DIRTSTATION 2015

[dezzmont]

Bottom post of the previous page:

Could a project manager comment on the actual change and policy on this situation? I would like to move treating this situation as the coder abandoning the change and it being fair game to removed without their consent.

[paprika]

Could a project manager comment on the actual change and policy on this situation? I would like to move treating this situation as the coder abandoning the change and it being fair game to removed without their consent.

I would like to move you not making shit up, I've made adjustments to this and have continued to do so. Anything is fair game to be removed without a contributor's consent, if the maintainers/head coders find it necessary. I don't 'own' this dirt feature. But it's perfectly fine as it stands and I'm still collecting feedback from observing rounds.

Bitching a lot =/= something getting removed. Give me some decent arguments for that because I've already presented my reasons for this feature several times over and I'm sick of explaining it to people who are kneejerk reactionary to anything I do.

[MisterPerson]

Could a project manager comment on the actual change and policy on this situation? I would like to move treating this situation as the coder abandoning the change and it being fair game to removed without their consent.

I don't have any real personal opinion about this change, I just didn't realize how awful this thread had become until earlier today when I actually decided to read the damn thing.

[dezzmont]

At the request of the contributor who made this change, I present every single argument against it not solely based on "It is ugly," spoilered because it is literally as long as some research papers I have written. Well done /tg/ community for generating this much content on this issue, much of it actually well thought out and insightful. Please enjoy. Forgive some personal annotation near the end, I felt like some of them needed some support all things considered. I also recognize that many of the points near the beginning were somewhat adressed, which is very good. However I included them simply to counter the myth that this thread is all pointless bitching about aethstetic, which is never pointless bitching considering aethstetic direction is a very large component in creating a good game feel.

Spoiler:

This is weird change, there's no reason that clean shoes walking on a clean tile is suddenly going to produce dirt out of no where.

I can get behind dirty shoes from the asteroid or someone in space making dirt tiles, but this is too much.

Where does all the dirt come from? Shoes are not magic dirt dispensers. Would it be practical for example, to causing people to track dirt after walking on say, the asteroid/soil tiles etc?

Of all the bay features to steal.

If we're going to keep this can we get rid of randomly spawned messes at round start? Yeah there's two jannys now but they can't keep up with the messes of even a 30 person crew when blood and dirt is encrusted on literally every floor tile. We actually had three janitors the other night on basil and even with just a 30 person crew there was still too much dirt.

Best part about this feature is the fact people can run in a circle to generate infinite piles of dirt, essentially making the janitor's efforts futile.

Playing a Janitor that's trying to do their job might as well be synonymous with ban-baiting with the way things currently are. Dirt shows up far too quickly.

Also it looks like the pubes of the elderly on certain tiles, but oh well.

You'd think the infinite blood trails constantly everywhere was enough work.

Maybe if cleaning a single hallway as a janitor didn't take 5ever with a mop I wouldn't be too upset with this.

If this was reworked it could be a interesting game play mechanic.

Just for example, if dirt could only be tracked from maintenance and the mining station. It could be a boon to security's investigation scope, for example if a crime was committed in maintenance recently and you arrest a suspect and find that their feet are covered in dust and dirt, or their hands are dirty from cleaning their shoes, it would add a interesting layer of complexity.

But right now I really dislike how dirt is just magically created just by walking down a hall.

There was some talk at one point (I don't think I've got record of it anywhere on hand) of styling changelings to be more like Mush. We add a "dirty" status that crops up from doing certain job and non-job related things and is removed by washing/showering. Using certain abilities would also cause dirty status and etc etc etc.

A dirty status and bloodied status on doing certain actions certainly would add a lot to forensics and make keeping the station clean a thing without how silly dirtstation is. Infinitely generating dirt from shoes is... yeah... At most it should be based on going on dirty maint tiles and going into space or the mines for a limited time.

Why do people keep saying 'infinitely generating dirt from shoes' when you don't need to be wearing shoes to dirty floor tiles?

The shoes part wasn't the important part you were supposed to be focusing on there pap.

thats even worse, because it implies that people must have dirt glands on their feet that slowly produce dirt out of nowhere

Why do people keep saying 'infinitely generating dirt from shoes' when you don't need to be wearing shoes to dirty floor tiles?

This statement doesn't make me think any higher of the change.

At least shoes being dirty makes sense, kinda, but not really.

The fact that the dirt infinitely spawns from nowhere is why this was very poorly implemented. It is open to tomfoolery like running laps around the station to deliberately make everything dirty forever.

Considering how openly exploitable and nonsensical this change is, and how absolutely non-vital spawning dirt is, wouldn't a revert be in order?

Or at least change it to a tile scuffing code rather than a dirt code, with a new sprite. Still can be wiped by the janitor, but doesn't leave actual miracle conservation of matter violating dirt, and instead shows wear on commonly walked paths.

No Assistant is going to start cleaning the floors just because they become dirty now. No amount of Janitors could keep up with the rate at which dirt spawns. Even if they could, its pretty boring work cleaning up endless halls of dirty tiles.

The mechanic is purely an annoyance mechanic and a poorly made one at that due to the weird effects and behaviors it creates.

It lowers the overal quality of the code. The change needs to be defended and justified considering how many people are pointing out what are inarguably flaws.

Again, why couldn't this be taken out considering the fact it is by all accounts broken? What does this actually add to the janitor job? Janitors already give up on trying to clean bloodtrails once they realize the work is hopeless, why would they try to keep the station clean when dirt infinitely spawns out of my toenails?

Does anyone seriously think that janitor players would get any real enjoyment out of the halls being endlessly dirty? And does this actually enhance the appeal of messes in any way if they are so common? Seeing blood or dirt in a place should be shocking and disgusting, not par for the course. Even blood trails smearing the entire hallways have the value of being somewhat shocking and requiring... special materials... to pull off. This is just dirt.

Ive never had a problem keeping the station clean as a Janitor. Cleaning up blood and rubbish is what i expect to do, and im fine with that. Running around endlessly cleaning a hallway however does not sound like fun. That doesnt even include the workplaces Janitors do not have access to, which will probably remain dirt-covered for the entire round.

I dont think this dirt mechanic is anything more than an annoyance. I feel that Janitors were fine before this update. They do not need to be essential to the station to be fun.

Even the monkies make too much dirt... and that's just two of them.

Move the dirt up to 300 times walking over a tile and I'll be happy. I fucking hate this change. The entire station being covered in dirt in every fucking workway hallway is unbearable. No Janitor could clean the station. I mean look at science xenobio has two huge ass trails then it gos int oscience hallway to the research lab and then out the door. I can only imagine the fucking prison.

I joined a round last night where chemistry looked like it was cult floors, no joke.

This change needs to go. Dirt happens in everyday life on earth because it gets tracked in from outside. On a controlled environment like a space station, the only places dirt should be coming from would be the public gardens and the asteroid.

This change wouldn't be so bad if cleaning didn't take a fuckton of time. Even soap got nerfed so it takes an annoying amount of time. Spray bottles are tolerable but constantly need refilling at chemistry.

Move the dirt up to 300 times walking over a tile and I'll be happy. I fucking hate this change. The entire station being covered in dirt in every fucking workway hallway is unbearable. No Janitor could clean the station. I mean look at science xenobio has two huge ass trails then it gos int oscience hallway to the research lab and then out the door. I can only imagine the fucking prison.

A 1 in 300 chance means that on an average 60 population round where the average person moves 1 tile a second, you are generating 1 dirt every 6 seconds on the station somewhere. That is still a rather high rate of dirt and it is going to generally be happening in areas the janitor lacks access to and in a non-centralized area.

Got my hands on some soap the other day and literally spent the entire round cleaning Medbay as a Medical Doctor. THE ENTIRE ROUND.

It was hilariously bad. Find a different solution, please.

If you take a step back from everything watching the community argue janitor related changes is one of the most surreal and hilarious things about this game. Four pages of discussing the merits of there being too much or too little dirt in a video game.

The argument goes both ways. It is only your personal opinion that this is a small issue. For others, the janitor job is now broken, and some people don't enjoy having the immersions ruined because the station looks like Ian scooted around the entire thing. Lots are arguing for the revert of this PR, but paprka is arguing just as much for it.

Humans generate dust yes. Mainly by losing hair and skin just you know churning our dead cells walking around isn't what releases it. Being stepped on actually disturbs the dust slightly so if we are talking skin particles and all that in a used area it would actually congregate on the less used surfaces.

Just sayin, the amount of dirt this "feature" assumes humans produce is roughly akin to Pigpen from the Peanuts cartoons.

It depends on how you think about gameplay.

It definitely harms janitor gameplay and removes a lot of incentive to try, so in that sense it is bad. Gameplay isn't all about conflict and combat, dirt is in fact a part of gameplay to a certain degree for most jobs and defines gameplay for one.

But you could also look at it from the lens of aesthetic direction and game feel, and by that account it is really damn ugly and feels wrong.

There hasn't really been a good defense for this change rather than "Eh?" which isn't very compelling. Instead of saying "Oh whatever" why not try to explain what this adds to the game experience? Because the agreement seems to be "No benefit, either no loss or minor loss." Meaning at best for most people it adds nothing to their experience and at worst it remvoes something.

"It isn't completely ass" or "Well I mean it doesn't really affect anything important negatively" is hardly a defense of the change.

Also, calling this a few dozen dirt stains is dumb when hundreds of dirt tiles are created every minute. That is a bit more than "a few dozen."

apparently me adding dirt from people walking over tiles a lot to make the janitor more fun and dynamic is a terrible feature

How often do you play janitor? Because the mess you're dealing with was insurmountable enough already without adding more.

Pretty often, you can clear everywhere you have access to (barring like, all of maint) in about 10 minutes with the space cleaner backpack.

I can believe that on slow rounds. But when there is a lot of blood, such as during high pop rounds, the 750u you start with (backpack tank, and spray bottle) run out very quickly. That's when the mess becomes insurmountable, because you're either waiting on chemistry every 3 minutes or you're using the slow mop (even the advanced mop is too slow) and having to deal with the ire of the crew.

IMO the backpack tank should hold way more cleaner and be refillable at cargo. Someone pointed out in IRC a long time ago that a tank that size would hold a lot more liquid than two spray bottles worth. So there would be a narrative reason to change it too.

Taken out of order because I love this one.

When I have to deleted 2000 dirt piles every ten minutes at high pop there is a problem. It looks like shit, clutters anything on a dirty tile and demonstrates an inherently problematic coder policy of having an idea of something to change and doing it. It seems that some people just think of A THING and merge it because they thought of it and made it and that's it. Can we get some thought behind changes because I find the fact this has been defended in any way ludicrous.

I'm literally under the impression that this is some kind of satire because I can't quite comprehend why some of these things are being said or happening. It's absurd.

No dirt is not a big deal, but that's not an excuse to not fix things. Some thought about the actual necissity of these changes needs to be made.

Here is the post you respond to for your rousing and in dept defense of this change:

Paprika, please elaborate as to why you think this change is a good one. The only reason I can find that you've given to this is essentially that you did this to intentionally provoke the community.

The Janitor is one of my most played roles along side the Medical Doctor but below Security. What this has done is create a unnecessary amount of work for a job that already has a large amount of work to do, the station is inheriently messy just from how the round progresses, yet now there's a even more obnoxious layer of a mess that has to be cleaned up as well.

Please provide a actual, sound, reasoning as to why you support this change. You gave no reason in the initial PR, no good reason in this thread (barring the "I did it to make u mad") and no good reason in game or in any follow up PRs. Because otherwise if even you can't defend your change that does not devolve into personal attacks, I don't see a reason why it cannot be reverted.

Here is your response:

It shouldn't be reverted because it adds more depth to the janitor job by having dirt generation that doesn't require people to die and be dragged around like corpses.

The issue is you didn't defend this change at all. You didn't actually adress any of the problems with the change or why it should be implimented THIS way. You just want a change like this one in the game.

Which is... fine! I fully agree with you that there should be some more standard mess generation! It makes a lot of sense as a concept and would make the janitor job better. But that statement doesn't defend THIS change, it defends the idea of having something like this change, and there is a huge difference.

FInally, here are some meta arguments as to why "It is reall bad looking" is in fact, some valid feedback:

Paparika, when you make a change that effects the aesthetics and look of the entire station, complaining about how it LOOKS is valid feedback, because it is an aesthetic change. And it looks really shitty. Especially since unlike the blood trails we already have, this change tends to generate the dirt in areas that janitor can't get to.

Here is how you responded:

Paparika, when you make a change that effects the aesthetics and look of the entire station, complaining about how it LOOKS is valid feedback, because it is an aesthetic change. And it looks really shitty. Especially since unlike the blood trails we already have, this change tends to generate the dirt in areas that janitor can't get to.

blood trails don't appear anywhere but hallways and maint you heard it here first folks

This is an impressively huge red herring because it never adressed the core argument and went off onto a tangent, and the tangent doesn't even make sense in some ways because it assumes that what they meant about blood trails was that the mess was mostly localized to hallways, instead of localized in high security areas.

I don't actually expect anyone to respond to this actually impressive and, in some ways, inspiring body of argument. That would drive me insane, and I have literally written a post on the /tg/station forums that I worked into an essay. The point of this body is to dispell any misunderstandings about the level of detail people have bothered to put into feedback for you. Considering that complaint is still in the thread, I believe attempting to adress it is a valid use of our time, correct?

EDIT: Actually spoilered.