientists/atmosians checking a tank for a specific pressure). And if it turns out to not being a big deal, with the idle recharge restoring power quickly, why even code it in the first place? Why make things more annoying just for the sake of being annoying? HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH?
