So one of the most important 'features' of the Skills System is that
Skills are supposed to have a fairly interconnected web of **Opportunity
Costs** against each other. EG: Points spent in Surgery are points not
spent in Xenobiology and vice versa.
A significant problem with this however is that from the start we were
very wishy-washy about having skills actually tell the players what they
do, and were intentionally refraining from telling the players the
actual numbers behind them. This creates a few major problems:
1. It creates a knowledge difference between players who can code-dive
to find out what the skills do, and those who can't, effectively turning
skills into the same problem as "Secret Chem Recipes".
2. It prevents players from making informed decisions about how they
build their characters.
3. It turns out players are extremely unlikely to put points into a
skill if they don't know what it does.
4. It sabotages the "Opportunity Cost" factor of skills. If a player
doesn't know that Xenobiology for instance has some niche uses for their
role, they won't ever consider taking it over something more 'useful'
like Surgery.
There is also a side issue that players generally tend to overwhelmingly
despise skills that are 'reverse ordered', giving them penalties if they
don't buy the skill. They feel like this punishes them for not picking
something. In the case of Firearms/Unarmed/Armed my hands are tied right
now because of how the combat system is (not) balanced. But I can at
least fix that for the Mech piloting skill with some clever small tweaks
to the math. Players currently strongly don't like the new mech movement
because the non-forward directions tend to be too punishing. So I'm
tweaking the Pilot: Mechs math to be more player-friendly by actually
improving the handling experience of mechs.
The bulk of this PR is of course making as many skills as possible fully
transparent about what they do. Wherever possible, Skills now openly
state what they modify, and by how much at a given rank.
<img width="1270" height="982" alt="image"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/9619f2fa-8dd6-4021-8482-43a1f76f33f4"
/>
The education age restriction now applies to tajara and unathi as well.
The max skill level was supposed to be unlocked in educated skills, but
was being accidentally locked to only the skill level the education
gave. This meant someone uneducated could sometimes get even higher
skill than an educated person, by spending skill points.
The three combat skill ranks were reduced to trained level as their max.
It was not possible for players to get higher before, and 3 was already
the baseline. If a professional is ever implemented for antags or
similar, it can be set back again then.
Doctor of Pharmacy was reduced to only need 25 years old, due to both
the description and that the pharmacist job has that age requirement
too.
fixes https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/issues/22376
fixes https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/issues/22286
fixes https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/issues/22232 kinda. It
was already fixed, but more fixing on restrictions also reported on it.
fixes https://github.com/Aurorastation/Aurora.3/issues/22610
This PR adds a new Combat skill largely designed for non-combat
characters called Tenacity. It's fairly analagous to traits like Will to
Live from Shadowrun. Ranks in this skill make a character take a little
bit longer to "bleed out in crit", but do nothing to actually change how
hard they are to take down in combat. Effectively this means that ranks
put in this skill give you a little bit more of a buffer of time to be
picked up by a paramedic and rescued.
For actual combat characters it's very undesireable since it does
nothing to actually help win you fights, so this skill is largely more
to serve as an option for characters outside of security who don't
actually want to spend any points on direct combat capabilities. All of
the numerical modifiers from the skill are rather small, and make use of
pre-existing signal hooks that I've made previously for Brainmed to
allow component based modifiers to organ code.
<img width="1069" height="243" alt="image"
src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/92d6c19a-a0f2-4cc8-b490-df4538fd2b3d"
/>
This PR is a revisit to the previously derelict PR #20159 that has been
unfinished for sometime now. More details about it in general can be
found here:
https://github.com/orgs/Aurorastation/projects/2?pane=issue&itemId=53167153
For awhile I've been talking about "Things I've been doing but it would
be really nice to do them with a skills system", or "And here's how I
would put this into the skills system when it's done". The main thing
that was stopping me from building it myself was having poor real life
skills in UI code and in DB code. However, I've gotten permission to
resume this PR, which has already completed the steps I would not have
been able to do myself. The rest of the PR fits well into my skillset as
a dev.
I'm opening this PR as a draft so as to enable my dev environment to
locally track all the previously modified files. I'll take this PR out
of draft and give this a full writeup when I have more work to show for
the PR this weekend.
### TODO
- [x] Rework a decent chunk of the currently existing skills to no
longer require hardcoded inserts into other systems. EG, converting from
classical ss13 methods, to modern /tg/-style ECS coding methods that
work off of component-signal patterns.
- [x] Make sure all of the existing skills have actual game
functionality (I won't PR a 2016 Baystation12 situation where 90% of the
skills are fluff only)
- [x] Add the various skills not yet made but are necessary for
completion sake, EG: Pilot (Spacecraft), Gunnery, Pilot (Walkers).
- [x] Examine each existing job in the game and assess whether it should
have a skill made with it in mind, or if it's covered by an existing
skill.
- [x] TO DISCUSS, BUT NOT ESSENTIAL: Additional skill proposals not
currently in the pre-existing TODO list, proposing subcategories.
- [x] Ensure that the previous TODO list is completed.
### Current Skills
The current list of skills, checkmarked for if I've completed them/they
have actual game mechanics. Or if we're just relegating them to separate
PRs. Originally this list was going to be forced to visit for a bare
minimum "does at least one thing" requirement, but now that is being
forgone due to this PR ballooning out of control and in complexity, as
well as development time overruns.
- [x] Bartending
- [x] Cooking
- [x] Gardening
- [x] Entertaining
- [x] Electrical Engineering
- [x] Mechanical Engineering
- [x] Atmospherics Systems
- [x] Reactor Systems
- [x] Medicine
- [x] Surgery
- [x] Pharmacology
- [x] Anatomy
- [x] Forensics
- [x] Robotics
- [x] Pilot: Spacecraft
- [x] Pilot: Exosuits
- [x] Research
- [x] Xenobotany
- [x] Xenoarchaeology
- [x] Xenobiology
- [x] Unarmed Combat
- [x] Armed Combat
- [x] Firearms
- [x] Leadership
---------
Signed-off-by: VMSolidus <evilexecutive@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: Matt Atlas <liermattia@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: FabianK3 <21039694+FabianK3@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Matt Atlas <mattiathebest2000@hotmail.it>
