/tg/Station 13

They work on other servers and they were fun as fuck while we had them. Removing them was a tragic loss. Other servers have apparently already made improvements that should appease maintainers, and as far as I can tell they've based it on the code that used to be on our repo. That means that porting it back from them along with the improvements they have made shouldn't be that hard.

Why were they removed in the first place?

knacker48 wrote:Why were they removed in the first place?

Balance issues that have since been fixed by other servers and discord drama

I'd like to see an alternative to circuits that allow them to be placed into various machines and computers, reading values and manipulating them. A sort of step in the Gmod wire direction, where a wire circuit could read inputs from one device and output commands or values to another.

Imagine, for example, attaching a circuit to the SM monitor console, and another to a gas pump, so that the pump only turns on when CO2 values are below a certain percentage, and allowing you to keep the CO2 levels nearly exactly at what you want them to be.

Circuits needed an output to make them useful, and so they interacted with the world directly. I'd love to see a version that interacts with computers and machines instead.

Never forget we had a circuit coder who would intentionally leave exploits in their code so they could abuse it ingame. Also the same group of people dogpiling on every circuit PR was/will probably still be a nuisance.

Besides, Having automation for a game meant to last ~hour seems silly unless it's required to progress within that hour. No feature requires that right now.

Circuits have the same problems that telescience had, their entire potential is just a wiki page/copy-paste away and it will be (and very much was) abused given the possibility

I dont know if any semblance of balance is possible without severely limiting its scope, possibly neutering the entire concept. I dont know what kind of changes were made in other codebases but there is a lot of things to be concerned about

I also remember the lack of useful logging was a big issue with circuits

knacker48 wrote:Why were they removed in the first place?

1) None of the current maintainers want to maintain them and also review 500 line PRs where chucklefucks try to sneak in undocumented features
2) Lack of logging causing massive headaches for admins
3) Massive balance issues, remember tracking shard thrower bots?
4) The gameplay that consists of either locking yourself in your autism fort for 45 minutes or just copy pasting whole circuits

It's a feature that requires hours to learn in real time, is only useful when you copy paste stuff other people make or download the code and spend a massive amount of time on a test server making shit.

Next to no interaction with crew or potential to sabotage your work, you just sit in an autism fort and make robots.

Most circuits are either:
-copies of existing items like door remotes or guns
-intended to annoy or harass crew like sound spammers or shock bots
-intended to have an overpowered function to powergame with like reactive smoke machines or harm alarms

I cannot believe people are making me agree with yakumo

them and denton are right, a gameplay element that requires you to copypaste out of game content in that persists across rounds is one that just doesnt work in game.

Removing the circuit printer and everyone says it's worthless, therefore it's literally worthless and I won't have it in the game

Even without stuff like throwers doing not doing thrown damage which was once suggested fix to the combat bots you could basically have seeking grenade bots just hunting people down and gibing them with explosive nades faster than they can react.

I made a circuit that would inject 20 gold cores with plasma over the course of a minute. It could be mailed through disposals.

It never worked consistently though, due to code issues. Circuits were a mess to work with, both in and out of game.

Compare to nanites, the other recent science feature that isn't shit:
-takes a few minutes to learn the basics of, a few more for programming Nantes with code and triggers.
-has to be researched, locks the overpowered shit by tike gates and gates if hard to obtain items
-heavy crew interaction, you can share your results with the rest of the crew easily.
-easily sabotaged, heavy dynamics in play.

Nanites are far less interesting, though. You press some buttons and receive a certain buff. You're not designing the nanites yourself, so there's very little creativity with it.

Circuits as a feature was basically the science version of the Supermatter; a lot of experimentation over time would let the creator make something unique and interesting, not unlike an SM custom cooling loop. It's just a shame that the only real applications were direct killing and powergaming.

Denton wrote:

knacker48 wrote:Why were they removed in the first place?

1) None of the current maintainers want to maintain them and also review 500 line PRs where chucklefucks try to sneak in undocumented features

this didnt actually happen(?)

Denton wrote:2) Lack of logging causing massive headaches for admins

likely fixed by other servers (havent checked personally) so wouldnt be an issue if we ported it back over, which is what i'm suggesting

Denton wrote:3) Massive balance issues, remember tracking shard thrower bots?

they were hardly massive, and other servers have since fixed this, see the above. that's not to mention how we had just about fixed all the major things like door remote circuits before we even removed them.

Denton wrote:4) The gameplay that consists of either locking yourself in your autism fort for 45 minutes or just copy pasting whole circuits

copy pasting can be disabled and circuits DO still have value without it. even with that in mind, what's so bad about this? non-interactive jobs are commonplace, with engineers building space forts, people fucking off to space in general, miners, geneticists, atmos autists, etc.

Not only that, but circuits DO still bring value to a round even if you have to spend some time getting them set up. I had a fucking crazy round in particular where I set traps with them (and fake traps with intimidating motion sensors that didnt actually do anything but make a circuit say "BOMB ARMED") as the RD while being chased by revs and it was honestly a highlight in fun out of dozens, maybe even hundreds of rounds. Fun and interesting (yet simple) chatbots and pullbots are a thing that are frequently made on other servers, while more complex creations are challenging to build and can be fun to collaborate on (if you've never collaborated with somebody else on a circuit you've been doing it wrong) even when they're not that useful (see my old text adventure GUI, ingame plaintext cracker (useless because out of game scripts exist), etc). The system as a whole is incredibly interesting and fun and we're missing out.

oranges wrote:Removing the circuit printer and everyone says it's worthless, therefore it's literally worthless and I won't have it in the game

i do not say this

shitters who are bad at circuits and cant be fucked to learn for 5 minutes say this

i did support copying circuits back in the day because i liked building large circuits and often couldnt finish within a round, but circuits arent "worthless" without the copypaste machine and are still a fun and interesting mechanic

they are worthless without it

oranges wrote:they are worthless without it

That is not true

>wanting ntsl again for the third time

oranges wrote: Removing the circuit printer and everyone says it's worthless, therefore it's literally worthless and I won't have it in the game

those people who bitched were cowards

Aranclanos wrote:>wanting ntsl again for the third time

the only reason it was removed the first time (actual ntsl) was because it crashed the server instantly just by clicking on the console and nobody wanted to fix it lol

the only reason it was removed the first time (actual ntsl) was because it crashed the server instantly just by clicking on the console and nobody wanted to fix it lol

I was the one who merged the removal, so you're either lying or not know what you're talking about

https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/12105

Just in case anyone was doubting Aran here for some reason, I'll just go ahead and what he's saying as accurate.

I misphrased yeah that definitely wasn't the ONLY reason, but I distinctly recall that at the time it was removed (from maps at least, code removal may have been separate) it would instantly crash the MC if you loaded a script and everybody would bitch in OOC

Anyways, to keep a little bit on topic: ntsl is a bad comparison since circuits have the capacity to have their copypaste completely disabled while still being interesting, while ntsl never had that capacity in the first place

When they were in it was generally agreed upon that copypaste was needed because else there wouldn't be any value in experimenting since everything would be lost.

So you have the catch of either allowing copypaste to "encourage" experimentation (which never happens since people judt copypaste to powergame) or be an enabler for players to sit in a room by themselves for 20 - 30 minutes only to pump out gas/grenades/explosive bots thay run up to you like some fucked up drone that was fast moving, with a small sprite, unable to be damaged, or turned off since it would go off as soon as you picmed it up.

Circuits were cancer and the majority of its proponents are either the people in the discord chats sharing powergaming scripts or people with rose tinted glasses

D&B wrote:When they were in it was generally agreed upon that copypaste was needed because else there wouldn't be any value in experimenting since everything would be lost.

No dude, read the thread before basing your whole argument on something that's been discussed and refuted already

PKPenguin321 wrote:

D&B wrote:When they were in it was generally agreed upon that copypaste was needed because else there wouldn't be any value in experimenting since everything would be lost.

No dude, read the thread before basing your whole argument on something that's been discussed and refuted already

the powergamers killed the magic, im sorry man
it happens to the best of features

If circuts are ever added I wish they would be more like Goonstation mechanic machines. They use visual feedback to communicate relationships between components and require a decent amount of space to actually make machines, so no pocket shard launchers, but yes to gigantic hallway sized people throwers.

The argument that we shouldn't add them because some coder was adding exploits isn't very good. I could very well do the same with atmospherics things and probably get away with it too under the guise of improving the game.


They seem fine on other servers when compared to other features we already have. The only problem I see is mostly with the research system though that has its problems already with people just spam camping and researching whatever the hell they want.

I'm not sure why circuits were created like they are anyways, I would've preferred if they interacted with existing components like automatically cooling something when it reaches a certain temperature or supermatter safety guards. They don't need grief bots to be interesting.

It's certainly a fair argument when the basis of features getting in relies on maintainers willing to review it, which they (at least myself) won't want to do when I can't trust the people coding features for it.

Cobby wrote:It's certainly a fair argument when the basis of features getting in relies on maintainers willing to review it, which they (at least myself) won't want to do when I can't trust the people coding features for it.

its open source, dumbass
anyone with two eyes can look over it and check for exploits
we also have testmerges, we don't even need to manually review for them we can let you people test for us

yet we had this problem in the past and it's not like we just went open source...

Cobby wrote:yet we had this problem in the past and it's not like we just went open source...

When did this happen with circuits

Are circuits currently oppressive on Hippie? If not, is that not valid evidence that circuits have been fixed to be fun and have less balance/powergaming issues?

ATHATH wrote:Are circuits currently oppressive on Hippie? If not, is that not valid evidence that circuits have been fixed to be fun and have less balance/powergaming issues?

do rounds even last long enough for anyone to make anything there?

I don't accept hippie as a valid place to draw feedback from on most things anyway