## About The Pull Request
Hello friends, I've been on a bit of a lighting kick recently, and I
decided I clearly do not have enough things to work on as it is.
This pr adds angle support to static lights, and a concepting/debug tool
for playing with lights on a map.
Let's start from first principles yeah?
### Why Angled Lights?
Mappers, since they can't actually see a light's effect in editor, tend
to go off gut.
That gut is based more off what "makes sense" then how things actually
work
This means they'll overplace light sources, and also they tend to treat
lights, particularly light "bars" (the bigger ones) as directional.
So you'll have two lights on either sides of a pillar, lights inside a
room with lights outside pointing out, etc.
This has annoying side effects. A lot of our map is overlit, to the
point that knocking out a light does.... pretty much nothing.
I find this sad, and would like to work to prevent it. I think dark and
dim, while it does not suit the normal game, is amazing for vibes, and I
want it to be easier to see that.
Angled lights bring how lights work more in line with how mappers expect
lights work, and avoids bleedover into rooms that shouldn't be bled
into, working towards that goal of mine.
### How Angled Lights?
This is more complex then you'd first think so we'll go step by step
Oh before we start, some catchup from the last time I touched lighting
code.
Instead of doing a lighting falloff calculation for each lighting corner
(a block that represents the resolution of our lights) in view we
instead generate cached lightsheets. These precalculate and store all
possible falloffs for x and y distances from a source.
This is very useful for angle work, since it makes it almost totally
free.
Atoms get 2 new values. light_angle and light_dir
Light angle is the angle the light uses, and light_dir is a cardinal
direction it displays in
We take these values, and inside sheetbuilding do some optional angle
work. getting the center angle, the angle of a pair of coords, and then
the delta between them.
This is then multiplied against the standard falloff formula, and job
done.
We do need some extra fenangling to make this all work nicely tho.
We currently use a pixel turf var stored on the light source to do
distance calculations.
This is the turf we pretend the light source is on for visuals, most
often used to make wall lights work nice.
The trouble is it's not very granular, and doesn't always have the
effect you might want.
So, instead of generating and storing a pixel turf to do our distance
calculations against, we store x and y offset variables.
We use them to expand our working range and sheet size to ensure things
visually make sense, and then offset any positions by them.
I've added a way for sources to have opinions on their offsets too, and
am using them for wall lights.
This ensures the angle calculations don't make the wall behind a light
fulldark, which would be silly.
### Debug Tool?
In the interest of helping with that core problem, lights being complex
to display, I've added a prototyping tool to the game.
It's locked behind mapping verbs, and works about like this.
Once the verb is activated, it iterates over all the sources in the
world (except turfs because those are kinda silly), outlining and
"freezing" them, preventing any future changes.
Then, it adds 3 buttons to the owners of a light source.
The first button toggles the light on and off, as desired.
The third allows you to move the source around, with a little targeting
icon replacing your mouse
The second tho, that's more interesting.
The second button opens a debug menu for that light
There's a lot here, let's go through it.
Bit on the left is a list of templates, which allow you to sample
existing light types (No I have no idea why the background is fullwhite,
need to work on that pre merge)
You can choose one by clicking it, and hitting the upload button.
This replaces your existing lighting values with the template's,
alongside replacing its icon and icon state so it looks right.
There are three types as of now, mostly for categorization. Bar, which
are the larger typically stronger lights, Bulb, which are well, bulbs,
and Misc which could be expanded, but currently just contains floor
lights.
Alongside that you can manually edit the power, range, color and angle
of the focused light.
I also have support for changing the direction of the light source,
since anything that uses directional lighting would also tie light dir
to it.
This isn't *always* done tho, so I should maybe find a way to edit light
dir too.
My hope is this tool will allow for better concepting of a room's
lights, and easier changing of individual object's light values to suit
the right visuals.
### Lemon No Why What
Ok so I applied angle lights to bars and bulbs, which means I am
changing the lighting of pretty much every map in the codebase.
I'm gonna uh, go check my work.
Alongside this I intend to give lighting some depth. So if there's room
to make a space warmer, or highlight light colors from other sources, I
will do that.
(Images as examples)
I also want to work on that other goal of mine, making breaking lights
matter. So I'll be doing what I can to ensure you only need to break one
light to make a meaningful change in the scene.
This is semi complicated by one light source not ever actually reaching
fullbright on its own, but we do what we must because we can.
I'm as I hope you know biased towards darker spaces, I think contrast
has vibes.
In particular I do not think strong lights really suit maintenance.
Most of what is used there are bulbs, so I'm planning on replacing most
uses with low power bulbs, to keep light impacts to rooms, alongside
reducing the amount of lights placed in the main tunnels
**If you take issue with this methodology please do so NOW**, I don't
want to have to do another pass over things.
Oh also I'm saving station maps for last since ruins are less likely to
get touched in mapping march and all.
### Misc + Finishing Thoughts
Light templates support mirroring vars off typepaths using a subtype,
which means all the templates added here do not require updating if the
source type changes somehow. I'd like to expand the template list at
some point, perhaps in future.
I've opened this as a draft to make my intentions to make my changes to
lights known, and to serve as motivation for all the map changes I need
to do.
### Farish Future
I'm unhappy with how we currently configure lights. I would like a
system that more directly matches the idea of drawing falloff curves,
along with allowing for different falloffs for different colors,
alongside extending the idea to angle falloff.
This would make out of engine lighting easier, allow for nicer looking
lights (red to pink, blue to purple, etc), and improve accessibility by
artists.
This is slightly far off, because I have other obligations and it's
kinda complicated, but I'd like to mention it cause it's one of my many
pipedreams.
## Changelog
🆑
add: Added angle lighting, applies it to most wall lights!
add: Adds a lighting prototyping tool, mappers go try it out (it's
locked behind the mapping verb)
/🆑
---------
Co-authored-by: MMMiracles <lolaccount1@hotmail.com>
Remove welder fuel usage from all actions except attacking and leaving
it on
most welder tasks require a minimum of 1u of fuel, some longer tasks
require a minimum of 2 or 3u welders now drain 1u every 5 seconds
they're active
## About The Pull Request
Prior to this PR welder fuel usage was random, a lot of tasks didn't use
any welder fuel and welders were basically near infinite so long as you
didn't use them for combat, it took 26 seconds of activity to drain 1u
of fuel, that means an emergency welder alone could run for 5 minutes
straight before needing a refuel
After this PR all welders will drain 1u every 5 seconds instead of every
26 seconds, but welding objects won't require extra fuel anymore, making
the fuel usage much more consistent.
resolves#55018
## Why It's Good For The Game
Actually makes fuel tanks useful and relevant without making it
obnoxious to do repetitive quick tasks like turn rods into plates,
there's actually a reason to upgrade off the emergency welder now since
it lasts 50 seconds rather than 5 minutes
## Changelog
🆑
qol: Welders now have a more consistent fuel usage
/🆑
A grid is shown while the user is holding a painting tool on an editable
canvas. This is achieved by drawing empty rectangles after the filled
ones are placed whenever the canvas is updated and if requirements are
met.
It's by no mean perfect, especially since the strokeStyle is a mere
"#888888" hexcolor, the contrast may get low around colors of similar
lightness. But I don't think I've much the strength to seek out a
fancier solution to a peeve that's hardly a botherance anyway while the
canvas is still mostly white.
I've also had a maintainer suggest me to make a toggle to
disable/enable. I talked a bit how that'd be a bit more complex to
integrate but not much so frankly, although switching hands or putting
away the tool already works for that. That said, I'm willing to do it if
player feedback suggests such toggle should be integrated.
## About The Pull Request
Having used the painting UI to kill some time during long rounds for a
decent chunk of the past year, the need of a quicker and less tedious
way to fix a misclick or mistake like drawing over the wrong pixel has
become clear to me, as well as getting some feedback on the palette
component I made last year.
As the title suggests, this PR adds an eye-dropper function to the
canvas. Right-Click a pixel on the canvas, and the painting tool will
copy its color. Simple as, works on both finished and unfinished
paintings.
As a bonus, you can also right-click one of those selectable
white/colored squares on the color scheme near the bottom of the UI (if
using spraycan/palette) to change its color without having to go back to
main game window and a radial menu.
EDIT: With the tooltip added to the UI, I can say it's ready.
## Why It's Good For The Game
This PR aims to add better options to change colors on the go and
improve the user experience on the painting UI.
## Changelog
🆑
qol: Adds a eye-dropper-like right-click function to the painting canvas
UI. Right-Click a pixel on the canvas while holding a painting tool to
have it copy its color.
qol: Also adds a right-click function to the color palette at the bottom
of the UI to allow users to set its colors without having to alternate
between the game window and the UI.
qol: Lastly, a tooltip has been added near the top-left corner of the
same UI to let players know of these features.
/🆑
## About The Pull Request
See the title and the relative bug report. Yes, this is a webedit.
The relative lines were removed by #74538. The author of that PR had
apparently read the typepath wrong and therefore thought it was
redundant (they were adding the TRAIT_KEEP_TOGETHER to canvases).
## Why It's Good For The Game
This will close#74707. Bugfix.
## Changelog
🆑
fix: Fixed large paintings looking pretty off while flipped E/W.
/🆑
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
This whole PR started because I realized that baseball bats are not
actually flammable which I found weird, then I looked at a whole bunch
of other stuff that really should be flammable but also isn't.
## Why It's Good For The Game
Makes wooden objects behave slightly more consistently? Honestly, most
of these seem like oversights to me.
## Changelog
🆑
balance: The following structures are now flammable: Picture frame,
fermenting barrel, drying rack, sandals, painting frames, paintings,
spirit board, notice board, dresser, displaycase chassis, wooden
barricade
balance: The following items are now flammable: Baseball bat, rolling
pin, mortar, coffee condiments display, sandals, wooden hatchet, gohei,
popsicle stick, rifle stock
/🆑
This builds on what #69790 did and improved the code even further.
Notable things:
- `Topic()` is a deprecated proc in our codebase (replaced with
Javascript tgui) so it makes sense to rename `canUseTopic` to
`can_perform_action` which is more straightforward in what it does.
- Positional and named arguments have been converted into a easier to
use `action_bitflag`
- The bitflags adds some new checks you can use like: `NEED_GRAVITY |
NEED_LITERACY | NEED_LIGHT` when you want to perform an action.
- Redundant, duplicate, or dead code has been removed.
- Fixes several runtimes where `canUseTopic` was being called without a
proper target (IV drips, gibber, food processor)
- Better documentation for the proc and bitflags with examples
## About The Pull Request
This PR refactors netherworld mobs into basic mobs as best as possible.
Also makes some of them run faster when they are getting damaged or deal
more damage. Now the mobs might be able to keep up a little with the
players.
## Why It's Good For The Game
Makes the mobs have better movement and more dynamic movement. Makes the
quality of these mobs better.
## Changelog
🆑
add: Added new damage buffs for netherworld mobs
refactor: Refactors netherworld mobs into basic mobs
/🆑
## About The Pull Request
This buffs scythes, goats, and plantbgone vs PLANT biotypes:
- Scythes now deal x1.5 damage to venus flytraps (3 hits to kill)
- Scythes now target the flower bud vines
- Goats now target flower bud vines and deal 15 damage to PLANT biotypes
- Goats have a eating sound whenever they bite PLANT biotypes
- Plantbgone now does 2 dmg per unit to PLANT biotypes (10 dmg per
spray)
- Plantbgone now has a 75% chance to remove weeds and deals large damage
to flower buds
- Weed control crates now come with a pair of leather gloves
- Golems are immune to thorn effects
- Any kind of thick glove material will prevent thorn effects when
attacking
- Flower buds will now take x4 damage from fire and sharp weapons
(unless they have fire trait)
- Regular scythes are now a sharp object
Also this fixes a few runtimes with spacevines and nulls. The bane
element now accepts `mob_biotypes` bitflags as an argument.
## Why It's Good For The Game
Before my changes:
- Plant-b-gone was doing 0.4 dmg per unit to PLANT biotypes (2 dmg per
spray)
- Scythes took 5 hits to kill venus flytraps
- Goats only affected podpeople
- Flower bud vines were being ignored by weed killing code
- Plantbgone only had a 50% chance to remove weeds (and this was very
inconsistent due to RNG)
- Botanical gloves and thick gloves didn't protect from thorns
- Golems were getting pierced by thorns despite having pierce immunity
- Flower buds were not taking the x4 damage like they should have been
- Regular scythes were not a sharp object, but other scythes
(chaplain's, megafauna loot) were sharp
This makes the weed killer crate more effective since people were
complaining about it being worthless vs vines and flower buds. These
changes give people more options to respond to threats vs plants.
## Changelog
🆑
add: Add a pair of leather gloves to weed control crate
balance: Mobs with the PLANT biotypes (venus flytraps, pod people,
killer tomatoes) are now much weaker vs scythes, goats, and plantbgone.
balance: Plantbgone is now more effective at destroying weeds.
balance: Regular scythes are now a sharp object
fix: Fixed scythes, goats, and plantbgone not affecting flower bud
vines.
fix: Thick and botanical gloves not protecting from thorns
fix: Golems not having pierce immunity from thorns
fix: Runtime where vines tried to spread into null turf
fix: Runtime where null vines that were destroyed were trying to spread
to nearby turfs
soundadd: Add eat food sound when goats eat plants
code: Improved goat targeting code
code: The bane element now accepts `mob_biotypes` bitflags as an
argument.
/🆑
## About The Pull Request
Resolves#72607Resolves#65701
Chisels and statues had quite a few bugs and they lacked any kind of
feedback system to inform the user on it's proper usage. My improvements
do the following:
- Chisels now give balloon alerts when selecting a target, cancelling,
or sculpting
- Chisels used on carving blocks that were interrupted will now continue
- Fixed abstract statues not letting people use the radial menu
- Fixed chisel targets to have no range requirement (so you can use
binoculars, cameras, etc.)
- Refactor a lot of the chisel and statue code to be more robust
- Add sculpting sounds when chisels are used on carving blocks
## Why It's Good For The Game
Less bugs and now people can now sculpt easier.
## Changelog
🆑
soundadd: Chisels now make sculpting sounds when used on carving blocks
qol: Chisels now give balloon alerts when selecting a target,
cancelling, or sculpting
qol: Chisels used on carving blocks that were interrupted will now
continue
fix: Fix chisel targets to have no range requirement (so you can use
binoculars, cameras, etc.)
fix: Fix standard mineral blocks (uranium, diamond, plasma, etc.) not
letting people use the radial menu to craft abstract statues properly.
This does not work with custom mineral blocks. (pizza, glass, etc.)
code: Change chisel and statue code to be more readable
/🆑
Co-authored-by: Time-Green <timkoster1@hotmail.com>
## About The Pull Request
chisels used to only work when clicking on away stuff
mothblocks broke them and made them only work on close stuff
fixes that
## Why It's Good For The Game
yippe
## Changelog
🆑
qol: fixes chisels
/🆑
Necessary for #72292 to work effectively, and probably not very useful
out of that context. Split out of its own PR because this is long and
boring.
I want to make sure that we're catching actual mistakes there, and not
just experiencing side effects of how shitty the attack chain is.
Makes the code compatible with 515.1594+
Few simple changes and one very painful one.
Let's start with the easy:
* puts call behind `LIBCALL` define, so call_ext is properly used in 515
* Adds `NAMEOF_STATIC(_,X)` macro for nameof in static definitions since
src is now invalid there.
* Fixes tgui and devserver. From 515 onward the tmp3333{procid} cache
directory is not appened to base path in browser controls so we don't
check for it in base js and put the dev server dummy window file in
actual directory not the byond root.
* Renames the few things that had /final/ in typepath to ultimate since
final is a new keyword
And the very painful change:
`.proc/whatever` format is no longer valid, so we're replacing it with
new nameof() function. All this wrapped in three new macros.
`PROC_REF(X)`,`TYPE_PROC_REF(TYPE,X)`,`GLOBAL_PROC_REF(X)`. Global is
not actually necessary but if we get nameof that does not allow globals
it would be nice validation.
This is pretty unwieldy but there's no real alternative.
If you notice anything weird in the commits let me know because majority
was done with regex replace.
@tgstation/commit-access Since the .proc/stuff is pretty big change.
Co-authored-by: san7890 <the@san7890.com>
Co-authored-by: Mothblocks <35135081+Mothblocks@users.noreply.github.com>
## About The Pull Request
This PR adds the canvas size to the name of the AI canvas from "canvas
(AI Universal Standard)" to "canvas (24x24) (AI Universal Standard),
making it consistent with other types of canvases which has their own
size on their name.
## Why It's Good For The Game
Consistency, every other canvases has their size on their name except
for this one.
Also makes it easier to distinguish the difference between this and the
other canvases.
## Changelog
🆑
spellcheck: AI Universal Standard canvas will now specify it's size on
the item name.
/🆑
About The Pull Request
Categorizes the Good Clean Fun vendor into a few different categories (art, toys, cards, other)
In doing this, puts the custom prices on a few items instead of relying on the vendor premium price, to make use of the categories
Why It's Good For The Game
Good Clean Fun Vendor is a long list of random crap, so this helps a bit.
🆑 Melbert
qol: Good Clean Fun Vendor is categorized.
/🆑
* base
* reasons
* GetToken proc, with a many remarks
* Add a way to change reason in transfer_money proc. Add a reasons.
* Reason to use the app. Commission. Standard application.
* Apply suggestions from code review - Tralezab
Co-authored-by: tralezab <40974010+tralezab@users.noreply.github.com>
* Tralezab & jlsnow301 advices. New format(everywhere)
* Nanotrasen
* Refactor TGUI(not me:( ). Fix useless capitalize
* Update code/modules/economy/account.dm
* Trans transforms in transaction
* coMmission. little autodoc mistalke. Translation != Transaction
* oops
* Merge Conflict
* ...
* back feats
* mistakes bye!
* ну да
Co-authored-by: tralezab <40974010+tralezab@users.noreply.github.com>
* canUseTopic now uses TRUE/FALSE instead of defines that just say TRUE
The most idiotic thing I've seen is canUseTopic's defines, they literally just define TRUE, you can use it however you want, it doesn't matter, it just means TRUE. You can mix and match the args and it will set that arg to true, despite the name.
It's so idiotic I decided to remove it, so now I can reclaim a little bit of my sanity.
About The Pull Request
I've reworked multiz. This was done because our current implementation of multiz flattens planes down into just the openspace plane. This breaks any effects we attach to plane masters (including lighting), but it also totally kills the SIDE_MAP map format, which we NEED for wallening (A major 3/4ths resprite of all wall and wall adjacent things, making them more then one tile high. Without sidemap we would be unable to display things both in from of and behind objects on map. Stupid.)
This required MASSIVE changes. Both to all uses of the plane var for reasons I'll discuss later, and to a ton of different systems that interact with rendering.
I'll do my best to keep this compact, but there's only so much I can do. Sorry brother.
Core idea
OK: first thing.
vis_contents as it works now squishes the planes of everything inside it down into the plane of the vis_loc.
This is bad. But how to do better?
It's trivially easy to make copies of our existing plane masters but offset, and relay them to the bottom of the plane above. Not a problem. The issue is how to get the actual atoms on the map to "land" on them properly.
We could use FLOAT_PLANE to offset planes based off how they're being seen, in theory this would allow us to create lens for how objects are viewed.
But that's not a stable thing to do, because properly "landing" a plane on a desired plane master would require taking into account every bit of how it's being seen, would inherently break this effect.
Ok so we need to manually edit planes based off "z layer" (IE: what layer of a z stack are you on).
That's the key conceit of this pr. Implementing the plane cube, and ensuring planes are always offset properly.
Everything else is just gravy.
About the Plane Cube
Each plane master (except ones that opt out) is copied down by some constant value equal to the max absolute change between the first and the last plane.
We do this based off the max z stack size detected by SSmapping. This is also where updates come from, and where all our updating logic will live.
As mentioned, plane masters can choose to opt out of being mirrored down. In this case, anything that interacts with them assuming that they'll be offset will instead just get back the valid plane value. This works for render targets too, since I had to work them into the system as well.
Plane masters can also be temporarily hidden from the client's screen. This is done as an attempt at optimization, and applies to anything used in niche cases, or planes only used if there's a z layer below you.
About Plane Master Groups
BYOND supports having different "maps" on screen at once (IE: groups of items/turfs/etc)
Plane masters cannot cover 2 maps at once, since their location is determined by their screen_loc.
So we need to maintain a mirror of each plane for every map we have open.
This was quite messy, so I've refactored it (and maps too) to be a bit more modular.
Rather then storing a list of plane masters, we store a list of plane master group datums.
Each datum is in charge of the plane masters for its particular map, both creating them, and managing them.
Like I mentioned, I also refactored map views. Adding a new mapview is now as simple as newing a /atom/movable/screen/map_view, calling generate_view with the appropriate map id, setting things you want to display in its vis_contents, and then calling display_to on it, passing in the mob to show ourselves to.
Much better then the hardcoded pattern we used to use. So much duplicated code man.
Oh and plane master controllers, that system we have that allows for applying filters to sets of plane masters? I've made it use lookups on plane master groups now, rather then hanging references to all impacted planes. This makes logic easier, and prevents the need to manage references and update the controllers.
image
In addition, I've added a debug ui for plane masters.
It allows you to view all of your own plane masters and short descriptions of what they do, alongside tools for editing them and their relays.
It ALSO supports editing someone elses plane masters, AND it supports (in a very fragile and incomplete manner) viewing literally through someone else's eyes, including their plane masters. This is very useful, because it means you can debug "hey my X is yorked" issues yourself, on live.
In order to accomplish this I have needed to add setters for an ungodly amount of visual impacting vars. Sight flags, eye, see_invis, see_in_dark, etc.
It also comes with an info dump about the ui, and plane masters/relays in general.
Sort of on that note. I've documented everything I know that's niche/useful about our visual effects and rendering system. My hope is this will serve to bring people up to speed on what can be done more quickly, alongside making my sin here less horrible.
See https://github.com/LemonInTheDark/tgstation/blob/multiz-hell/.github/guides/VISUALS.md.
"Landing" planes
Ok so I've explained the backend, but how do we actually land planes properly?
Most of the time this is really simple. When a plane var is set, we need to provide some spokesperson for the appearance's z level. We can use this to derive their z layer, and thus what offset to use.
This is just a lot of gruntwork, but it's occasionally more complex.
Sometimes we need to cache a list of z layer -> effect, and then use that.
Also a LOT of updating on z move. So much z move shit.
Oh. and in order to make byond darkness work properly, I needed to add SEE_BLACKNESS to all sight flags.
This draws darkness to plane 0, which means I'm able to relay it around and draw it on different z layers as is possible. fun darkness ripple effects incoming someday
I also need to update mob overlays on move.
I do this by realiizing their appearances, mutating their plane, and then readding the overlay in the correct order.
The cost of this is currently 3N. I'm convinced this could be improved, but I've not got to it yet.
It can also occasionally cause overlays to corrupt. This is fixed by laying a protective ward of overlays.Copy in the sand, but that spell makes the compiler confused, so I'll have to bully lummy about fixing it at some point.
Behavior changes
We've had to give up on the already broken gateway "see through" effect. Won't work without managing gateway plane masters or something stupid. Not worth it.
So instead we display the other side as a ui element. It's worse, but not that bad.
Because vis_contents no longer flattens planes (most of the time), some uses of it now have interesting behavior.
The main thing that comes to mind is alert popups that display mobs. They can impact the lighting plane.
I don't really care, but it should be fixable, I think, given elbow grease.
Ah and I've cleaned up layers and plane defines to make them a bit easier to read/reason about, at least I think.
Why It's Good For The Game
<visual candy>
Fixes#65800Fixes#68461
Changelog
cl
refactor: Refactored... well a lot really. Map views, anything to do with planes, multiz, a shit ton of rendering stuff. Basically if you see anything off visually report it
admin: VV a mob, and hit View/Edit Planes in the dropdown to steal their view, and modify it as you like. You can do the same to yourself using the Edit/Debug Planes verb
/cl
About The Pull Request
Reorganizes the entire icons/mob folder.
Added the following new subfolders:
nonhuman-player (this was initially just called "antag", but then I realized guardians aren't technically antags)
simplemob
silicon
effects (for bloodstains, fire, etc)
simplemob/held-pets (for exactly that -- I wasn't sure if this should go in inhands instead)
species/monkey
Moves the following stuff:
All human parts moved into species, with moth, lizard, monkey, etc parts moved to corresponding subfolders. Previously, there were some moth parts in mob/species/moth, and others just loose in mob. Other species were similar.
icemoon, lavaland, and jungle folders made into subfolders of simplemob
All AI and silicon stuff, as well as Beepsky et al. into the silicon folder, simplemobs into the simplemob folder, aliens into the nonhuman-player folder, etc.
Split up animal_parts.dmi into two bodyparts.dmi which were put in their respective folders (species/alien and species/monkey)
Code changes:
Filepath changes to account for all of this
Adds a check when performing surgery on monkeys and xenos, because we can no longer assume their limbs are in the same file
Turns some hardcoded statues and showcases that were built into maps into objects instead
Things I'd like to do in the future but cant be assed right now:
Remove primarily-antag sprites from simplemob/mob.dmi (Revenant, Morph, etc.) and put them in the nonhuman-player folder
Split up mutant_bodyparts.dmi into different files for Tizirans, Felinids, monkeys, etc and put them in their own folders. Those may have once been meant primarily for mutated humans but that's now how they're being used right now.
Moves singulo and supermatter dmis into obj/engine, renamed from obj/tesla_engine
Moves Halloween, Christmas, and misc holiday items to obj/holiday
Moves lollipops to obj/food
Moves crates, closets, and storage to obj/storage
Moves assemblies to obj/assemblies
Renames decals.dmi to signs.dmi ...because they're signs and not decals
Moves statues, cutouts, instruments, art supplies, and crayons to obj/art
Moves balloons, plushes, toys, cards, dice, the hourglass, and TCG to obj/toys
Moves guns, swords, shields to obj/weapons
* Makes condiments their own subtype, fixes geese, prepares for merging
* Fixes geese checking drink type instead of edible foodtype to eat gross food.
* Renames foodtype var on drinks to drink_types to prevent above from happening again because it KEEPS HAPPENING. DRINKS AREN'T FOOD!
* Makes Condiments their own subtype of reagent_containers because they don't make any use of being a subtype of food, at all.
* Starts moving things from food to /food/drink subtype in preparation for merging /food/drink with /drink
* fully removes Food subtype
* /reagent_containers/drinks are now /reagent_containers/cup - This is so it's no longer confused with eachother.
* /food/drinks is now /reagent_containers/cup/drinks, so we can keep their special abilities.
* Fixes a LOT of errors with food, which are STILL checking the reagent_containers, despite ACTUAL food being refactored away from it a long time ago.
This doesn't compile yet, but I do want to make sure my progress is well tracked.
* remove copypaste code, changes soda cans
* Removes most copy paste code between the two drinks, moving most stuff to parent whenever needed.
* Made soda cans their own subtype since they didn't share anything with glass bottles anyways.
* Fixes more problems with food/drinks, especially with geese. Geese really were just broken this whole time and no one said a word...
* Removes a snowflake signal, now that both drink types share a common one.
* Adds everything to the .dme
Currently my goal is to get this all compiling, then remove isGlass var by making glass be all glass ones only.
* Moves all icons into a single drinks dmi
I'm not that great at icon stuff, hopefully I didn't forget/break anything.
* Turns juices into their own subtype
This allows us to let them check for type in molotov, to both get rid of a use of isGlass, and so non-glass non-cartons don't show up as 'carton'.
* fixes compile issues, adds updatepaths
* a better updatepaths
* updates the damn maps now
* properly names the updatepath
* how did that get there
* i suck at handling merge conflicts
* how am i this bad
* code improvement and soda fix
* more fixes
* Don't be a timer
Ports from old food bottles to trans the reagents, rather than add a timer to.
* Merge conflicts and fixes bottle smashing
* Bottle smashing is now consistently functional regardless of how much liquid they have in them, when before it would spill first, then smash on the second hit.
* runs updatepaths again
* Fixes statue simplemob not being able to teleport, and their 3 spells they're supposed to have.
* Also repaths statues to netherworld mobs, to reduce copy paste code.
* Alright, so I'm optimizing parallax code so I can justify making it do a
bit more work
To that end, lets make the checks it does each process event based.
There's two. One is for a difference in view, which is an easy fix since
I added a view setter like a year back now.
The second is something planets do when you change your z level.
This gets more complicated, because we're "owned" by a client.
So the only real pattern we can use to hook into the client's mob's
movement is something like connect_loc_behalf.
So, I've made connect_mob_behalf. Fuck you.
This saves a proc call and some redundant logic
* Fixes random parallax stuttering
Ok so this is kinda a weird one but hear me out.
Parallax has this concept of "direction" that some areas use, mostly
the shuttle transit ones. Set when you move into a new area.
So of course it has a setter. If you pass it a direction that it doesn't
already have, it'll start up the movement animation, and disable normal
parallax for a bit to give it some time to get going.
This var is typically set to 0.
The problem is we were setting /area/space's direction to null in
shuttle movement code, because of a forgotten proc arg.
Null is of course different then 0, so this would trigger a halt in
parallax processing.
This causes a lot of strange stutters in parallax, mostly when you're
moving between nearspace and space. It looks really bad, and I'm a bit
suprised none noticed.
I've fixed it, and added a default arg to the setter to prevent this
class of issue in future. Things look a good bit nicer this way
* Adds animation back to parallax
Ok so like, I know this was removed and "none could tell" and whatever,
and in fairness this animation method is a bit crummy.
What we really want to do is eliminate "halts" and "jumps" in the
parallax moveemnt. So it should be smooth.
As it is on live now, this just isn't what happens, you get jumping
between offsets. Looks frankly, horrible. Especially on the station.
Just what I've done won't be enough however, because what we need to do
is match our parallax scroll speed with our current glide speed. I need
to figure out how to do this well, and I have a feeling it will involve
some system of managing glide sources.
Anyway for now the animation looks really nice for ghosts with default
(high) settings, since they share the same delay.
I've done some refactoring to how old animation code worked pre (4b04f9012d). Two major
changes tho.
First, instead of doing all the animate checks each time we loop over a
layer, we only do the layer dependant ones. This saves a good bit of
time.
Second, we animate movement on absolute layers too. They're staying in
the same position, but they still move on the screen, so we do the same
gental leaning. This has a very nice visual effect.
Oh and I cleaned up some of the code slightly.
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.
I'll do more in the future but I'll limit myself to this because I'm tired, bored, and don't want to make so many PRs touching the same things that I have to deal with conflicts each time one is merged.
Just as an example, screwdriver's gotta be done as well, does the exact same thing wrenches do, I believe.
Standardizes (and touches) each time default_unfasten_wrench is used.
Fixes tool logs, since it relies on tool acts to exist, I'm trying to move as many tool acts to its proper proc. Like a spiritual successor to the tool superpack PRs.
Co-authored-by: Luc <89928798+lewcc@users.noreply.github.com>
About The Pull Request
See the title. Hexadecimal values are better than color names for programming since they can be sanitized and are more easily converted to RGB(A) or HSV. Color names aren't really meant to be used in some functions and methods about colors.
TL;DR: color names don't work with the Color common package in the TGUI folder.
Why It's Good For The Game
This will remove the need of a hacky bandaid from /obj/item/canvas/proc/get_paint_tool_color that only covers about half the pen colors anyway.
Changelog
cl
fix: Fixed certain pens breaking painting on a canvas because of their peculiar colors.
/cl
This adds some new defines and flags for the rotation component that lets us remove lots of c/p code chunks. I also added documentation to all the rotation defines that currently exist and in other spots that had weird behavior.
New rotation flags:
ROTATION_GHOSTS_ALLOWED - checks if ghosts are able to manipulate objects in config and lets them rotate the object
ROTATION_IGNORE_ANCHORED - this skips checking if an object is anchored (which normally prevents us from rotating) Used mainly for chairs.
ROTATION_NO_FLIPPING - this removes the flip verb from possible right click rotation options. Used for pipes that have custom flipping verbs instead
ROTATION_NEEDS_ROOM - this checks if an object needs to have an empty spot available in target direction. Used for windows and railings.
Objects can now be rotated in the direction based on which LMB or RMB you click with when you ALT click it. LMB is counter clockwise. RMB is clockwise. Before some objects could only be rotated clockwise. Now any object that inherits the rotation component can be rotated in either direction.
There was also a bug with wheelchairs that existed from when they were ported over from another codebase. The rotation logic was broken and never allowed anyone to rotate them. This has been fixed.
Rotation for IV_drips was enabled however Alt Click was being used for another proc and rotation was ignored because of this. I removed the rotation component due to this since I didn't want to change the hotkeys for IV drips since those have an actual effect on gameplay interactions while rotation does not.
Fingerprints are no longer added when something gets rotated. Only a few objects had this enabled but I believe this interaction was very spammy and unnecessary. I can readd this as a flag if needed but for now it's removed.
Alert balloons have replaced a lot of rotation to_chat() messages for the same reason as fingerprints. Rotating objects has almost no effect on gameplay and will only clutter a player's message log.
The hotkeys for pipe interactions had to be redone since Alt clicking was already being used in some situations. For regular pipes: Right clicking now changes the pipe layer. Alt clicking rotates the pipe. For Trinary pipes: Right clicking now flips the pipe device. Alt clicking rotates the device.
ComponentInitialize() is a deprecated function and the AddComponent proc was moved to Initialize for several objects.
I am disgruntled by the way pay stations work. They're not intuitive, they're a pain to build and have no interface. Basically: They don't get made, and the potential is lost.
Pay stands => Holopay
Summoned by right clicking your ID
Disappears if the card is out of range.
New TGUI window that offers more customization
Other bundled fixes:
Custom vendors become more user friendly
Code improvement
Lots of documentation + refactoring
New bundled number input will likely take place of animated number in tgui input number
Why It's Good For The Game
More RP opportunity for players, plus bug fixes. It's now much easier for players to start their own in game business selling substances clown shoes.
Changelog
cl
code: Created a new input component that accepts only integers. More usage to come.
refactor: Pay stands are now holographic. It's 2562! Create one by right-clicking your ID.
del: Circuit boards for pay stands.
refactor: Pay stands now have their own TGUI.
fix: Custom vendors now alert you when someone makes a purchase.
fix: Custom vendors now place items in your hand when you make a purchase.
/cl
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
About The Pull Request
Paintings can now do stroke painting.
Added painting management panel for admins.
Paintings now display author's character name, year of painting, medium and patron when hung on wall.
You can become new patron by paying more than the previous one.
Added painter's palettes to library vendor. (Sprites by @Mickyan )
Backend changes:
Images are now stored in /data/paintings/images/*.png instead of /data/paintings/[category]/*.png
Old categories are now just tags
Screens & Video
Changelog
cl
add: You can now become patron of your favorite painting by buying sponsorship from Nanotrasen Trust Foundation.
add: Painter's palettes are now available at library vendor.
qol: Can use strokes in paintings now
/cl
