Donutstation

[carshalash]

Is every complaint people post about this map going to get brushed aside?

[MMMiracles]

if the complaint is from you or nox then yeah

[Horza]

Is every complaint people post about this map going to get brushed aside?

Yes. It's hip to act aloof and snarky at valid points that you can't answer.
The incinerator door system is still broken in the map, by the way. It always jams if you're trying to go from internal-external and you have to unweld your way out of the middle chamber.
The layout is fucked, unintuitive, maint is disproportionately huge for a mid-pop station, public botany is bizarre, regular botany doesn't even make lip service to providing stuff for the kitchen (aside from the who-cares change of finally giving kitchen/botany mutual access for once), kitchen is hilariously unfun to use because the sink is inside the fucking back room and the general layout is annoying, the bar has the same problem as box and delta where the soda/booze dispensers aren't accessible at the same time from a single tile, fire extinguisher slots are still super rare, the approach to medbay allows for an easily-destroyed cloning section while allowing for trivial access to secure storage, medbay also has a disproportionately enormous security room, the windows are all sorts of extremely fucked, the SM layout is really not fun to set up as an engineer while there's not enough free space to easily customize, and the map is so garbage in general that nobody ever treats it seriously.

All that huge run-on sentence is there to say that MMMiracles seriously needs to sit in on rounds in Sybil or even Bagil and actually read all the constant bitching that is going on by most of the actual userbase. It's all there, it's just that nobody wants to post on the forums just to have their concerns and complaints dismissed by Discount Oranges.

[MMMiracles]

if you think a giant circle is an unintuitive/confusing layout then god help you boy

the incinerator will forever be the bane of my existence though

[Denton]

I'll have a look at the incinerator once your recent Donut tweaks PR gets merged, the component IDs or pipes are probably just fucky

[Denton]

Yeah it was the vent pump subtype, fix PR is up.

[oranges]

if the complaint is from you or nox then yeah

based lmao

[Yakumo_Chen]

Telecomms server air alarm is not properly configured, it's just set to the default.

[Detective Google]

I honestly think we should have MMmiracles on and observe and forcemap the map to donut for a while and just watch how much everyone fucking *despises* donut

nobody takes this map seriously and it's basically treated as the new birdboat, Lets let goon keep donut and add a new and up to date map in it's place, Kilo, or CAPTTLasky's WIP map come to mind

valid criticism is important but why keep a map everyone fucking hates playing on

[oranges]

why does MMM have any more control over the server configs than any headadmin has?

[Tlaltecuhtli]

he owns the map

[Detective Google]

I honestly think we should have MMmiracles on and observe and forcemap the map to donut for a while and just watch how much everyone fucking *despises* donut

nobody takes this map seriously and it's basically treated as the new birdboat, Lets let goon keep donut and add a new and up to date map in it's place, Kilo, or CAPTTLasky's WIP map come to mind

valid criticism is important but why keep a map everyone fucking hates playing on

I meant have an admin force the map as donut and have him on to watch how it goes, not implying he had the power to magically force the map to donut with his mapper voodoo

[MMMiracles]

Dude I fuckin' love these kinds of complaints with nothing to work with past 'i don't like the map', almost as much as I love the complaints where people go on about ALL the issues with the map and when I actually get them to post an issue, it's something like 'well chemistry doesn't have a large beaker at roundstart' and suddenly run out of complaints.

I fully understand if you don't like the map due to the layout or how its structured but when I scroll through the community meeting and complaints are shit like "i hate the map because I don't know the layout" or "well other people consider it the bad map so that means admins can shit on the round so nobody actually learns the map", what the hell am I supposed to do with that? I only saw about 2-3 actual pieces of criticism during that segment of the community meeting with the rest being actually useless to work with. Like, damn man, if you got issues with the map I WANT to know what they are. I want to go through the same process Metacide did of literal years of tweaking to get Meta to where it is now, but I can't with the current shit show.

[Detective Google]

Dude I fuckin' love these kinds of complaints with nothing to work with past 'i don't like the map', almost as much as I love the complaints where people go on about ALL the issues with the map and when I actually get them to post an issue, it's something like 'well chemistry doesn't have a large beaker at roundstart' and suddenly run out of complaints.

I fully understand if you don't like the map due to the layout or how its structured but when I scroll through the community meeting and complaints are shit like "i hate the map because I don't know the layout" or "well other people consider it the bad map so that means admins can shit on the round so nobody actually learns the map", what the hell am I supposed to do with that? I only saw about 2-3 actual pieces of criticism during that segment of the community meeting with the rest being actually useless to work with. Like, damn man, if you got issues with the map I WANT to know what they are. I want to go through the same process Metacide did of literal years of tweaking to get Meta to where it is now, but I can't with the current shit show.

you can dislike a map for reasons other than it being actually flawed, departments might be in weird directions, or odd layouts, or in general you might just not enjoy playing it, which I don't.
I can't think of a reason or reasons why I don't like donut, It's just not particularly fun to play on, especially compared to the other maps we have.

[cacogen]

I don't like Donutstation and the only explanations I have for that is A) I don't know the layout (which is stupid I know, this is true of every new map) and B) It feels very barebones compared to other stations. It doesn't feel lived-in and I just find it boring.

It's good of you to be so open and receptive to feedback.

[MMMiracles]

I can understand to an extent how you feel about it being bare bones and I am trying to take steps to fix that (mostly maintenance currently), but do you have any examples of what makes you feel like that? I can see a few areas that could be touched up but otherwise I'm not entirely sure.

[deedubya]

The core issues with the map aren't going to be fixed with "minor adjustments" so to speak. The core concept is simply unappealing to people outside of memes. Considering that the reason the map got made was as a "SINGULOOSE EATING STATION FROM INSIDE OUT" meme, what else would you expect? If I had to pin down one major issue that rises above all the others, is that it's simply not intuitive or obvious where different departments are. This isn't just pinned down to "you don't know the map", this isn't really a major issue on other stations.(aside from pubby engineering, but I also dislike pubby) The core concept of a circular hall also just doesn't work very well. Like it or not, bored of it or not, squared off straight hallways work best in BYOND, and deviating from that just isn't appealing to the vast majority of the playerbase. Also, you can't just toss out "I dislike the map" as an invalid opinion. Most people aren't able to provide constructive criticism, and in some cases constructive criticism may not even help the core issue. If the majority of people dislike playing on a station, what's the point? The only time I ever see the map played is on medium-low pop on Sybil when people just want to troll the rest of the server.

...and before you go "meta good, other station bad", Box happens to be my favorite map. Delta, Kilo, and Mini are all also good and well laid out maps.

[MMMiracles]

Honestly, if that's how you feel about the map then there's not much I can do to cater it towards people who share your viewpoint. The map had a fairly decent response during creation/testing with the singularity being the main criticism originally (why I eventually changed to SM), so I don't exactly see where you get the 'only reason this map was made' argument.

If you struggle with finding departments when you either go left or right with relevant departments with some level of cohesion being close to each other, WITH an updated wiki page, then I can't help you. I don't think anyone can help you at that point, honestly. You have diagonal movement which makes the circular design super easy to traverse (I made sure that halls were always at least 3-wide and going wider if necessary). There is a subset of people who enjoy the map for not being standard, so I'll keep trying to cater to them while accommodating those who still prefer box-standard.

[deedubya]

To clarify my above post, I'm not trying to shit on you or your efforts in trying to create a unique map concept. Only trying to put into words why many players(including myself) hold a large disdain for the map. I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to have a "non-standard" map type in the game, but I do think it's a bit of an issue when the majority of players dislike playing on it.

[MMMiracles]

I wouldn't go as far as saying majority dislike it, more of there being a very vocal group who tend to be very assertive about shit they dislike in the game, for better or for worse. Either way, I try to fix these issues without straying too far from the original concept.

PR with various changes I've made based on both personal choice and feedback I've gotten. There's a full map of the update as well here. I'm considering this PR finished unless I get more criticism on the matter.

[deedubya]

I've already stated my view on the original concept itself, so I won't beat that horse any longer. So far, the PR looks pretty good, but I do have a laundry list of issues with xenobio.

1: There's only two slimes. Every other map comes with three. This makes starting out much more cumbersome.
2: The slime consoles are on the opposite end of the lab from the entire rest of the workplace. This makes working here extremely inconvenient with the starting layout.
3: Two freezers. Why is this even necessary? It looks like a waste of space.

How I would fix it: Move all the slime pens 2-3 blocks to the left. Delete the bottom freezer. Move the top freezer to the right of the new top slime pen location. Move both slime consoles to the right of the bottom slime pen location. Perhaps move a bio-locker so that they both flank the airlock, and shuffle around the machines/tables to look more cohesive and clean. This would put the layout of donut xenobio more on par with all the other maps.

[MMMiracles]

Something like this suit better?

[deedubya]

-snip-
Something like this suit better?

Honestly, that's more or less spot on. The only change I'd suggest there is to swap the locations of the killroom airlock and freezer to make it look cleaner/more sensical. For a mild nitpick; putting a table or the smart storage in between the two slime consoles would help a tiny bit. Otherwise, that's immediately a crap ton more convenient, and more in line with other xenobio layouts.

edit for my nitpick: Just noticed that would probably make the lower left glass table inaccessible, so if the nitpick is to be considered, you could also swap the locations of the water tank and the top right table.

edit the second: Behold my mspaint visualization:

[Reyn]

Theres a glitchy bit of something which resembles the cooling area of the sci tech server room in space for some inexplicable reason. Just gonna say that.

[MMMiracles]

yo what if i added a second floor with catwalk maintenance and hallway overhangs while redoing chunks of lower maintenance to accommodate it lmao

[Farquaar]

I dig it.

[deedubya]

What is this fresh hell you're about to bring upon us?

[PKPenguin321]

pls do a sewer/maint level below the main station in addition to catwalk maint

[MMMiracles]

On a more serious note from the last post: the first iteration is probably mostly going to be figuring out what works and what doesn't work. Stuff like chemistry's plumbing is currently sitting on the 2nd floor with ladder access with the rest of the area being harder to break flooring that mimics the station's exterior hull. Sensitive areas (i.e atmos, armory, toxins) have reinforced hull to make breaking in through the roof harder.

This project is probably gonna take a good minute but hopefully by then 513 will be stable enough and we'll have fixed some of the visual issues with openspace by then because honestly this is cool as shit to play around with.

[MMMiracles]

Right now I'm mostly fucking around with ideas while waiting on some of the more glaring visual issues to get fixed. Here's some screenshots of what I've been messing around with:

Blowing a hole in chemistry's plumbing room into the security office below

Spoiler:

2nd floor of the library, including private studies, a balcony view of the floor below, and a printer room

Spoiler:

Reworked armory floor 1

Spoiler:

Reworked armory floor 2

Spoiler:

Some idea of a permabrig overlook so officers can treat it like the gladiatorial arena that is actually is.

Spoiler:

Maintenance balcony/catwalk section

Spoiler:

I've replaced the overhead maintenance bit with a secondary primary hallway so I can more easily connect all the upper floor rooms for public access. This also means 1-2 primary elevators and an array of ladders to travel through the levels. Stairs feel way too easy to break the illusion of upwards/downwards movement so I'm probably gonna avoid those entirely unless someone has a nice way of accomplishing them in a completely destructible environment.

[Jalleo]

I honestly would like some "maint" rooms that are actually abandoned rooms connected to the hallways if this happens. Just to make the station seem more ancient and badly maintained.

[Farquaar]

Blowing a hole in chemistry's plumbing room into the security office below

Spoiler:

I know this post is a bit old, but allowing anybody with a crowbar and welder to deconstruct one floor tile for an easy entrance into the would be a major headache for security.

The other screenshots look pretty awesome though.

[Sandshark808]

Blowing a hole in chemistry's plumbing room into the security office below

Spoiler:

I know this post is a bit old, but allowing anybody with a crowbar and welder to deconstruct one floor tile for an easy entrance into the would be a major headache for security.

The other screenshots look pretty awesome though.

I think that's just the medbay lobby security kiosk. No biggie.

[MMMiracles]

Blowing a hole in chemistry's plumbing room into the security office below

Spoiler:

I know this post is a bit old, but allowing anybody with a crowbar and welder to deconstruct one floor tile for an easy entrance into the would be a major headache for security.

The other screenshots look pretty awesome though.

Exterior sections have a special flooring with higher blast resistance and extra deconstruction steps. Secure areas like Security have a reinforced version of this that's even more annoying to deconstruct. Both variants cannot be RCD'd at the moment. Breaking in through the ceiling is going to be a lot more difficult since it's pretty much one of the sneakiest ways into a room right now but requires some actual prepwork.

[Farquaar]

Exterior sections have a special flooring with higher blast resistance and extra deconstruction steps. Secure areas like Security have a reinforced version of this that's even more annoying to deconstruct. Both variants cannot be RCD'd at the moment. Breaking in through the ceiling is going to be a lot more difficult since it's pretty much one of the sneakiest ways into a room right now but requires some actual prepwork.

Yeah, I hope you can figure it out. If you can't see them coming, then the problem persists no matter how long it takes to deconstruct the floor. The need for some sort of measure of counterplay against bombers, assassins and thieves that come from above will be a constant across all multi-Z maps, and not many people have given it much thought.

[Sandshark808]

There should be a notification if someone decons the floor above you.

[deedubya]

I heavily disagree with the armory being out of sight of the warden, nevermind most of it being on a completely different z-level. It'll make it far too easy for the armory to be looted.