Re: Chemistry is a disease
Posted: Tue Jan 22, 2019 8:08 pm
Bottom post of the previous page:
also don't think I am not aware of issues with xeniobio, they just happen to be another threadBottom post of the previous page:
also don't think I am not aware of issues with xeniobio, they just happen to be another threadruinssomerandomguy wrote:WhatShadowflame909 wrote:Assistants can get nukie hardsuits and one pulse pistol
How
That sounds broken as hell
I'm sure the folks it should matter to will find a way to blow it off.Shadowflame909 wrote:Can't disagree with that thinking.
I think you're imagining apparatus much bigger than I actually intended, these would be two/three square table scale sets, the interfaces you mentioned are not far off the mark for the kind of chaining systems I'm thinking about, I'm just saying they should have real on station physical "item" equivalents, not just exist soley inside an abstract tgui interface.Jegub wrote: Having a set of reconfigurable physical apparatus could create mapping headaches and wouldn't address availability, if the goal is to increase complexity this could be achieved by having extra processing methods within the interface. Separating the input and fabrication would make it harder to blow your arm off, sadly, perhaps incautiously made products could become unstable at the point of handling. Manufacturing more useful precursors could take place in a separate controlled environment and require personal attention to provide the primary risk factor.
Agree, any kind of copypaste gameplay shoudl be strongly avoided, I regret macros, they were not something I should have been keen on.Macros worry me, beyond the inability to check them after entry; they are basically there to bypass the actual method. They risk ending up with a few people using the feature to build enough generic strings that subsequent players then copy and paste, taking no interest in how they were devised or what other possibilities there could be. Then the job calcifies because no one is engaging with it directly, shades of telescience. There was justification for allowing circuit schematics to be input because of how complex they could become, and being able to store and share chemical processes between networked users could work well, but constructing them should be done in-game to ensure engagement and give some human value to the output.
I appreciate this, but surely the chemist would come to botany or xenobio to request and then get reagent sourcesThere's the social aspect of someone making a request and then seeing someone fulfil it for them, a reminder that they are in a living system that requires cooperation and interaction to function. The physical distance between mining and science made having a means of transferring materials indirectly a suitable solution to the logistics involved. I don't know whether it would be preferable to have departmental hoppers that process resources and transfer them to a station-wide pool in a similar manner, but there are times when even a minute or two away from your plants can mean returning to a host of problems.
The general trend I want to aim for is longer rounds, not shorter, I appreciate that it can be unfortunate to not be able to react to *every* single situation, but good gameplay arises where tradeoffs are required to be made, and you have to think about what you actually want to acheive during a round, you can definitely retool a production line, but I don’t think it should be an instantaneous thing.Above all any changes would need to preserve responsivity. When a blob mutates and you have a dozen people coming in with severe burns there isn't really time to wrangle soxhlets in order to gear up for the revised situation. If the station just got several big holes punched in it and there are no surviving engineers some timely metal foam could make it livable or at least escapable. If no one else is available to subdue a rogue AI you can be hard pushed to get some thermite and metal foam to their chamber before detonation as things stand. When a roboticist needs to rejuvenate a brain it has to happen before the inhabitant decides to log off and do something else instead. To function within the context of a mutually satisfying game pace there is a need for the barrier to production to be swiftly surmountable, and to an extent this defines the upper bounds of its complexity.
This is something the project has always struggled with and in general our current approach seems to work, the playerbases resistance to any kind of change not withstandingFinally, there's the question of how such sweeping changes to various mechanics could be implemented. Merging 'trek'chem and goonchem which was comparatively minor got complicated by the balance issues that cropped up and there were instances such as when cryo chems couldn't be made because a precursor had been removed. A year on I would be asked by previously accomplished chemists how the revised system was working out, because they hadn't felt motivated to get back into it. This would be altering three departments simultaneously, so it would require extensive play-testing for bugs and unforeseen consequences by volunteers before it went near the actual servers in order to avoid alienating people with frequent revisions.
If your only contribution to every thread is going to be that we don’t' care or take others opinions into account, I'm just going to put you on dev forum approval to save us all having to skip over your posts.Zarniwoop wrote:I'm sure the folks it should matter to will find a way to blow it off.Shadowflame909 wrote:Can't disagree with that thinking.
I think you're missing the point. If you design a system with sufficient complexity, "flawless optimization" isn't trivial. A good system would have enough points of fine tuning that truly optimizing the fun out of it would be difficult. Even then, just because you can just copy a guide and take the fun out of it, you don't have to. If people want to have fun they can, and if people want to be powergaming hyperoptimizing shitlords they can as well.MisterPerson wrote:Sounds like Jegub is describing a fun game, but I'm not sure that it would be fun as a repetitive, multiplayer game. Once you figure out how to make whatever chemical really fast, you basically just recreate that exact sequence over and over. Even if there's no explicit macro/copy-and-paste/whatever ability, people are still gonna just blindly copy from the wiki/whatever with no real need to experiment. So trying to make a chain system just sounds like the current boring situation with a neat UI stuck on top. Again, a good game, just one that only needs to be played once.
the eternal problem with the "git gud" mindset - if you try to learn for yourself instead of using the already-solved optimised flowchart on the wiki, the powergamers will scream at you for being inefficient. If you just do the wiki to appease the shitheads that scream at you in OOC after the round for daring to not be perfect, you'll get moaned at for not really understanding it and also get fucked over next time coderbus changes something that makes the wiki inaccurate, in which case the shitheads will still scream at you for not instantly magically divining the correct solution out of the etheractioninja wrote:I think you're missing the point. If you design a system with sufficient complexity, "flawless optimization" isn't trivial. A good system would have enough points of fine tuning that truly optimizing the fun out of it would be difficult. Even then, just because you can just copy a guide and take the fun out of it, you don't have to. If people want to have fun they can, and if people want to be powergaming hyperoptimizing shitlords they can as well.MisterPerson wrote:Sounds like Jegub is describing a fun game, but I'm not sure that it would be fun as a repetitive, multiplayer game. Once you figure out how to make whatever chemical really fast, you basically just recreate that exact sequence over and over. Even if there's no explicit macro/copy-and-paste/whatever ability, people are still gonna just blindly copy from the wiki/whatever with no real need to experiment. So trying to make a chain system just sounds like the current boring situation with a neat UI stuck on top. Again, a good game, just one that only needs to be played once.
That's literally what orange man is proposing here though, making chem recipes more involved.MisterPerson wrote:That's possible to do, but based on what was provided and assuming it's on top of the existing chemical recipes, the optimal way to make all chemicals is fairly trivial (protip: It's what you would do in your hand, just in a machine!). If someone wants to make the chem recipes more involved, well yeah then obviously that will change things. But making the optimal strategy not obvious and trivial is much harder to do than you might think.
No details were provided, so I'm assuming the worst. I'm fun at parties.actioninja wrote:That's literally what orange man is proposing here though, making chem recipes more involved.MisterPerson wrote:That's possible to do, but based on what was provided and assuming it's on top of the existing chemical recipes, the optimal way to make all chemicals is fairly trivial (protip: It's what you would do in your hand, just in a machine!). If someone wants to make the chem recipes more involved, well yeah then obviously that will change things. But making the optimal strategy not obvious and trivial is much harder to do than you might think.
This guys sayin, What were all thinkin! At least what I'm thinking! The chem dispenser is just that: free chems at no cost at all(Its been a long time since power in the things have been an issue) And we could theoretically wipe them from the codebase right now! All of the chems in the dispensers can be ground from objects found throughout the station. Xeno and Botany could have chems to give to chemistry, but for xenobio, we already have slime jelly, which could be utilized in more reactions. Some of the more lackluster or non-existent effects with slimecores could also generate chemicals otherwise available or unavailable. Why keep it to those departments? Walls could rust over in maintenance and an assistant could help a fella out by scraping it into a beaker.oranges wrote:
we need to do away with the chem dispenser entirely, make all reagents gathered from xenobio and botany sources and add actual work recipes to distil and mix chemicals
i.e you have to heat things to temperatures, burn off side products etc