Zoom control for ghosts

[cedarbridge]

The same idea has crossed my mind a few times in the past, but I hadn't really considered how useful it would be until last night when I was orbiting the loose singulo.

Give ghosts the ability to zoom out several levels to see a wider swathe of the station. Watching the singularity eat things is nice, but a max size singulo also takes up most of the screen so you really just see a very tiny portion of the actual damage being caused and you rarely get the interesting context. You can't really appreciate the immensity of a plasma fire, or a loose tesla/singularity if you can only see a tiny normal-zoom amount of it at once. This could also be useful in watching larger player movements. With good camera placement and maybe a little squinting you can watch the nuke ops moving about while security and the captain move about elsewhere.

I'm sure there's already a verb for it somewhere or a means to accomplish this as I've seen full map screenshots and post-singulo admin screenshots. Would this place any additional strain on server resources? If not, what would stop us from implementing this for ghosts generally?

[kevinz000]

VG has that

[MrEousTranger]

Theres no reason not to have this.

[cedarbridge]

How long until the feature freeze is over?

[PKPenguin321]

Admins have this but afaik if like more than five people use the max zoom out level it can lag the server and also on most computers it will lag your client

[Haevacht]

Theres no reason not to have this.

Except that basically everything that's an overlay will break and why do ghosts even need it.

Leave it admin only.

[cedarbridge]

Theres no reason not to have this.

Except that basically everything that's an overlay will break and why do ghosts even need it.

Leave it admin only.

I also skip reading the OP in threads before replying to them.

[Haevacht]

The uses you state are stupid, and not worth breaking shit for.

The only people who NEED this already have it.

[cedarbridge]

The uses you state are stupid, and not worth breaking shit for.

The only people who NEED this already have it.

Not an argument.

"Not worth breaking things for."
Yet we've broken bigger things for much less.

[JJRcop]

I'm pretty sure that some mechs have this anyway.

[PKPenguin321]

I'm pretty sure that some mechs have this anyway.

on other servers, not here

[lzimann]

I'm pretty sure that some mechs have this anyway.

on other servers, not here

That deathsquad mech that I forgot the name has the zoom thing.

[kevinz000]

so do flightsuits but they're laggy pieces of shit anyways so who the fuck cares right?

[PKPenguin321]

so do flightsuits but they're laggy pieces of shit anyways so who the fuck cares right?

you mean the snowflake jetpack that requires a full suit that 3 people have ever used

[cedarbridge]

I'm pretty sure that some mechs have this anyway.

on other servers, not here

That deathsquad mech that I forgot the name has the zoom thing.

The new cops Marauder has it too doesn't it?

[Nabski]

Even the slightly extended range you can get from a devil deal is amazingly nice.

[Cobby]

The uses you state are stupid, and not worth breaking shit for.

The only people who NEED this already have it.

Not an argument.

"Not worth breaking things for."
Yet we've broken bigger things for much less.

That is also not an argument

Bad feature A doesn't mean we should add bad feature B because it is "less bad" than feature A. It means we should fix/remove bad feature A.

[XDTM]

This is already a thing in both flightsuits and devils; either they're too rare to cause trouble, or they're harmless enough to give to ghosts.

[lzimann]

I think the only reason ghosts don't have a way to change view range is because no one did it. Last time someone tried to do it, it was a half-assed version, which deleted the admin verb and replaced with a verb available to everyone, but only up to 14 range(the admin verb is 128).

[PKPenguin321]

I think the only reason ghosts don't have a way to change view range is because no one did it. Last time someone tried to do it, it was a half-assed version, which deleted the admin verb and replaced with a verb available to everyone, but only up to 14 range(the admin verb is 128).

also because like i already said apparently too many people viewing too much at once puts stress on the server itself

[Remie Richards]

This is already a thing in both flightsuits and devils; either they're too rare to cause trouble, or they're harmless enough to give to ghosts.

the former.
Byond gets incredibly shitty on larger viewsizes, what we have now is pushing it for normal day-day gameplay, with flightsuits/devils/marauders being rare-so-more-acceptable uses.

[lzimann]

I'm doing a proper PR for this right now. Gonna add hotkeys(shift + '+' or '-' since it seems byond doesn't allow scroll up/down) and up to 10 view range(or 14 if you are byond member!).

[cedarbridge]

I'm doing a proper PR for this right now. Gonna add hotkeys(shift + '+' or '-' since it seems byond doesn't allow scroll up/down) and up to 10 view range(or 14 if you are byond member!).

Since there's a lot of concern about server strain. Is there a way we can get data over time about the possible server impact during a future possible testmerge? It would be good for scaling if we could see "yeah, this far out is far enough."

[lzimann]

I'm doing a proper PR for this right now. Gonna add hotkeys(shift + '+' or '-' since it seems byond doesn't allow scroll up/down) and up to 10 view range(or 14 if you are byond member!).

Since there's a lot of concern about server strain. Is there a way we can get data over time about the possible server impact during a future possible testmerge? It would be good for scaling if we could see "yeah, this far out is far enough."

I asked MSO about it, he was the one that suggested the values. If it lags, reverting is super easy, if not, increasing the max range is also super easy.

[Sweaterkittens]

I feel like the problem with just "waiting to see if it lags" is that it's going to be incredibly situational. I'm assuming it's not going to log when ghosts change their view ranges, so we'll have no way to tell that it's due to ghost view ranges if we get a bad lag spike. Not to mention that there have to be enough ghosts observing and using it. I'm concerned this will just add to late-game lag as everything is destroyed and the singulo's loose, and we'll just end up shrugging and chalking it up to lots of things going on.

[lzimann]

I feel like the problem with just "waiting to see if it lags" is that it's going to be incredibly situational. I'm assuming it's not going to log when ghosts change their view ranges, so we'll have no way to tell that it's due to ghost view ranges if we get a bad lag spike. Not to mention that there have to be enough ghosts observing and using it. I'm concerned this will just add to late-game lag as everything is destroyed and the singulo's loose, and we'll just end up shrugging and chalking it up to lots of things going on.

Sadly there's not much that can be done about it besides testing(it won't make any difference testing it locally). Thankfully we have testmerges to things that can end up being bad.

[Sweaterkittens]

How can we monitor if it's causing lag, though? I promise that I'm not just trying to be difficult, I just don't know how we're going to be able to to tell if it's this specific function that's causing it if and when the server starts lagging, which makes testing problematic.

[MisterPerson]

You'll know in one of two ways: Either byond will spend more processing time on sending maps or byond will spend more bandwidth sending the maps. If it's the former, that'll manifest as classic stutter lag you might have experienced a lot prior to all the anti-lag stuff MSO has been doing. The time reserved every tick for sending maps won't be long enough so every tick will run long, slowing the whole game down. If it's the latter problem, well there was a byond bug for the past few days where it was using too much bandwidth and people were reporting lag, so it would be like that.