/tg/Station 13

https://github.com/tgstation/-tg-station/pull/6321

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:

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.

There isn't a PR for this yet, but still...

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?

Well it looks like I will never play miner again.

Give mining cyborgs electric laterns that run off their own power supply, otherwise you'll have a lot of dead cyborgs to mining mobs.

If my calculations are correct (Yes, I always wanted to say that) then on average a lantern will last four minutes and ten seconds (4:10). That's.... too low. Just too low.
The minimum with shitty luck would be one minute, fourthy seconds (1:40). The maximum with god tier luck would be Six minutes and fourthy seconds (6:40).

Ah yes simple electronics known everywhere for failing in minutes fresh out of the box. Will comms be done over cell phone brick as coders continue to time warp in search of "retro" inspiration?

How about crank powered electric lanterns? Personally used one pretty handy.

Incomptinence wrote:Ah yes simple electronics known everywhere for failing in minutes fresh out of the box. Will comms be done over cell phone brick as coders continue to time warp in search of "retro" inspiration?

How about crank powered electric lanterns? Personally used one pretty handy.

and in real life shifts also always end in disaster and almost never last more than 2 hours, right? and in real life you can recognize the voice of over fifty people talking over the radio at the same time instantly, too.
the times can be tweaked easily.

crank powered flashlights that only work while they're in your hand or something would be pretty neat. (else they'd be either too annoying (spam flashlight for one minute every ten minutes) or too op (activate flashlight once in hand, ten minutes of power).

also, i dont see any mention of PDA changes anywhere in that PR, are you seriously going to complain about changes that nobody ever mentioned except for an oldcoder in a joke three years ago? welp i didnt notice :V
I think that making it impossible to be really bright for the entire round makes light outages matter more, since they're a joke atm. also makes things more spooky when the lights are out.

As I said in the PR, while I'm not against the idea I feel that the difficulty in recharging the depowerd cells will be insanely high. Hence my suggestion to make the cells recharge while the flashlight is not on.

Also the PDA should have unlimited power, the amount of light it produces is only enough to go about two or so tiles out from the player.

Yeah the game is highly unrealistic Miauw. I love that. I don't like realism it can be tolerable but pseudo realism busybody nonsense boils my blood. Falling out the backside of reality into more of a chore than the real thing doesn't somehow equalise the preposterous nature into a realistic game and far from a balanced one. Ooh is steampunk next will we need to assemble our goggles our of mounds of cogs?

Mechanical power to electricity can also power batteries, you crank it like nuts then it slowly gets dimmer over time as charge is expended.

We're in 2500. Cetainly someone has already made a flashlight that can last more than five minutes?

This looks like another change seeking a purpose. What exactly will improve about gameplay with these changes? Its hard to tell by the tone of the OP, but no, "annoying" is not something that should be strived for.

Also consider, anything refillable is just as easily replaceable. I'm not going back to the station to refill a lantern when I can just carry two. All this will functionally do is cripple people for leaving PDA functions on...for some reason.

Yeah, I'm basically of the same voice.This change doesn't really strike me as improving the game, just adding some more micromanagement.

Give the miners another reason to not be outside mining, sounds like a great change. Keep slowing down acquisition of minerals in already the least interactive job on the station, forcing them to spend more time micromanaging a flashlight's fuel than getting shit back to science and robotics. *COUGH LEXORIN*

I am not seeing the point of this, really. More things to manage, tiny, annoying things that reduce utility. Nerfs that require you to seek upgrades in order to simulate the original functionality. These changes are tolerable, but irritating. I just hope it will not hurt the mining players too much.

There is absolutely no point to putting on the sever at all, this would be a feature of a RP heavy server, not a server where the power can go off at just about any time due to engineers being incompetent,traitors powersinking,Singloth Hungerings, or plain old grey tiding by smashing all the lights.

Stop making mining worse, damnit.

Please stop proposing change for the sake of changing something.

This is stupid.

Looks okay to me, you might need to buff the length of time a mining latern would last, so either give it a bigger fuel tank or make it consume slower. I think it should be a superior choice to the flashlight every time.

This is something that I would expect to not even go over well on Baystation. Unless they have it already, not a clue.

This is literally changing something that isn't broken for the sake of changing it. All this does is make the game less fun and miners considerably more useless than they have been since they need to fuck off to recharge lanterns every 5 minutes. Unless there is a reason for it that somehow makes sense I don't see the purpose of this outside of "lol realism".

The desire for realism and simulation of every little thing will going to kill this game server eventually.

Please stop trying to proxy-nerf science, if they can't get their RnD toys and slimes then they will just go rob the armory with telescience or make bombs again

I am not sure what is this PR supposed to achieve. It is just plain annoying change that won't bring any more fun to the gameplay.

Poorly thought out change that isn't actually trying to accomplish anything.

PDA's 2 range lightsource is meant to be the bare minimum unless you are naked, this was designed deliberately, with complete darkness being an opt in thing to avoid revealing your location. You need light to do things and light outages are about limiting vision range and safety, and not really about actually preventing you from doing anything. The PDA light isn't even meant to be a real flashlight, it seems more like you using your light up screen to see around.

Mining lanterns should not be completely inferior to flashlights, they are a unique job only tool designed to help miners mine. Honestly though there should be more reason for miners to be doing stuff on station if we want them to have unique tools involving vision, otherwise the mine should just start with light. However as Saegrimr said this slows down mining, which is a boring bottlekneck, even more.

Before this should even be considered, the question "What is this actually trying to do" must be answered. It looks like it is a pointless 'realism' change, but realism is not actually a good thing to try to emulate 1:1 for design. Realism is more a cost than a feature, something you give up for good gameplay tactically rather than something you seek out. Realism for realism's sake at the expense of gameplay is pointless.

AssassinT90 wrote:We're in 2500. Cetainly someone has already made a flashlight that can last more than five minutes?

There are real world flashlights that will not run out of power for years, provide massive amounts of light, fit on a keychain, and cost almost nothing. LED flashlights are IRL OP.

0/10
pointless
not fun
why
it'll get merged for sure

This is a bit silly...

I'm all for giving these things powercells or recharge times, but the numbers are way too low. Why would the mining lantern last around 5 minutes? You'd need to add more power cells all around, too, and probably lower the chances of LIGHTS OUT every round that blows up all of every department's lights...

It makes thermals and night vision (and mesons) infinitely more powerful too.

Lastly, I see no reason for this to be a thing. I mean, if you were going to add a flashlight battery or mining fuel lantern cost, make the former last 10 minutes on the smallest capacity battery and the latter subject to some sort of possible upgrade.

Night vision mesons for mining when?

One more interesting change IMO would be letting emp's effect all eletrical light sources (pda's/flashlight, but not lanterns/glowshrooms etc) in a way similar to headsets. Shuts them off, but you can turn them back on after a bit.

We right now, in modern times, have flashlights that will last the duration of a space station 13 round easily. So 500 years in the future, all functioning batteries were replaced with barely functioning shitty ones?

Wyzack wrote:We right now, in modern times, have flashlights that will last the duration of a space station 13 round easily. So 500 years in the future, all functioning batteries were replaced with barely functioning shitty ones?

Every time people make stupid posts like this questioning the nature of realism in a way that doesn't make any sense logically when you consider literally every other aspect of this game, I am personally wire-transferred $5,000

Don't give paprika money, think before you post.

I think it is good. Right now there's no reason not to have all the lights on unless you're hiding. Adds more use to flares. Opens up additional uses for EMP.

Now I wouldn't mind lings getting some kind of night vision and combined with EMP it could actually be good.

Frankly, lots of things could use power, including guns, hardsuits, health analyzers, etc.

This is possibly the most annoying unnecessary thing i've heard. Realism does not equal immersion. Mining especially doesn't need this, hell they don't even need a nerf. The game is already full of tedious actions that make game play more annoying then it has to be, we don't need more. Most of the jobs that require portable lighting are major arteries of game play. For example, mining supplies science with minerals, with this, there are things to do in science, without this, science stagnates. Xeno runs out of plasma, proto-lathe can't make anything that requires more than metal and glass. The only thing that can operate is toxins and Telescience, both of which only require one or two people, leaving two to three other people without something to do. It's already a weak spot for an tags to exploit (which is what you want), adding more annoyances that get in the way and prevent further game play, only clog the arteries.

However, i do like the idea of lights being knocked out by EMP, that gives counter play. (it might also give people more incentive to use EMPs for more than winning prizes at the arcade). Now as an antag, you have the ability to figuratively blind your opponents, with out making non-antags useless ever few minutes.

The battery's like that engineer glasses change, unnecessary and makes the game worse for no reason

But do please let EMPs shut off all lights like they shut off radios

Yeah, no to batteries. Yes to EMPs. Everything else has already been said.

The main issue with these things is that darkness is not threatening at all, everybody has built-in lights in their goddamn PDA.

Maybe we should come up with a better solution than this. EMP being the sole source of darkness isn't really ideal either, though.

How would people feel about removing PDA lights and increasing the amount of flashlights on the station?

That is actually not an awful idea. Or just make PDA lights piss-awful like they are on baystation. Have them light up your square and dimly light adjacent squares, that is all. That kind of lighting might even be more spoopy than complete darkness

Big problem with darkness is that there's no middle ground right now. Either things are too easy to see, or it's practically unplayable.

Random Players wrote:If my calculations are correct (Yes, I always wanted to say that) then on average a lantern will last four minutes and ten seconds (4:10). That's.... too low. Just too low.
The minimum with shitty luck would be one minute, fourthy seconds (1:40). The maximum with god tier luck would be Six minutes and fourthy seconds (6:40).

Your calculations are wrong. On average, the mining lantern will last 6:40, and with fantastic luck it will last the entire round.

That's what I get for using formulas I only half-remmember, I guess. A average of 6:40 is still far too low though.

Black screen so spook.

I am okay with EMP knocking out lights. Having PDAs, flashlights, and mining lanterns run out of fuel/battery is just pure dickery that serves no purpose other than to cause suffering. It doesn't ADD anything to the game-play experience, it doesn't promote or encourage any real changes in playstyle, it just dicks over mining for no fucking reason other than that the coders seem to hate it.

iyaerP wrote:I am okay with EMP knocking out lights. Having PDAs, flashlights, and mining lanterns run out of fuel/battery is just pure dickery that serves no purpose other than to cause suffering. It doesn't ADD anything to the game-play experience, it doesn't promote or encourage any real changes in playstyle, it just dicks over mining for no fucking reason other than that the coders seem to hate it.

if EMP knocks out light but you can just continue lighting up the entire screen by carrying a bunch of lights all the time, there's no point.

The idea with emp's is it would (temporarily) fuck all the (electronic) lights. Whether they're on or not when you emp them doesn't matter. Also who the fuck is going to hold a dozen torches in case they get repeatedly emp'd?
The real solution would be carrying around max potency glow berries/torch/lantern/other natural lights.