/tg/Station 13

Bottom post of the previous page:

I want modular station to be in a usable state for this.

It's basically up to MSO

Bump for MSO

Hope this isn't too old to bump. What if smaller maps automatically played if the population is below a certain number?

There aren't any small maps to play currently. We should put a sticky or something asking for small ~20ish player maps. It'd give an opportunity to everyone who wanted to get into mapping to give it a shot too without the task of making a gigantic 50 person station.

JackHunt wrote:There aren't any small maps to play currently. We should put a sticky or something asking for small ~20ish player maps. It'd give an opportunity to everyone who wanted to get into mapping to give it a shot too without the task of making a gigantic 50 person station.

How up to date is Ministation? 20-25 players seems like a good threshold for replacing box/meta with mini

Right now, I'm not sure if modular station will ever be used by anyone aside from maybe a few test runs at best.
That's not discouraging me from stopping anytime soon, but I know it discourages a lot of people from even trying.

Maybe map rotation isn't the best way to go about it right now, since there really aren't enough maps, but there are a few other things you could do.
Create some incentive for people to make and update their maps.
Maybe have a special day of the week assigned to playing different maps or something, that way people would get a feel for the new maps, without some of the people going 'muh box'.
You'd probably get more people wanting to make a map for people to play on that day, and the already existing maps could get a bit of polish from being tested.
And then once there are more maps out there, tried and tested, maybe you could make a full map rotation that can only get more maps added to it.

Luke Cox wrote:

JackHunt wrote:There aren't any small maps to play currently. We should put a sticky or something asking for small ~20ish player maps. It'd give an opportunity to everyone who wanted to get into mapping to give it a shot too without the task of making a gigantic 50 person station.

How up to date is Ministation? 20-25 players seems like a good threshold for replacing box/meta with mini

Ministation's pretty awful (also it has a tonne of custom jobs and gamemodes (2-man nuke ops for example) to make it work), and people genuinely dont like it's stripped-down-to-bare-bones departments.

Not-Dorsidarf wrote:

Luke Cox wrote:

JackHunt wrote:There aren't any small maps to play currently. We should put a sticky or something asking for small ~20ish player maps. It'd give an opportunity to everyone who wanted to get into mapping to give it a shot too without the task of making a gigantic 50 person station.

How up to date is Ministation? 20-25 players seems like a good threshold for replacing box/meta with mini

Ministation's pretty awful (also it has a tonne of custom jobs and gamemodes (2-man nuke ops for example) to make it work), and people genuinely dont like it's stripped-down-to-bare-bones departments.

Yeah people already hate doing their jobs, thats why a majority of the equipment on box comes pre-assembled and all they have to do is wrench down one thing or feed x to y and you're done.

Ever fucking done R&D just so you could build a mech fab because one guy really wants to be borged on ministation? Actually built the solars from scratch? Its a pain in the ass but strangely rewarding.

Metastation is disliked for the following reasons, at least for myself:

> Feels empty as hell unless you have 80+ people, with so much space there's barely space for actual crew interaction in the halls and so forth.
> Inefficient layout (parts of the station go nearly entirely unused).
> Terrible with 30-50 people, which are normal non-primetime Sybil numbers these days.
> Main corridors are ridiculous.
> Lack of familiarity with layout.

Amelius wrote:Metastation is disliked for the following reasons, at least for myself:
> Inefficient layout (parts of the station go nearly entirely unused).

So kinda like the entire western part of the station on box right?

We had both box and meta on rotation on Sybil today, and I actually really liked it. It could use a little more decluttering, but all in all it felt like a much more realistic station. Either make it 50% chance to be box/50% meta or have automatic round-end votes. They're both great maps and there's no reason why we have to only have one.

It needs to be made clear at round start what map is going to be selected, mainly for the benefit of offstation antagonists such as nuke ops or wizards. Its hard to formulate a plan when you don't know which station your assaulting today.

Steelpoint wrote:It needs to be made clear at round start what map is going to be selected, mainly for the benefit of offstation antagonists such as nuke ops or wizards. Its hard to formulate a plan when you don't know which station your assaulting today.

Of course. This could be stated on the lobby status screen.

Amelius wrote:Metastation is disliked for the following reasons, at least for myself:

> Feels empty as hell unless you have 80+ people, with so much space there's barely space for actual crew interaction in the halls and so forth.
> Inefficient layout (parts of the station go nearly entirely unused).
> Terrible with 30-50 people, which are normal non-primetime Sybil numbers these days.
> Main corridors are ridiculous.
> Lack of familiarity with layout.

We had 50+ yesterday and it certainly didn't feel empty. People congregated around the bar/kitchen and medbay/research areas.

You know exactly how it is on box.

Efficiency is improved in some areas over box, in other areas it is worse. God forbid different styles exist.

The community response to MSO putting metastation on because sybil voted for it was absolutely amazing though.

Just like how people on bagil freaked out when he tried to change their map to box.

A map rotation would be fine, though. On both servers

I feel for the coding team that has to maintain both, though. Fighting over one map's conflicts was bad enough.

MSO is open to the idea of implementing a map rotation system, and has already begun working on implementing the framework. He says he might be able to get it running in about a month, possibly less.

If we have a map rotation, it has to be on both servers, so I can jump to whichever server is running Box.

Also any map in rotation must have one active maintainer, or else it gets booted from rotation.

Or we could just have a server that always runs box and one that shuffles between.

Incoming wrote:Or we could just have a server that always runs box and one that shuffles between.

This is the best idea

Scones wrote:

Incoming wrote:Or we could just have a server that always runs box and one that shuffles between.

This is the best idea

So box on basil, shuffle on sybil.

Incoming wrote:Or we could just have a server that always runs box and one that shuffles between.

And literally nothing changed at all. Great idea! At least you tried.

Remember the old box station? The one that had ai core in the middle, and HOP line between where now Captain office and Teleporter is?

Tornadium wrote:

Scones wrote:

Incoming wrote:Or we could just have a server that always runs box and one that shuffles between.

This is the best idea

So box on basil, shuffle on sybil.

Or the other way around. Why should the solid high pop server have to be changed?

Scott wrote:

Tornadium wrote:

Scones wrote:

Incoming wrote:Or we could just have a server that always runs box and one that shuffles between.

This is the best idea

So box on basil, shuffle on sybil.

Or the other way around. Why should the solid high pop server have to be changed?

Because when we voted on it Meta won alomst 3:1 for a good number of the votes. A significant portion of the Sybil playerbase wants Meta to play on the server at least occasionally.

That's not because people liked meta though, that's because people were bored with the same old same old. This isn't exactly rocket science, here the grass is always greener. ANY map would have won against box in that circumstance, it's not something anyone should be using as "justification of what the players want".

People are bored, they want new things, they always want new things. This is not news.

Incoming wrote:That's not because people liked meta though, that's because people were bored with the same old same old. This isn't exactly rocket science, here the grass is always greener. ANY map would have won against box in that circumstance, it's not something anyone should be using as "justification of what the players want".

People are bored, they want new things, they always want new things. This is not news.

And that's why a map rotation is the best option here.

Balancing for one map is hard
Balancing for two maps is a pain
Balancing for three maps is a fucking trial

We're already, in theory, supporting three maps. No one bothers to keep ministation up to date and without Meta around metastation wouldn't be fairing much better. I really don't think given the circumstances that it is a practical option unless every single map was being properly maintained and balanced in sync with the pull commits, which would both slow down the ability to make features and generally dissuade people from touching the map(s). If you "forced" people to balancing things for 3+ maps at once I feel like the net result would just be a lot fewer pulls getting merged.

it's not even just "balance".

Anyone who mapped for any significant amount of time knows how painful map conflicts are.

Imagine them happening three-fold.

Three could be a little much, I agree. Two should be manageable though, and the benefits outweigh the inconvenience. Both Box and Meta are pretty well maintained.

We have two servers
We have two maps
We don't have to constantly shuffle
The option is already there

Can people just get the stick out of their ass about bagel already, if everyone who wanted to meta just went there any supposed metafriending would quickly get lost to the wave of sybilians.

Or you could learn that our largest population are people who likely don't even know we HAVE a forum, and just join sybil because its the highest population server on the front page, or have bookmarked :1337 and not :2337 so they never even see bagil nor metastation before now.

Box has been run on basil and Meta on sybil, and there was no difference in population. People play on Sybil because it's higher pop, not the map.

Luke Cox wrote:Box has been run on basil and Meta on sybil, and there was no difference in population. People play on Sybil because it's higher pop, not the map.

Actually a long time ago this all happened before and while it initially looked a bit like that eventually everything normalized and the server running box was still effectively "sybil" even when it was basil.

Based on the poll I'm running so far, 7 people want exclusively box and 14 want multiple maps (10 for random selection, 4 for polls). Twice as many people want more than one map than people who want only Box. In my opinion, the best way to handle it would be random selection, with 70% box 30% meta.

I'd be okay with that

I'd prefer 60% box, 30% meta, 10% assteroid once CR gets it working properly.

Well, for Basil it's gonna be more 60% Meta, 30% Ass, 10% Box, given how many people absolutely loathe Box on there.

Incoming wrote:

Luke Cox wrote:Box has been run on basil and Meta on sybil, and there was no difference in population. People play on Sybil because it's higher pop, not the map.

Actually a long time ago this all happened before and while it initially looked a bit like that eventually everything normalized and the server running box was still effectively "sybil" even when it was basil.

Citation?

Seems to utterly contradict my recollection.