/tg/Station 13

AI multi-cam mode has been enabled for a trial period of time on the servers, which started a little more than a week ago.
This trial period is going to end on October 22nd, 2018. At the end of the period, it will be evaluated if the feature will stay enabled.
Your feedback is important - the feedback in this thread will determine whether or not the feature will remain enabled.
Let me know if you have any questions/concerns.

Please keep it enabled.

the only valid complaint I've seen is it encouraging AIs to become lawbots. every other aspect of multicam is a downgrade to AI's normal viewing, for the sake of protection over a shockingly few amount of areas. An AI only has access to a maximum of 6 different multicam windows. it's not like they can fill their screen with every single high security area and expect to not be fish-eyed the whole round.

for the sake of honesty, I do use this to lawbot in a way. I watch my upload, the armory, and tech storage where the AI upload board is almost all the time if I use multicamera mode, but you have to keep in mind I'm only seeing a 4x4 square when I do it. if a traitor is sincerely dead-set on getting into these rooms, there is very little I can do past frantically bolting doors / alerting security. every traitor who knows what he's doing has already planned for these things. seriously. just take off your ID and wear a gas mask. you have completely beaten the system. I don't think a feature like this would upset game balance in any noticeable negative way.

a far better usage of this is to multi-cam on doors people beg to be let out of all the time, like cloning/brig/etc.

Can the AI still move around as per normal or does he have to select the cam manually?

BeeSting12 wrote:Can the AI still move around as per normal or does he have to select the cam manually?

AI has to select a "focused" cam which moves around like normal. Unfocused cams dont track people for instance, and are only there to watch over the area you point them at. They can switch the focused cam at will, but it's finnicky like I said if you're trying to track someone.

So long as multicam stays as a window separate from "mobile cam" it's fine.

Its aggressively okay, the limitations make it feel like a proper trade.

The obnoxiousness of using it is a fairly good offset for a very limited multitask ability. If we were to force ais to use this full time I suspect we would be accused of nerfs. That should tell you just about everything you need to know about its balance, a decent but cumbersome tool.

Hell for perfect balance you could let the ai detector attack tiles and walls to test if the ai can see them

not gonna lie fampais it's pretty shit because of how tiny the cameras are if you use more than 1 at a time at that point you might as well just use normal mode. note that this is coming from me, the guy who plays DORF FORTRESS, an AI that reports EVERY stationwide happening down to someone smashing a lightbulb or slipping.

iamgoofball wrote:a far better usage of this is to multi-cam on doors people beg to be let out of all the time, like cloning/brig/etc.

or you know just set cloning to emergency access but brig should have the warden in it anyways

It's honestly nowhere OP like people said it would be. You have to switch between free-cam and multi-cam so you'd have to know ahead of time someone would be there, or get lucky, to catch people on the multicam if you're watching a secure area. It does expedite door opening of doors in remote parts of the station though.

i was excited to try it but actually it's just clunky to the point of being unusable
i only tried it once, but it's hard to tell it where the multicam zone should be centred and then it just expands how it wants instead of letting you draw a box around the area you want to watch

It's obstinately of limited value using them to watch any secure area, as you want your primary camera to be as large as you can, leaving the other viewports to be 4x4 at best. Anything you would really want a camera for as lawbot / powergame reasons (like your AI core itself, or the armoury) won't be useful in any preventative measure (if you can see someone three tiles from your AI core it's already too late, not to mention you'll physically hear them coming) or already have numerous security measures and it won't be much better (you might spot someone getting in the armoury but unless it's dead station on box there's already a full sec force and armsky to protect it and you get motion alarms anyway).

I'd say it's probably more useful as an antag (where you have much different things you probably want to keep an eye on) or, as above, to watch common areas for entry requests, or maybe the comms consoles to see which asshole is trying to recall for the 40th time.

And the tradeoff feels pretty high too, the ability to view things is the AI's primary tool and having the primary viewport be smaller means you are more liable to miss something important you're passing by.

I agree, it's a really neat concept, but I ended up really only using it for the sake of using it. I can set it on the Armory, but then I usually forget to check it. If I get a motion sensor alert, I can just click the link. If someone is asking often to have a particular door open, it's just as quick to click their name as it is to click the multi-cam button.

A hotkey to toggle multi-cam on and off could help...

Truth be told, if I could just have a RTS-style minimap of the station that I could click to jump my camera to, that would be all I could ever ask for as an AI.

ultimately like many tools, not nearly as big a deal as it was made out to be

Not having it as a popout separate window made it less viable.

Maybe a compromise is having a popout for the multicam that only cycles a number of presets (you hotkey after roundstart) similar to a five nights at freddy's. Pressing 1 through N give you that locked in feed.

Due to mostly positive feedback, this will stay enabled. Our biggest concern was it being used as an unbalanced tool for silicon powergaming, but it seems that worry was unfounded.
As for the concerns with just *how* useful it is, that's more of a code problem and doesn't quite intersect with the concerns we had when starting this trial.
Thank you all for your contributions to this thread!