Genetics rework design document

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Genetics rework design document

Post by PKPenguin321 » #347929

Came to me while I was trying to sleep last night

Works around a sort of minigame, you'll understand as I go along. The minigame is from this guy and is called magic square. I couldn't find a decent online version of it so I spent an afternoon coding my own in a shitty javascript website thing that you can click on and play here: https://studio.code.org/projects/applab ... vw99aOSDFk
Basically you have a 3x3 grid, and clicking on a tile in that grid toggles both the tile you clicked and any tiles adjacent to it in cardinal directions. So clicking the top left corner will flip it, the one to its right, and the one under it. There's a desired pattern (traditionally a box, where all the tiles are lit up except the center) that you want to get to.

So how does this fit into genetics?

I said how in magic square the desired pattern is traditionally a box. This desired pattern is the "ideal state" for magic square. I propose that a unique "ideal state" is created for each trait (both disabilities and powers), randomized at round start. The genetics console has every trait listed as a button on its main screen, rather than showing the jumbled up DNA.
I've made a mockup of the main genetics console screen that will hopefully give you a better idea of my vision:
Image
Also the screens you could see when you click on individual traits:
Spoiler:
Image
Image
Image
As I mention in the image, the "known ideal state" (the ideal state saved in the console) doesn't necessarily match the "true ideal state," or the actual state required to manifest a power or turn off a disability. Bad/malicious geneticists could save incorrect states, and genes set to the incorrect state would still show as correct. Conversely, a competent geneticist that saves only correct states could allow you to know what disabilities/powers a subject has at a glance.

Each move you make in a magic square game outputs a bit of radiation like the current system. This can be reduced by getting upgrades from R&D. Potentially there could be a really small cool down between moves also reducable by R&D, but this might just be annoying.

I've also considered an upgrade you could get from R&D that would allow you to, with a high cooldown, change only the tile you click in the magic square game without changing its adjacents. Perhaps another upgrade could show you on the screen for a gene if the subject appears to actually have the trait, which would speed up research by not forcing you to open the scanner every time (not shown on the main screen so at-a-glance disability checking is still reliant on saved ideal states).

The name genes (I forget if they're UE or UI) will remain the same for the purpose of detective work, and have a traditional buffer that you can save to the machine and apply in one click. Appearance genes could fit under this system, with multiple ideal states (the hair color gene could have a different state for each color). Perhaps they could be in a separate tab from the SEs.

Proposed changes to genetics to accompany this system would be:
- Removing power manifest chance. If you match up the current and ideal state, powers activate immediately
- Remove traditional buffers (for SEs only) that allow you to instantly rewrite the SE (and consequently remove injectors) from the genetics console. Powers can still be handed out en masse, but you need to know the ideal states and to be able to play the magic square game quickly.
- Maybe allow injectors for SEs to be researchable, but at a high cooldown (and they are temporary)? This way the 1 competent geneticist can still use his powers for himself.

Potential future expansions could essentially allow basically any amount of genetic powers or disabilities, since they all require some modicum of skill to acquire now instead of almost complete RNG. More absurd powers could potentially have the magic square grid expanded beyond a 3x3 to a 4x4 or higher, reducing the chance of you seeing it in a round and making it harder to manifest. Some traits could also not be on the console by default, requiring a disk obtained elsewhere to be accessible in the scanner before they're available to modify. Maybe a traitor item with an awful genetic disability could be purchased that can't be accessed otherwise, or a power could be a reward from a lavaland ruin, that kind of thing.

I think it would be pretty cool. If you have questions or feedback just post it here, thanks.
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by TribeOfBeavers » #347937

I like the minigame idea instead of pure rng we have now. I'm a bit confused by the ideal state thing though. How do you discover what it is other than trial and error?

There are 512 possible combinations per square so trial and error would really suck.


I think goon style genetics (tons of powers, everyone only has a couple built into their DNA, main job of geneticists is hunting for new powers or disabilities and fnding cool combinations instead of just sifting through disabilities to find the same powers every round) with this as the minigame instead of the DNA matching one goon has could be interesting to try out.
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by ShadowDimentio » #347948

Just porn Goon's system
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by PKPenguin321 » #347950

TribeOfBeavers wrote:I like the minigame idea instead of pure rng we have now. I'm a bit confused by the ideal state thing though. How do you discover what it is other than trial and error?

There are 512 possible combinations per square so trial and error would really suck.
Good point. This number could be greatly reduced by counting rotated versions of the pattern, so all of these would be considered equal:
Spoiler:
Image
If this number is still too high, we could count the flipped pattern and its rotations as equal as well:
Spoiler:
Image
i play Lauser McMauligan. clown name is Cold-Ass Honkey
i have three other top secret characters as well.
tell the best admin how good he is
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by TribeOfBeavers » #347951

PKPenguin321 wrote:
TribeOfBeavers wrote:I like the minigame idea instead of pure rng we have now. I'm a bit confused by the ideal state thing though. How do you discover what it is other than trial and error?

There are 512 possible combinations per square so trial and error would really suck.
Good point. This number could be greatly reduced by counting rotated versions of the pattern, so all of these would be considered equal:
Spoiler:
Image
If this number is still too high, we could count the flipped pattern and its rotations as equal as well:
Spoiler:
Image
You could also have partial solutions visible based on the level of the parts in the machine or something like that.
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by TribeOfBeavers » #347985

Also I wrote a program to check the rotation/flip thing.

Unless I messed up (which is quite possible as I suck at this) then you have 184 unique solutions for the rotation thing, and 172 if you include a horizontal flip.
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by PKPenguin321 » #347989

TribeOfBeavers wrote:Also I wrote a program to check the rotation/flip thing.

Unless I messed up (which is quite possible as I suck at this) then you have 184 unique solutions for the rotation thing, and 172 if you include a horizontal flip.
Even with the flipped form's rotations?

I really like the visible partial solutions idea as well, I think it would work great! Would make research a lot more realistic if the 172 positions thing is accurate and doesn't force players to go in completely blind.

From an actual coding implementation perspective, I was thinking of how to store the genetic data as a var in humans without using too many vars, and I found this: If you represent all 9 tiles as 1s or 0s, where 1 is on and 0 is off, you get a 9 digit binary number which can be converted to a 3 digit hexadecimal number, and each gene being 3 hex digits is AFAIK what we already use for our genetics system, so I don't think this would be too much of a hassle to implement from that side. Grids larger than 3x3 might require a separate var, though
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by Nabski » #348234

So you have unique ideal states each round, and you're doing a puzzle to try to get to them, but you have no idea what the solution to the puzzle is supposed to be?

Are you trying to solve each trait on it's own puzzle, or just work the same grid to find all it's outputs?

It seems like you're taking RNG that is equal and basically time gated, and pushing it to reward being able to spam as many possible different outputs as possible.
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by D&B » #348236

ShadowDimentio wrote:Just porn Goon's system
NO ERP
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by kevinz000 » #348266

Interesting
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by ShadowDimentio » #348267

D&B wrote:
ShadowDimentio wrote:Just porn Goon's system
NO ERP
How did I type porn, I meant port
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-Not-Dorsidarf

"The amount of people is the amount of times the sound is played... on top of itself. And with sybil populations on the shuttle..."
-Remie Richards

"I just spent all fucking day playing fallen london and sunless sea and obsessing over how creepy the fucking dawn machine is and only just clocked now that your avatar is the fucking dawn machine. Nobody vote for this disgusting new sequence blasphemer he wants to kill the gods"
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"Penguins are the second race to realise 2D>3D"
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"Paul Blart mall cops if they all had ambitions of joining the Waffen-SS"
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"These logs could kill a dragon much less a man"
-Armhulenn

">7 8 6
WHAT MADNESS IS THIS? POETIC ANARCHY!"
-Wyzack

"We didn't kick one goofball out only to have another one come in like a fucking revolving door"
-Kraseo

"There's a difference between fucking faggots and being a fucking faggot."
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"You guys splitting the 20 bucks cost to hire your ex again?"
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by TribeOfBeavers » #348271

PKPenguin321 wrote:
TribeOfBeavers wrote:Also I wrote a program to check the rotation/flip thing.

Unless I messed up (which is quite possible as I suck at this) then you have 184 unique solutions for the rotation thing, and 172 if you include a horizontal flip.
Even with the flipped form's rotations?

Yeah, I had it make a 3x3 matix, rotate it four times, then flip and repeat. If all of these were unique (compared to previous solutions) the matrix was added to the solution list. It repeated this for all possible 3x3 matricies containing only 1s and 0s. At the end it printed the length of the solution list.
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by Takeguru » #348279

I prefer my idea tbh
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by PKPenguin321 » #348388

Nabski wrote:So you have unique ideal states each round, and you're doing a puzzle to try to get to them, but you have no idea what the solution to the puzzle is supposed to be?
Yes, but there are some proposed ideas to help with this (too lazy to write them again, read the posts in this thread past the OP).

Research from scratch would essentially be picking different states and checking after, but once the state is known then applying it to others is like a regular magic square puzzle. I'm considering allowing multiple states to be saved aside from just the ideal one so you can also save incorrect states and knowingly avoid them as you research. Might make a mockup if I worded this confusingly.

The upside to this new kind of research is that you know what you're going to get beforehand when you start working on a gene, and once you've solved it you're guaranteed to reap rewards instead of hoping they manifest. Ideally it would take the same amount of time to find a gene this way as the old way, without having to sift through all the regular genes that literally nobody cares about ("oh boy I found the near-sighted gene!" --nobody), and on top of that it would allow us to add more genes without making every other gene rarer (see goof's funny talking genes for example).
Nabski wrote:Are you trying to solve each trait on it's own puzzle, or just work the same grid to find all it's outputs?
Every gene has its own 3x3 puzzle with its own solution. One puzzle encompassing every gene would be neat but way too complicated to be fun.


As for why this system would be cool over goongenetics: The upside to goon is that there is a limiter to how many powers you can get and how difficult it is to get them. However, if you go into genetics with a gimmick in mind that revolves around a certain power, there's no guarantee you'll be able to get it. The upside to current /tg/ genetics is that once research is done, it can be applied intelligently to anybody with no upper limit. The proposed system potentially allows the lack of an upper limit that we currently have, but also applies a skill ceiling limiter like goon has, meaning that getting all the powers in one round is unlikely and applying them all to one person would take a significant time depending on your ability to solve the puzzles. I'm sort of trying to get the best of both worlds.

Another thing I realized would likely require changing is mutagen giving powers, as once a power is present in a subject you can instantly extract the ideal solution from them regardless of how many defects they acquire, which would trivialize research. I want to keep radiation giving powers rarely, but if players find a way to force get powers through abusing rads this might be too OP as well.
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by AnonymousNow » #348458

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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by Nabski » #348561

I support more possible powers, and a system that isn't just I push da button and pray. The SE system being maintained in some form is good.

I am concerned about the fact that this may be a shitty long RNG hunt, coupled with that weird byond lag when trying to do things quickly.

I fear that this will make a system that punishes new players heavily, while greatly rewarding master/outside tools like telescience did.

Fourth try's the charm when it comes to avoiding FUCKLONG paragraphs.

I would like to see a system like figure out two puzzles to unlock a puzzle, clone/scan another person unlock a puzzle, maybe even some use of the giant DNA machine's sampler tool to get more samples. This would reward doing the cloning part of the genetics, and encourage getting out and doing stuff with the crew than balling up in the lab hoping mining and science do useful shit while they just try to solve puzzles as quickly as possible.
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by kevinz000 » #348582

If a puzzle system is done it better have an optimised interface any lag would be horribly detrimental
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by Nabski » #348602

The lag doesn't matter because after each attempt you have to open the door and shine the light in their eyes to find out if they have x-ray. If not try the next of the 100 possible combinations. :( :revolver:
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Re: Genetics rework design document

Post by PKPenguin321 » #349078

kevinz000 wrote:If a puzzle system is done it better have an optimised interface any lag would be horribly detrimental
The biggest roadblock to this is actually coding the UI, which would contain the puzzle. I have no idea in the slightest how our UI code works and every time I look at it it reads like black magic.
Nabski wrote:The lag doesn't matter because after each attempt you have to open the door and shine the light in their eyes to find out if they have x-ray. If not try the next of the 100 possible combinations. :( :revolver:
From the OP:
Perhaps another upgrade could show you on the screen for a gene if the subject appears to actually have the trait, which would speed up research by not forcing you to open the scanner every time (not shown on the main screen so at-a-glance disability checking is still reliant on saved ideal states).
If the research aspect is too tedious then this could be made default behavior.
i play Lauser McMauligan. clown name is Cold-Ass Honkey
i have three other top secret characters as well.
tell the best admin how good he is
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