Away Missions Spinoff

[paprika]

Edit: This is not a ship-focused game. This is a game where the rounds are built around away missions rather than them being a sidenote feature. Thanks!

Presenting the spiritual successor to Space Station 13, this time coded in the classic platform dream maker!

Three decades since the Plasma Wars of the '50s, space is cold. Nanotrasen and the Syndicate, the largest interplanetary conglomerates of mining corporations are locked in a territory stalemate since the arms race has reached a point of 'planet cracker' S-WMD deterrence.

You are a crew member enlisted with the WOLF CORPS, an 'elite' paramilitary organization that is privately contracted to the highest bidder. Along with your team of privateers, take on missions, explore the relics of the old war, and survive!

Space Ship 13 is a total conversion but builds on the concepts that made Space Station popular. Multiple roles, rounds, playable antags, and a dangerous environment make the experience similar while having a distinctly different round flow. The primary map is a movable vessel that transits between z-levels, ditching the stale concept of escape pods and escape shuttles.

The rounds have a universal round timer, which will end the round if ticked to 00:00. This means each mission has a time limit by default, but this can be disabled if the mission is more roleplay-oriented and you anticipate longer rounds. Admins can also disable the round timer if need be.

The missions also end instantly if the mission's goal is complete, whether that be collecting an object, killing enemies, or doing those things and then escaping in the ship afterwards. Mission creators can set their round-end goals to be anything.

This is where Space Ship 13 really breaks off from Space Station to create a much better environment for community content as well as server independence.

Replacing gamemodes, events, mining, and away missions is the new 'missions' system. This is the focal point of all SSh13 rounds: independently created, server-side missions with customizable mission timers, title screens, multi-zlevel transition support, as well as self-packaging custom assets. Think of ArmA scenarios.

Any custom .dmis, .dms, sound files, et cetera are packaged with the mission map files themselves and #included using the mission .dm, which also sets the title of the mission. The only thing required of missions is that they have a timer and at least one landing zone for the Space Ship itself.

Why is this beneficial?

It allows people to make custom content that is the focus of the rounds while also allowing custom content creators to circumvent github politics. You do not need to contribute to the main Space Ship 13 github in order to create custom weapons, roles, et cetera. All you need to do is make custom files and package them with your mission, ala 'ministation'. This allows for missions to totally transform the rounds, as well as have incredible secrets and exploration since the missions are server-sided and ran by the host of the server. Obviously, you can release your missions for other servers to use as well.

Missions can be anything. The default mission packaged with Space Ship 13 is 'stranded', my personal template mission that involves collecting fuel rods for the ship's engine from several wreckages of space stations. Missions can be gamemodes or have custom antags included, as well as roles for observers.

Once the game has finished the first alpha tests, my code will be released on github for collaboration and mission-making. You can contribute to the main project, but ideally the github project will be 80% bugfixes and code improvements, 20% features. This is because features will be made inside of custom missions made by communities of servers who host Space Ship instead of everyone screaming at each other that security jumpsuits should definitely be red!!!

The idea is that the github is where improvements to the ship(s) themselves and the roles are made so that missions have their own testing periods and don't break the base game. If a mission is broken, it can just be removed until the creator fixes it.

Playable alpha of the ship, mostly completed roles, and placeholder assets is expected to be around winter this year. I'm pretty far along coding myself, but obviously things will go faster once the code is up on github.

Media coming soon.

[ShadowDimentio]

Is this one of your memes Paprika

I feel like Walt Disney every time he wakes up from cryo, excitedly asking if the Jews are finally dead yet, and then going back to sleep sad when they aren't

[paprika]

No, this is something I've really worked on for the past few months. I've realized that rather than changing ss13 I should just make the version of ss13 I've always wanted to play which is focused around the away missions concept and not antags so much. I think ss13 has a problem with stagnation and lack of creative content because while I think gamemodes like Clock Cult take a tremendous amount of effort to make, if they're only played a few rounds out of 100 it's a waste of potential where missions can be played whenever you want since they're not secret. The secrecy comes from the missions themselves, which are serverside and unexplorable by observers.

[ShadowDimentio]

So Goof away missions but the entire game

Well you've got me interested

[Reece]

So almost like Destiny? The doees the ship 'jump' away from it's location?

[Zilenan91]

Who will take the time to make this content and map everything out though, SS13 doesn't exactly have a massive playerbase to keep something like this healthy,

[Ricotez]

like all SS13 remakes I'll believe it when I see play it

[InsaneHyena]

> It's another SS13 remake

Yeah, sorry, no. I don't believe anymore.

[Super Aggro Crag]

If it keeps crapkrika away from the tgstatiom codebase I'm all for it.

[AnonymousNow]

Seems neat. Might attract the powergamers who get bored if there's nothing to kill.

[TheNightingale]

Open source?

[Gamarr]

I'm all for the ss13 engine/codebase being used for something, whether this materializes or not. Considering such things myself before, one thing that it can benefit from is spriting. Away missions and all that I think can be done with what is present. One limiting factor however is the somewhat low amount of natural environments.

[Bawhoppennn]

empty promises

[paprika]

Thankfully my passion project doesn't require any approval from you guys

At the very least I can probably manage to do CM better than CM once I finish datum antags

[PKPenguin321]

[oranges]

That's probably the greatest ss13 related image I have ever seen.

[paprika]

It's a lot funnier considering I made this thread in celebration of getting unbanned in the first place

Too bad someone's jealous they didn't think of it first

[paprika]

Anyway here's a progress update on what I have done in preparation for working alpha tests.

The system I've developed for missions is a lot more modular than I originally had it a few months ago, rather than hardcoding a lot of stuff there's seperate mission datums (much like gamemode datums) that determine the round flow. The mission datums are tied to the maps and can be customized with separate proc checks independent of the master gamemode controller which is just a modified 'extended' gamemode right now (because of a lack of patience for dealing with the shit gamemode code).

Antags are datumized and it's easy when you don't have to convert a lot of pre-existing antags to datums. I think initially I'm going to stick with allowing users to choose whether or not they'd like to be considered for antag in a general pref because of the nature of antag datums being tied to the missions themselves. I'd make generic 'traitors' and shit but I think that would undermine the nature of variety I'm setting up.

I don't really expect people to contribute to this initially until I run more public playtests that's not just me and a few people I know helping me with asset work but at the very least this absurd effort in byond's shit language will make it easier for myself down the line.

I implemented this system here: https://tgstation13.org/phpBB/viewtopic ... 53#p171853 as well since it was fairly easy to code.

[calzilla1]

So, FTL13?

[paprika]

I wish byond had the capacity for the kind of events and dynamic ship gameplay that FTL has. It'd make it a lot more fun. The ship is only a glorified shuttle right now and probably will remain that way for quite some time, so don't get your hopes up. I initially wanted something a lot more focused on the ship, maintaining it, and inter-ship gameplay, but ultimately byond is not made for that kind of shit. I mean, you could code that in theory, but not on top of ss13 which is the only thing I'm super familiar with. Working on a mod for ss13 that's more focused on away missions and co-op/semiPVP dungeon crawling is more what this is about.

[calzilla1]

FTL13.com
Someone is already doing it lel

[paprika]

I'm glad that I'm not the only person who knows the way forward for this game is the end of the station grief lotto.

I'm probably gonna be renaming this project to 'away mission' since it's more of a continuation of that and will probably be less confusing to the people who think I'm making a moveable space station.

[Wyzack]

This is a pretty friggin ambitious project, but it seems like you have already made some good headway on it and honestly if you pull it off it is gonna be fucking cool as shit. Would love to see this come together

[oranges]

It's not that ambitious, 99% of the framework exists within ss13 code anyway. They're just adding a new gameplay wrapper to replace our roundbased one.

[onleavedontatme]

The ambitious part is getting enough people to make missions, and not halfass/rush them, which was one of the biggest problems with away missions in ss13.

[paprika]

The reason they were halfassed and rushed is because there was no framework to add custom content to make away missions interesting

Even one with a ridiculous amount of time put into it like MO13 still was limited as fuck to baseline, var-edited assets. Just ask WJ.

Also what Oranges says. The reason a pleb like me can code this without much issue is due to the diligent work of coders like Carn and Coiax and their work on the shuttles system. Credit where it's due, I'm mostly modifying their code.

An example is here:



I've packaged 'stranded' by itself. All the assets (sprites for the radioactive engine fuel rods you need to collect for the ship to win the mission) are packaged with it. If another mission wanted to use it all they'd have to do is copy the content. Obviously this wouldn't be possible if the missions were 100% serversided, but mission creators can obviously share their assets if they decide to do so and people want to use them without sharing the map file itself to preserve secrets or surprises. My missions will be fully open sourced so people can pull from them but my code is shite so it doesn't matter much.

Almost all of the ship assets will be global and in the codebase itself.

WARNING: don't get your hopes up. My coding is messy and shit. Fortunately you won't need to worry about my lack of code standards or /tg/'s because as long as your shit works and doesn't break the game it's accepted. This should facilitate content creation too. I'm not trying to make a dig at /tg/ here, this would be a good place for people to practice making ss13 content without needing to shit up /tg/.

[Remie Richards]

Even one with a ridiculous amount of time put into it like MO13 still was limited as fuck to baseline, var-edited assets. Just ask WJ.

WJ is the reason his stuff doesn't have custom content, he refuses to learn, despite hanging out in coderbus all the time surrounded by plenty of people willing to help.
You know this pap we've worked together on stuff and I've helped you with questions.

It's the one thing I'll always put WJ down for, he asks for custom stuff but isn't willing to learn.

[paprika]

I'm not gonna speculate on WJ or any other coder. It was probably wrong to use him as an example. All I know is that the desire to make interesting custom shit on an easy framework is there (I personally have this desire) so I think this project will facilitate that for a lot of people.

My experiences in coding for /tg/ (as much of a joke as it is to a lot of people) taught me that trying to cram shit into this game and change it turns it into a bloody corpse of what it used to be. I'd rather just make my own thing and let people join me if they have similar desires. I feel like a lot of coders take heat for this too, so maybe it's a better idea to allow them to make their content in a vacuum and we can all gather 'round and enjoy it together without having to worry about it 'ruining /tg/'.

[nsos]

Playable alpha of the ship, mostly completed roles, and placeholder assets is expected to be around winter this year.

i think u made this thread too soon but GL

[paprika]

Better than people asking what codebase I'm working for when I ask them code questions, but yeah, it will probably be sooner than that in any case

[PKPenguin321]

memes aside this looks pretty cool good job pap

[oranges]

also even if it doesn't zoom off to a bold new era, it should provide trickleback in the form of either content that can be away missions or space ruinized.

[paprika]

Since /tg/ is going through some serious growing pains right now (64x sprites, higher fps, etc) I'm going to wait for those things to be developed before continuing this. /tg/ is still the codebase I'm basing off of and I want to wait for a lot of those big features that might make a lot of this work obsolete.

I developed this system in a vacuum, so I can add them to a branch on /tg/ if need be eventually. This thread is early but I just want people to know that away missions are getting a proper successor, one day, eventually, soontm.

[cocothegogo]

this seems like it could be a really cool idea, like landing a ship on a planet to get resorces to do r&d and do bigger and better missions

as long as there is chances of space pirates that can attack you in space that would be cool