## About The Pull Request
1. Fixes the modsuit pathfinder module's pathfinding for the second
time. This time AI idling broke it, we just make it not idle.
2. Changes the heuristic used by JPS nodes from Chebyshev distance to
Euclidean distance. I have no real logical explanation, it just appeared
to produce a more optimal path. CC @LemonInTheDark
3. Renames `get_dist_euclidian()` to `get_dist_euclidean()`.
Red line: Euclidean dist JPS path (roughly)
Green line: Chebyshev dist JPS path (roughly)
## Changelog
🆑
fix: MODsuit pathfinder module works. Again.
code: AI pathfinding should produce slightly better paths.
/🆑
## About The Pull Request
I woke up today and thought 'what would be easy thing to do today so I
can say I've done something?'. Then I remembered I saw several gangtool
usages the time I split radio up, and I could remedy those. 7 hours
later, device.dmi is split in a folder of its own, and I've also given
unique sprites to door remotes and landing desginators.
## Why It's Good For The Game
The device.dmi was kind of a mess.
## Changelog
🆑
/🆑
## About The Pull Request
Code to handle this flag only ever existed on the `/obj` sublevel, so
there's no need for it to be on the `/atom` level `flags_1`. There was
probably a point in time in which mobs or turfs conducted electricity
but there's zero code for it anymore so we truly just live in a society
now.
## Why It's Good For The Game
Frees up a slot on `flags_1` (which is really nice actually), proper
scoping of certain bitflag stuff, etc.
## Changelog
Not relevant to players.
I may have screwed something up, will be doing a few passes on this
myself to ensure all the search and replaces went alright but we should
be good™️
## About The Pull Request
This adds a simple but important piece of machinery to every bounty
hunter shuttle, the Fugitive Locator.
Functioning near identically to the Booty Locator (the pirate loot
tracker machine), this machine selects a random fugitive, reads their
_real_ name, and reads the name of the area they occupy. It has a 40
second cooldown, and will track a random fugitive each time.
The locator will report any location you are in, be it space, lavaland,
some distant ruin or the wastes, the hunters will always know where to
start looking for you.
Since a lot of this code was referenced from the booty locator, that has
also been touched up slightly. A bit of code was moved out of the way,
and the cooldown now uses a COOLDOWN_DECLARE() instead of time tracking.
Lastly, this renames the "fugitive tracker" (which tracks the bounty
hunter shuttle) to the "bounty shuttle tracker", because the name is
misleading.
## Why It's Good For The Game
This seeks to solve the issue of fugitive hunters not knowing who their
targets are, and having no way of knowing where their targets may be.
I decided on this particular implementation because it gives only a
vague area and identity for the fugitives to work with. This allows for
fugitives to make use of hiding spots, disguises, potted plants, and
other popular tactics that would be invalidated if the mechanism were a
hud tracker or pinpointer of sorts. The intent isn't to lead hunters
straight to their targets, but to give them somewhere to start.
As for the impact this may have on the Fugitive experience -- It will be
more difficult to coast through the round in a single hiding spot or
disappear from the z-level and never be heard from again.
Directing the hunters towards the fugitives should lead to a more active
experience, encouraging evasion over just plain hiding. Just remember:
the less fugitives there are, the easier it is for the hunters to
consistently track your area, so make sure you're looking out for each
other!
## Changelog
🆑
add: Fugitive shuttles now have a "Fugitive Tracker" machine, which
gives a readout on the location of a random fugitive on a 40 second
cooldown.
spellcheck: Renames the fugitive pinpointer to the bounty shuttle
pinpointer.
/🆑
stack/init was adding stacks to the global list if they had LESS THAN 10
units, though the sniffer only looks for things >= 10 units. Flipped
bracket, gg. add() was also using += instead of |=, which resulted in
duplicate entries for the same object in the global list when adding
stuff to a stack.
🆑 ShizCalev
fix: The materials sniffer now actually works!
/🆑
Ladies, Gentlemen, Gamers. You're probably wondering why I've called you
all here (through the automatic reviewer request system). So, mineral
balance! Mineral balance is less a balance and more of a nervous white
dude juggling spinning plates on a high-wire on his first day. The fact
it hasn't failed after going on this long is a miracle in and of itself.
This PR does not change mineral balance. What this does is moves over
every individual cost, both in crafting recipes attached to an object
over to a define based system. We have 3 defines:
`sheet_material_amount=2000` . Stock standard mineral sheet. This being
our central mineral unit, this is used for all costs 2000+.
`half_sheet_material_amount=1000` . Same as above, but using iron rods
as our inbetween for costs of 1000-1999.
`small_material_amount=100` . This hits 1-999. This covers... a
startlingly large amount of the codebase. It's feast or famine out here
in terms of mineral costs as a result, items are either sheets upon
sheets, or some fraction of small mats.
Shout out to riot darts for being the worst material cost in the game. I
will not elaborate.
Regardless, this has no functional change, but it sets the groundwork
for making future changes to material costs much, MUCH easier, and moves
over to a single, standardized set of units to help enforce coding
standards on new items, and will bring up lots of uncomfortable balance
questions down the line.
For now though, this serves as some rough boundaries on how items costs
are related, and will make adjusting these values easier going forward.
Except for foam darts.
I did round up foam darts.
Adjusting mineral balance on the macro scale will be as simple as
changing the aforementioned mineral defines, where the alternative is a
rats nest of magic number defines. ~~No seriously, 11.25 iron for a foam
dart are you kidding me what is the POINT WHY NOT JUST MAKE IT 11~~
Items individual numbers have not been adjusted yet, but we can
standardize how the conversation can be held and actually GET SOMEWHERE
on material balance as opposed to throwing our hands up or ignoring it
for another 10 years.
## About The Pull Request
Are YOU annoyed about never finding the fucking mats you need? Slap some
cable coil on an analyzer and find that untouched sheet of iron and or
glass. It's a pinpointer for basic sheets.
## Why It's Good For The Game
Originally I meant to give this as something borgs might want, but I
realized they really won't have a great time using it and the situation
is more about botanists not being asked, and not knowing how to grow
lots of iron, repeat for all other departments. Awareness problems!!!
But I still like the item as a miscellaneous craftable.
## Changelog
🆑
add: Craftable Material sniffers
/🆑
---------
Co-authored-by: Fikou <23585223+Fikou@users.noreply.github.com>
## About The Pull Request
Makes pinpointers tell what/who are they tracking when examined.
## Why It's Good For The Game
Makes pinpointers more comfortable to use.
## Changelog
🆑
qol: Pinpointers now tell what they are tracking when examined
/🆑
This PR covers 4 Key features:
Price Rebalancing
Passive Income
Gas Exports
Lathe Tax
Relevant Design Doc (Slightly out of date as a result of the discourse on the subject).
https://hackmd.io/WlWgyRafTaiAqz6ouOqC-Q
-- START DOCUMENT --
# Arconomy Version Two
This is mostly me organizing a long list of thoughts that I'm not sure if I can properly describe and get across, but lets just work with what we got and go from there.
## There should probably be a relationship to time and profit
So, part one of a series called "Arcane was completely wrong about game design", I made a rather large misstep in regards to designing arconomy, and nobody told me this until far, FAR after I had gone way too in on my own ideas:
"There needs to be a relationship between time and money". Because Space Station 13 is a game that is built around rounds, either long, LONG rounds on MRP or 30 min - 1 hour long rounds in LRP, your whole orientation of the game is built around time. The longer you spend in a single round, the more you can do and mold the station and the game in a specific direction, whether it's from an admin event, doing your job, or going off on a wierd character based tangent.
The issue here lies in a question I tried to answer in my previous design doc:
> "Command players start with lots of money, and make mountains of money, and as a result, have so much money by the end of the shift that they're practically immune to the effects of the economy.
> Assistant players start out with practically no money, find that the station is covered in costs that they'll never be able to practically afford, and decide that the economy is stupid and not worth utilizing altogether."
Two fundimentally different outlooks on the same problem, caused by the pay discrepency as it existed originally. Since we have so many different jobs all at different paygrades, the option that made the most sense at the time was to completely remove paychecks alltogether because they would multiplicitively exacerbate the previous issue.
While it would flood the in-game economy over time at high levels, it did add a sense of timescale to the existing in-game relationships. You **KNEW** that after x many minutes you would get that fancy hat, or that you would need to find cash in other ways to get it. Having that time-scale is helpful as we've moved to our 90 minute round average/goal. It also, similarly, means that we know exactly how many credits each job SHOULD have had access to before a major disaster calls for a shuttle call. But, in hindsight, that is a value that should be consistant for all players. If a single, unaided player looks at a 200 credit bill, that should have the same impact player to player, and not limit their access to jobs.
## Bounties just ain't that fun, but they stand to see improvement from where they are now
So, guilty as charged, bounty running doesn't quite have the same charm as it used to have. For our friends just joining us, cargo used to have a single, per round laundry list of items that would payout to the cargo budget each shift. Each list would start with 10 items, one of which would randomly be assigned higher priority with a higher payout, and it would be cargo's job to ~~Break into each department and steal that thing~~ cooperate with jobs around the station to aquire funds for station crisis or when you just want to dick around and make stacks of cash. This had a distinct charm to it, but one element of it that majorly reduced the replayability of bounties was that they were severely limited in scope. Once you did your ONE drink bounty or your ONE chemical bounty, you no longer needed to interact with that department.
My original goal was this: Make an unlimited bounty system, where crewmates were able to get a cut of their work as profit. To a degree, it's fairly successful! Crew do have a way to actively work with cargo to get paid for their labor, and they help cargo as a result by giving them free valuables. The issue lies in the fact that this has kinda flipped the relationship on it's head: Bounties stopped being cargo's job to outsource to the crew, and instead the crew's job that becomes dependent on cargo.
In general, many bounties simply weren't meant to be repeatable content in the first place. And certainly not meant to be used for every job. Offloading it as a kind of fetchquest minigame so that all jobs can offset the loss of passive income? It's not the best choice. For jobs like botanists or scientists it's tolerable at best, frustrating at worst. Just look at the state of things like experisci-slime experiments or scanning furniture.
It gets far worse when it's from the perspective of jobs that have *explicitly* limited supplies like security. No, a security player is not going to be allowed to haul away all the good metal handcuffs from the brig for a bounty, and no, you cannot take all the riot shotguns from the brig.
Now, a few of these things were fixed over time, with mixed successes. Bounties started to be cleaned up in order to prevent limited quantity items from being an option for repeat bounties. Jobs that lack exports started to get some content for still allowing them to have repeatable exports (Like the Scanners for Security Officers to go on patrols).
The BIG EXCEPTION to this is Restaurant Bots, but we'll hit that in a second.
## Getting everything on the same price scale has been a major improvement.
Unironically one of the best changes made has been the idea that even if we lack that good time-credit scale from before, we didn't really have a "standard" to work off of when something new is added to the game and the dev needs to determine how much to make that thing cost. That's why the current costs of objects and values on-station are scaled off of a single define, the value of a crate sold on the cargo shuttle.
> Yes, I'd like an APPLE. It's worth 3124151 CREDITS. NO, I don't know why the apple juice in the vendor is worth 415 CREDITS, nor do I CARE, GOOD MAN.
From the back end, everything is scaled off the same define now. Paygrades are defined off of a different scale still, but that's fine. You know, from the cargo end of things, that a cargo player needs to ship off X number of empty metal crates to purchase a laser crate, or a pizza crate. Definate relationships help in solidifying the singular value of a product.
If we decide that we want to rescale the in-game economy and provide space credits with more granularity, at least we know we can do it with a single line of code, and not looking at every single instance of something that charges the player money.
### Arconomy Tangent: We gotta nuke gas selling.
This has been a long time coming and I know people are going to be upset at me, but look man.
I have no idea how selling moles of gas works these days. It seems like with minimal resources, true atmos wizards are able to make singular cans of gasses with infinite moles of some kind of gas, and if it's exotic enough, they can make upwards of a million credits a can. I've seen multiple occasions where selling gas cans to cargo has allowed for players to buy a bike.
For our Gen-Z zoomers reading this, players were never meant to BUY the bike. The bike is just a reskinned scooter meant as a cute little pokemon joke. If a player can actually buy a bike in a round, that's a sign that someone, somewhere, fucked up.
We fucked up the whole system with atmos gas selling.
We've now gone through metas of extracting miasma from lavaland for credits, we've gone through a meta where cargo starts building their own hydrogen burn chambers for simply produced gasses, we've seen time and time again that processed gasses in the funny space simulator just tends to be abused to death and back. I've had talks with TheFinalPotato on this in the past, and it just feels like a system that would need to be rewritten from the ground up, or looked at in terms of the whole cargo department. If I don't get to it first, the next cargo design doc someone writes **SHOULD**.
## Giving jobs content that integrates into the economy can be really fun.
Tourism bots and the baked in ingredient shopping is fun! It's enabled for a fluff job that doesn't have too terribly much by way of serious responsibilites to integrate active income minigames into the gameplay of chefs and bartenders. It's fully optional, it's quick, and it's not even a full shift investment.
These secondary tasks, which utilize jobs core gameplay loops in a new way, while rewarding them within the in-game economy are a decent way to keep players engaged with their jobs, and allow for them to use credits as a player resource as well as a primary job resource.
**I AM NOT SAYING** that all jobs need to find tasks to arbitrarily reward players with credits for. The reason it works so well for jobs like the chef or bartender is because their job is already to make food and drinks, but they have so many options that they're not encouraged to make too wide of a variety of food, especially when botanists won't always make everything you need. The food market gives them an outlet to buy outlier ingredients and the tourists pay handsomely enough that you can offset your costs most or the time.
I'll break this down as well into the three different methods of money-making in game as well, to guide someone on how to make good, secondary income content.
| Primary | Secondary | Tertiary |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |
| This is something like passive paycheck income. You get this just purely for playing the game, and staying alive. | This is an active trade off between your job's specific content, where you are trading your time for something it is directly your responsibility to do. Eg. Tourist Bots. | An active task you are performing for income, but lacks the specialization of a job. EG. Bounties. |
Jobs that excell at more service based tasks and less production based tasks should aim to aquire more seconary style economy integration, like medical, science, or security.
## The options for moving money around the station are actually pretty decent, but could be streamlined
Bounty boards are pretty decent at being a way to pay crew members for single service jobs. However, bounty boards are pretty much dead content, in a sense. There's not much incentive to hunt down your department's bounty board.
Similarly, most crew would just prefer to hand credits out by hand to prevent most kinds of abuse of their own credit supply.
Long term and certainly a major personal outcome I'd like to see: Bounty boards and Newscasters should be merged together. Newscasters have some truely awful spaghetti and their being held together by shoe-strings and duct tape (This is slang for HTML). Bounty boards are... well they're functional, but they have the benefit of being built in TGUI. Merging the two's functions should cut down on wall-space, as well as improve the quality of a vast deal of code, and make money transfer on station slightly easier.
Honestly, pretty happy with vend-a-trays. They're pretty decent store-machines on station and do their job pretty well when they get used. All in all I'm happy with how they work.
Custom Vendors are clunky to a fairly major degree and I don't think most players get how to make them work on account of need a price tagger (not a sales tagger, that's the cargo item) to mark an object for it's sale value, then load it into a custom vendor sales unit, then load it into a custom vending machine, and that's only IF custom vending machines decide to work this year. Streamlining the tools, or perhaps just vending machines would certainly improve this as a service.
## Just ain't enough cool stuff to buy with credits.
An ever-present problem, that we're just kinda stuck with. There's a decent number of issues involved with making content that can safely be gated with just credits.
* If it's usable as a weapon, is it too dangerous to hand out to the crew at large?
* Does security get potential oversight?
* If it's illegal, does it go through cargo?
* Does it HAVE to go through cargo?
* If it's beneficial, is it going to invalidate the existance of a job? (Think old medkits!)
* Is there anything that players WANT that's not a weapon, benefical to the station but not too strong, or quite literally traitor equipment?
It's a tough question.
Some items make complete sense to implement on a per job basis as either uncommon or premium equipment, while other items could potentially be moved to station-wide unique purchasables.
# Takeaways:
Look, these are just some possible solutions that I'm considering. I think that working alongside a maintainer who could actually give a damn on getting this system orderly and possibly alligned with our current design philosophy (Who also understands that a not-insignificant amount of current economy was abitrarly written by goofball an actual decade ago) could help iron this out into a clear and consise set of goals and milestones to make the in-game economy workable. Not balanced, but workable.
* **Design a simple simulation for per round intake and outtake, to determine benchmark values for a 90 minute round.**
It would need to look something like this, as a kind of fucked up, Multi-Input Multi-Output Control Problem. Possibly could be done in simulink, but I'm not quite sure how to do that at this moment, so a less complex version might be fine.
* **Look back at implementing crewmember incomes, but at a flat, more consistant rate over all jobs**
My leading idea: 50 credit, uniform paygrade. No wild, unscaled pay rates based on what job is "important" or not.
That line of thinking means that certain jobs should have more expensive equipment over other jobs, but then we're right back to the captain thinking that a cup of coffee is practically free where an assistant thinks that a screwdriver from the vendor is going to put them out of house and home.
Improves time-relationship values with credits.
This could lead way to heads of staff having some degree of control to giving raises or paycuts to crew-members, but perhaps at a very, VERY gradual rate.
* **Perform another big-picture look at bounty cubes.**
Potentially try to put bounties back in the hands of cargo, while still providing payouts to crewmates who assist in completing jobs. This may require some minor refactoring of the pricetag component, perhaps to even allow for multiple crewmembers to recieve profit from a payout.
This means once again, look at making bounties workable for all jobs on the station, not making the objects requested literal lathe-fodder, and finding ways to benefit the station in some way with the task of bounty cubes, even if it's just for credits.
Deceptively hard task.
* **Add secondary tasks that integrate the economy into non-bounty-able jobs/departments**
Like it says on the tin, look into ways to add content that improves economy integration into existing jobs, without necessarily changing what those jobs DO. The bounties for those jobs can still exist as a tertiary thing, but should be made clear that they're... tertiary.
Chefs still make food and bartenders still serve drinks, but they have a way to hand them out for fun and profit.
Some thoughts and ways to handle this potentially:
*Science:* Perform intricate testing on anomalous materials using science equipment. Should NOT REWARD RESEARCH POINTS. Mr. OJ Headcoder will CHEMICALLY CASTRATE me, or you, if you do.
*Medical:* Complete tricky or non-standard surgeries on dummies for medical data. Think like that meme from the TV show, House.
"He needs Mouse bites to live. MORE MOUSE BITES."
*Engineering:* Repair wacky machines that use both station-standard parts as well as solving quick puzzles.
* **Look into more effective money sinks that are dynamic sensitive**
Think, for example, about the station ransom event that spawns space pirates.
What if instead of the captain just dumping credits from the cargo budget into the aether to prevent pirate spawns (They're bugged anyway to my knowledge to spawn anyway), crewmates had to cough up that dough before a time-limit, or risk a pirate spawn. For those of you who were scratching their heads at (Operational Costs!?) in the above controls diagram, this is the sort of thing I mean.
Little, smaller things that might need to be purchased, invested in, or otherwise drain credits from the station over the course of the round.
# Arconomy 2.0: Smarter, Better, Flashier.
## Roundstart
Players begin each shift with a set amount of money, with the value being mostly uniform over the course of a shift assuming no interaction with economy. Jobs are split up into only 3 paygrades, Minimal, Crew, and Command. Minimal is reserved for jobs that are meant to fill population counts but lack a specialization, like prisoner and assistant. When starting the shift, a player will start with 5 paychecks worth of savings. This system is not designed for persistance, so you will always be able to tell how much money a player starts out with. Every 5 minutes, aka every economy tick, the player will recieve one paycheck, which is capped out at the standard crew member paycheck. This means that even if you start the shift as the captain, and begin the shift with 500 credits, you will recieve the same 50 credits as regular crew members.
| Minimal Paycheck | Crew Paycheck | Command Paycheck | Frequency |
| -------- | -------- | -------- |--------|
| 125 Cr | 250 Cr | 500 Cr | Roundstart |
| 25 Cr | 50 Cr | 50 Cr | Passive Income |
## Product Prices
Products found in vending machines are defined by the amount of a player's paycheck they're meant to cost. Regular items use the PAYCHECK_CREW value, while more expensive or otherwise prohibitive items are defined by PAYCHECK_COMMAND. Items are defined in this uniform, horizontal fashion in order to maintain the equal value of credits over all jobs. A 100 credit medkit in medical should have the same value to a doctor as it does to a botanist.
Jobs apply a discount to vending within their own department, so an engineering would have a discount on tools, and a doctor would have a discount on sutures. Items that are important to gameplay progression in a role are less expensive to their intended users.
> **AUTHORS NOTE:** I am considering removing in-department discounts. In the benefit of making the value of purchasables more universal, deciding that credits shouldn't be spent within their own department just seems... rather fucking stupid.
> Possibly move the discount to only the first few minutes of the shift, or perhaps as some kind of gameplay benefit to slowly increase in-department discount through gameplay milestones? Who knows 👻
>
Some jobs have premium, high value items stocked in their vending machines that are not meant to be purchased at roundstart. These are meant to encourage players to save or combine resources to gain access. An example of this is insulated gloves. Other high value items can also be found in contraband through hacking vending machines. This remains unchanged.
## Markets
The cargo department has been changed in order to improve player involvement with the economy, as well as to give cargo more variety in their merchandise while preventing a singular stale meta of products to purchase from.
Yes, I'm looking at you, russian surplus crate.
Lets start with what's remaining the same:
* Cargo is a department that manages imports and exports of products, fulfilling departmental orders, and aquiring supplies dependent on the station's state.
* Cargo encompasses the station's mail, mining, and flow of orders, as well as drone exploration.
* A skilled cargo member is able to find high value items to sell back to centcom in exchange for more funds, to purchase those supplies.
* Centcom may request bounties which crew can fulfill in exchange for credits, if they wish for additional work.
**Now for the new design flow:**
Cargo starts out with a new mechanic called a market. Markets hold existing export datums as well as purchasable products. The values of items will fluxuate up and down based on the market status, with in-game events or player actions raising or lowering the values of specific markets.
At roundstart, cargo has a single market to sell to, which is Nanotransen. This will not incapsulate all the existing export datums in the game, just the *primary* exports that are used by players. Items that are exclusive to nanotrasen and required to play certain game modes, like mindshield implants or being able to sell crates, are included and will always be available to purchase.
Additional markets can be unlocked through gameplay sources, such as:
| Market Name | Source | Imports/Exports |
| -------- | -------- |- |
| The Syndicate | Emagging/Hacking the Console | Illegal Goods/Contraband |
| The Clown Planet Commerse | Discovering the clown planet ruin | Pies, Horns, Pranking Equipment |
|Terragov Sector Security Surplus | Killing any megafauna. | Weapons, Ammunition, Advanced Riot Gear. |
| Mekki Materials Co. | Recovered loot from Exodrones | Materials and industrial equipment. |
|Donk Co.| As a tip from tourist robots. | Foods and Drinks, Toys and Games.|
|Waffle Co.| As above. | Bootleg products and wacky merchandise. |
|The Research Consortium| Reward for completing any experiment tree. | Slime Cores, RnD Artifacts, Robotics Equipment |
...And more, if I can think of more.
The purpose being, of course, to split up cargo's purchasable goods to be more instanced and unique, while also create unique situations where due to profitable markets, very specific exports are needed to help the department make money.
End of document for now :@ArcaneMusic
-- END DOCUMENT
Price Shifting
So, in-game items that have prices have a major issue on their hands, being that they were decided by how much money that job should make. This means that many of the jobs in-game have been given prices scaled to their job's income. That income I adjusted by removing passive income in #54161. While this was helpful to moving towards an active in-game economy, it resulted in items falling into distinct price brackets. A high paying job like security's items could never be purchased by someone like a botanist, but a job like a security officer had more capital and buying power than most other jobs in-game combined when moving down those brackets. We've done a simple normalization of scale to help in bring things closer to a semblance of equality.
There are now 3 price brackets, PAYCHECK_LOW, PAYCHECK_CREW, and PAYCHECK_COMMAND. Command staff will still have a higher base level of money on-hand than other crew, and low paying wages that we on-station don't respect as being real jobs (assistant, prisoner) will have their items be intentionally cheaper to encourage active participation in the economy, but the difference in scale is now noticeably far closer to each other. This means that assistants can still interact with the economy as spenders, but if they want to be doing a lot of work with money, they'll need to put in work. Additionally, this means we arbitrarily enforce a system that allows for items to have uniformity in what they cost to other players. 50 credits for a wrench feels better when you know that other job critical items in-game are also around the same price, and it's equivalent to one paycheck.
Paychecks are reintroduced
Economy lost it's relationship to time. In a game where a single round takes 90+ minutes (Backed up not only by the head-coder's design direction as well as plenty of aggregate round data), having a relationship to time and how long it takes to afford something is a major consideration when you look at buying something. Also, we get to say that I was certifiably wrong in regards to the active economy thing, since we have very, VERY few active sources of content in-game that are very... fun? Bounties are literal fetch quests but something like tourists is at least more engaging and interactive with the round, and should be the direction we want economy-job integration to head in.
Between having inflation as a price manipulation mechanic already in the code, as well as prices being roughly equalized in terms of their costs between jobs and their impact on the round, this allows for the reintroduction of paychecks to an extent.
As an additional note, doing this meant tweaking down the syndicate briefcase of cash, so that instead of giving you 5000 credits for 1 TC, it now costs 5 TC to accompany the fact that this is now a rather significant amount of money, even on decently high population. Fun fact: the Syndicate Briefcase of Cash actually PREDATES the economy, and was NEVER ADJUSTED beyond the original implementation of the economy as a result!
Gas Exports.
ALRIGHT ARE YOU READY FOR SOME GRAPHS? I THOUGHT SO, YOU LOVE GRAPHS.
So, gas exports are fucked, have always been fucked, and consistently have proven to be capable of breaking the in-game economy for a long time. This is no secret, I've been pinged with players getting billions, actual billions of credits using it multiple times in as many years. See, any round where a player manages to buy the bicycle is a round where I've fucked up, or someone fucked and I let it get past me.
So here's how gas exports work right now.
So, all of this hinges on the value of a single mole of gas, and some gasses enable you to make extremely, EXTREMELY profitable gasses through atmospheric gas wizardry However, even those less profitable gasses are still in an extremely high magnitude of value.
Most gasses if you have a full can of it will net you OVER 10k credits. For scale, one crate being sold in cargo is 200 credits.
That's a minimum of crates for pumping gas into a hollow metal box and praying it doesn't explode.
So we adjusted the values accordingly.
The baseline value of a single gas has been tweaked downward significantly. Even these values are still arguably very high, but I can play with it at the discretion of LemonintheDark. The green line at the top represents gasses that previously sold for 100 credits per mole, antinobilium I believe, and working downwards. I am going to try and enforce 10 credits per mole as the absolute maximum hard cap on gas exports, regardless of how many gasses we try to add in the future. Because the alternative is getting a gunjillion credits by huffing miasma into a tank of steel. And we ain't having that shit.
Lathe Tax
Part of the testing for this PR involved me modeling the SS13 economy in a given round as a kind of controls problem, with each source of income introduced in the round as a kind of input (Passive Income, Bounties, Tourists) in order to get a handle on roughly how much income a single round of SS13 will see per player on the given designed round-length, in order to estimate how much things are going to cost. Modeling how much players spend on a given round is variable enough that it'd be too difficult to accurately test without just throwing this up on a server and getting live data.
However, from the appearance of my dataset, players would be making a LOT more money nowadays with all of the above changes implemented. In an attempt to curve that intake, I attempted to implement a small, low scale tax of printing items that would take a small amount of players income every time they print, as a way to add a basic economic side-effect to this mechanic.
This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a mixed decision. So, maintainers came up with an intended direction they want to see it, as they wanted to make sure that economy would remain a secondary system, that could still have an impact on round direction and the changes they want to see in the game.
So, here's the intent:
Lathe tax should exist in the form of printing things from protolathes outside of your department, not on autolathes or your own protolathe.
We want to promote people talking and collaborating to access things if it's outside the scope of their department and they still want it, with theft still being a viable avenue of gameplay.
Players will be charged 10 credits for printing a set of items not from their own protolathe, each. Printing an item can be paid for from your own ID card's bank account automatically, but the payment component has been buffed to handle physical money alternatives, as well as pulled money, similar to the luxury shuttle scanner gate's behavior.
Borgs are still enabled to print from lathes, however instead of it costing them credits, they now take a self-significant power cost in order to do so, preventing them from being used as a roving bank account for printing. I'll look into this further as we don't want to invalidate mechanics like borgs being able to do organ based surgery or building machinery, but we don't want them to become credit cards, so place that under advisement.
Tweaks and Updates:
(Suggested by Ziiro) If the revolutionaries win, centcom will no longer enforce the Lathe Tax.
(Suggested by about ~1000 people independently between my DMs, Reddit threads, the Feedback Thread, and elsewhere)
Printing items only taxes you once per print. EG: If you print 10 Kitchen Knifes as an assistant from the service lathe, you will only be charged once instead of 10 times.
For many of the reasons that I outlined above, this is a good change in a positive direction.
Players get more ability to interact with the economy without having to do content that's becoming increasingly depreciated in my absence.
Players also have a baseline consensus on what values of credits are high and low because jobs have been given an equalized standard in regards to the cost of certain items.
Price fluctuations through inflation will now be more meaningful in situations where the economy becomes more relevant.
The system will still encourage you to play a job that's productive to the status of the station through lower paycheck jobs existing as well.
Gas exports are now reduced to the point that their value is appropriate for the first time... actually ever. Nice.
The values of nearly every item purchasable by players has been rebalanced.
Players will now start with less starting money, but will receive a paycheck once every 5 minutes.
The value of gasses exported through the cargo department have been skewed way, WAY down in terms of price.
The Syndicate briefcase of cash now contains now costs 5 TC, up from 1 TC, for 5000 credits.
Printing items from lathes on station now costs a fee of 10 credits per item printed if it's from a lathe not under your department.
The payment component has received additional handling for physical credits, as well as pulled credits/ID cards for those without hands.
About The Pull Request
Converts more inputs to TGUI. Possibly all user-facing input lists in the game.
Did any surrounding text/number inputs as well
Added null choice support so users can press cancel.
Added some misc TGUI input fixes
Fixed custom vendors while I was there
I refactored a lot of code while just poking around.
Primarily, usage of .len in files where I was already working on lists.
Some code was just awful - look at guardian.dm and its non use of early returns
If there are any disputes, I can revert it just fine, those changes are not integral to the PR.
Why It's Good For The Game
Fixes#63629Fixes#63307
Fixes custom vendors /again/
Text input is more performant.
Part of a long series of TGUI conversion to make the game more visually appealing
Changelog
cl
refactor: The majority of user facing input lists have been converted to TGUI.
refactor: Tgui text inputs now scale with entered input.
fix: Many inputs now properly accept cancelling out of the menu.
fix: Fixes an edge case where users could not press enter on number inputs.
fix: Custom vendor bluescreen.
fix: You can now press ENTER on text inputs without an entry to cancel.
/cl
Bring _HELPERS/_lists.dm to latest standards by:
-Adding proper documentation and fixing existing one
-Giving vars proper names
-Procs now use snake case as per standard (many files that use those procs will be affected)
## About The Pull Request
stop forgetting to include mapload, if you don't include it then every single subtype past it by default doesn't include it
for example, `obj/item` didn't include mapload so every single item by default didn't fill in mapload
## Regex used:
procs without args, not even regex
`/Initialize()`
procs with args
`\/Initialize\((?!mapload)((.)*\w)?`
cleanup of things i didn't want to mapload:
`\/datum\/(.)*\/Initialize\(mapload`
Converts most spans into span procs. Mostly used regex for this and sorted out any compile time errors afterwards so there could be some bugs.
Was initially going to do defines, but ninja said to make it into a proc, and if there's any overhead, they can easily be changed to defines.
Makes it easier to control the formatting and prevents typos when creating spans as it'll runtime if you misspell instead of silently failing.
Reduces the code you need to write when writing spans, as you don't need to close the span as that's automatically handled by the proc.
(Note from Lemon: This should be converted to defines once we update the minimum version to 514. Didn't do it now because byond pain and such)
Creates update_name and update_desc
Creates the wrapper proc update_appearance to batch update_name, update_desc, and update_icon together
Less non-icon handling code in update_icon and friends
Signal hooks for things that want to change names and descriptions
99%+ of the changes in this are just from switching everything over to update_appearance from update_icon
Nanite Monitoring program now makes people trackable as if they have enabled their suit sensors, as stated in the program description.
Now you can track people with Nanites Monitoring program using following devices:
Crew pinpointer (arrow)
Crew pinpointer - contractor version (arrow)
Crew pinpointer (proximity)
Lifeline radar (modular computers software)
Also fixed multi-Z tracking for the first three devices. When the target is on different Z of the same station, it shows "?" icon.
Also, the stationary crew monitor will now work properly on multi-Z stations.
* The Re-pricening
* Rewritten and adjusted for paycheck defines.
* I made the map changes finally.
* And the refills too.
* "OH YEAH REPLACING IT ALL WITH DEFINES AND SCALING IT THE EXCEL DOCUMENT WILL BE EASY, ARCANE!!!"
* And the premium ones too.
* Accidently spoiled a future pr due to dme bleedover
Implements the ?. operator, replacing code like A && A.B with A?.B
BYOND Ref:
When reading A?.B, it's equivalent to A && A.B except that A is only evaluated once, even if it's a complex expression like a proc call.
* Renames a few variables. Also reorders fallback order again.
Renames item_state to inhand_icon_state
Renames mob_overlay_icon to worn_icon
Renames mob_overlay_state to worn_icon_state
worn_icon_state/mob_overlay_state now never gets used for inhands.
* Fixes some comments
* Fixes map issue
* Restart lints
* Properly resolves conflicts
About The Pull Request
When #48236 was in progress, there was discussion about how a crew pinpointer was OP for paramedics. I immediately had an idea for a new one and made a PR to the paramedic PR. 81Denton asked me to make this its own PR after the paramedic PR was merged.
The proximity crew pinpointer does not point in the direction of the patient, but has a circle sprite that gets smaller larger as you get closer, so you have to search around, or combine it with the handheld crew monitor.
The circle is at maximum the smallest size after 29 tiles away, so you must be 28 or fewer tiles away for an indication that you are getting close. I welcome feedback on this. The handheld crew monitor can be used to find the area they are in.
proxpin
Demo video: https://youtu.be/_rXeJ49b-e8 (The pinpointer gets bigger rather than smaller now)
This is only attainable at the moment to paramedics as they spawn. Should it also be available elsewhere? now constructable from the Biological Technology techweb
Further changes
Moved Crew Pinpointer into premium nanomed items for 900 credits
Moved Handheld Crew monitor into premium nanomed items for 1750 credits, same price as before
Why It's Good For The Game
In #48236 it was stated that paramedics should start with the bare minimum equipment to do their job. The crew pinpointer that points them in exactly the right direction is pretty powerful, and this nerf will encourage them to either get used to the proximity one, or upgrade to the normal one at a price from the NanoMed or from techwebs.
Moving the Crew Monitor into premium was necessary to make it more of a luxury than an instant grab.
Feedback for nanomed premium prices on the normal pinpointer and the handheld monitor would help a lot
Changelog
cl JJRcop
add: New proximity crew pinpointer.
balance: Paramedic's crew pinpointer replaced with proximity crew pinpointer.
balance: The crew monitor was moved to premium items in nanomed, same with the handheld crew pinpointer
/cl
* update_icon() improvements
Fixes some update_icon() calls to properly call parent and use update_overlays() and update_icon_state().
The rest of obj/item fuck it
* Suggested fixes, also passes the linter
* I always forget . = ..() is faster than return ..() FOR SOME FUCKING REASON
* Actually this is better
* Signilzes datum/action to update its icon when its connected item does.
* prices & income
* more prices
* lower megaseed premium prices
* custom prices for premium tools
* slightly lowers prices for some snacks/drinks/cigs
* hey get back here
* Adds sorting to most input() lists.
* Sorted some global lists, added more input sorting
* Should now use correct sort everywhere.
* compiles
* Last fixes.
removes materials list from items, uses custom_materials instead. This might introduce some bugs so we should testmerge this for a while (and Ill test stuff locally as much as I can)
this also adds material crafting to sheets. Test case being chairs. In the future we can add stuff like tables, walls, doors etc.
also applies materials to everything, with fixes, which can close#46299
About The Pull Request
Converts every single usage of playsound's vary parameter to use the boolean define instead of 1 or 0. I'm tired of people copypasting the incorrect usage.
Also changes a couple of places where a list was picked from instead of using get_sfx internal calls
This was done via regex:
(playsound\(.+,.+,.+, ?)1( ?\)| ?,.+\)) to match 1
(playsound\(.+,.+,.+, ?)0( ?\)| ?,.+\)) to match 0
full sed commands:
/(playsound\(.+,.+,.+, ?)1( ?\)| ?,.+\))/\1TRUE\2/ 1 to TRUE
/(playsound\(.+,.+,.+, ?)0( ?\)| ?,.+\))/\1FALSE\2/ 0 to FALSE
I'm not very good with regex and these could probably be optimized, but they worked.
Why It's Good For The Game
Code usability
* mostly fixes in this commit
* removes old_god from the dme
* russian shuttle improvements
* TODO: fix the hook gun
* shotgun finished, next commit shuttle
* bounty hunting shuttle
* back up to speed on the dmis
* readds poster 46 and adds the shuttle finally
* dmi fixes
* traps need fixing, work out whatever is happening with synths
* super final touches, see desc
map ports + proper spawners, pinpointer and traps functional. other misc changes
* removes verb stuff from non verb stuff
* review (see desc)
antimagic checks and it now the two objects move inside each other instead
* dmi conflicts
* PLUNGERS. BEGONE.
* 1/4 done? maybe?
* more
* stuff
* incremental stuff
* stuff
* stuff & things
* mostly done but not yet
* stuffing
* stuffing 2: electric boogaloo
* Git Commit and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
* make it actually compile
* found more stuff
* fixes
* fix AI laws appearing out of order
* fix windows
* should be the remaining stuff
* this time for real
* i guess it should compile too
* fix sechuds
* Free codebase churn
* fixes dviewmob
* a commit
* Partial revert "Free codebase churn"
This reverts commit 9dd41b3860c331637bbc85e694dd32dc59768ad5.
* better fix to dviewmob
* renames living_mob_list to alive_mob_list, adds mob_living_list and carbon_list
* make some use out of the shiny carbon list
* make some use out of the shiny new living list
* more things, also make the mobs subsystem (Life) use living list
* bonus
* domo arigato mr. roboto
* compile fixes, also made the drone code less dumb
* better?
* make admin message prettier
* honk
* fixes blobs
* rev fixes
* one small thing
