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
This is a remake of #66106, with more thought put into the underlying balance. The main goal of this PR is to make fighting spiders more accessible and interesting for the majority of the crew while nerfing the extremely strong and boring option of simply using freezing temps to kill spiders. Also fixes#67765. The changes are as follows:
NEW SPIDER COUNTERS
Fly swatters now deal 25 damage to spiders on hit, increased from 1
Pesticide now deals massive stamina damage to spiders and a little bit of physical damage as well (the damage portion not added by this PR)
Spiders can now be caught on fire through any traditional mean of catching something on fire. Spiders will automatically put themselves out after a time. This was done instead of an active action because AI spiders are also subject to this change as well, and I don't feel like bloating the simple mob AI with putting themselves out
SPIDER CHANGES
NERFS
Toxin injection has been removed from all spiders except for the hunter, flesh spiders and the viper
Hunter toxin (used by hunters and flesh spiders) now only brings the afflicted down to 40 health, and will stop taking effect once the afflicted reaches that threshold. Should the afflicted still have the toxin in their system and get healed, the toxin will begin dealing damage again until the afflicted is at 40 health or below again
Viper toxin now only brings the afflicted down to 10 health, but also has the hallucination effects of Mindbreaker toxin. This hallucination effect is applied regardless of target health. It also no longer generates other harmful chemicals into the afflicted's system, but is much more potent at base
Flesh spiders cannot regenerate while on fire
BUFFS
Time it takes for spiders to normalize their temperature cut by half. While they will react faster when in cold or hot environments, when they leave said environments it will take less time to return to normal temperature
Unsuitable temperature damage reduced to 4 from 8
You can no longer push spiders by running into them
Webbing heat damage threshold increased from 300 to 350 (same temp where spiders also take damage)
Broodmother egg laying time reduced to 12 seconds from 15
Broodmother web laying time multiplier reduced to 0.5 from 1
Broodmother health increased to 60 from 40
Broodmother damage increased to 10 - 15 from 5 -10
BEHIND THE SCENES CHANGES
You can now make any simple mob able to be caught on fire by setting flammable to true
How fast a simplemob stops burning is controlled by fire_stack_removal_speed
Can now now control how fast simplemobs regulate their temperature using temperature_normalization_speed. Before this PR, this value was hard-coded at 10, I have set the default to 5 as 10 was too long in almost any case. This will notably affect slimes, who could easily die to being cold long after being removed from the cold area. I see this as purely beneficial
Toxins now have a health_required value. The afflicted has to be above this health value in order to take damage from the toxin. Only used in the spider toxins currently
When I was setting up simplemobs to be flammable, I noticed basic mobs can be glitchily set on fire, so I fixed it to where they can't be set on fire.
Why It's Good For The Game
Spacing something is very easy, but not very fun or interesting compared to starting and controlling a fire. Swapping spiders' temperature weakness from spacing to fire is beneficial to the fun of fighting them and playing as them, allowing more creativity and resourcefulness on both sides. Ideally, this should allow for atmosians and chemists to use their skills in a fun way.
Currently, ignoring spacing them, the only people who can reasonably take on spiders is security, since they have lasers which do burn and stuns to slow the spiders down. However, this small subset of players cannot normally destroy a spider infestation without spacing them, so letting fly swatters and pesticide be used to combat spiders allows other crewmembers to fight back, letting them actually enjoy facing spiders as a threat and allowing the crew to defend themselves.
Being killed by spider toxin after fighting off a horde isn't fun. The changes still make it a threat you have to be aware of, but not one which detracts as much from the combat loop. This also forces spiders to secure the kill themselves, which is more fun than having the toxin do it for you.
Broodmothers in their current state are incredibly weak by themselves, which is intentional by design. However, the new changes hope to make playing as a broodmother easier and hopefully allow more broodmothers to get the spider infestation started properly. After all, Dynamic is their common source now, and they should be consistently worth the threat cost to spawn them.
Previously, spider structures would seemingly vanish for no reason if the room was heated to be greater than 300 but less than 350, as the spiders would not be able to tell that it was too hot. Now, if the structures are taking damage, spiders will also be taking damage, so understanding what's going on should be easier now.
Pushing spiders into a corner by running into them was not a fun tactic to deal with as a spider and didn't make much sense seeing how big the spiders are.
Changelog
cl
add: Spiders can now be caught on fire
add: Spiders take significant damage from fly swatters and stamina damage from pesticide
balance: Spiders have been re-balanced. Their toxins can no longer kill but they are not as susceptible to freezing
balance: General stats of spider broodmothers have been buffed with more health, damage, and faster web and egg placement
balance: Flesh spiders cannot regenerate whilst on fire
balance: Simplemobs change their internal temperature twice as fast
fix: Basic mobs no longer glitchily catch on fire.
/cl
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
* Removes ComponentInitialize()
Completely removes ComponentInitialize() as a proc, which was called on every single atom in the game, twice in some instances (like new players), over something that can already be done with Initialize().
This is the second attempt at doing this, after the first attempt fell apart for some reason. This time it was way easier though, since storages are no longer a Component.
* update icon blocker added before calling parent
* Update code/game/machinery/porta_turret/portable_turret.dm
Co-authored-by: san7890 <the@san7890.com>
* adds a mapload while I'm here
* moves human mood
* Does some UNRELATED thing to the PR
Co-authored-by: Fikou <23585223+Fikou@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: san7890 <the@san7890.com>
Co-authored-by: Fikou <23585223+Fikou@users.noreply.github.com>
* Replaces many instances of GetComponents in mining items with signals and better uses overall of Components, in drills and the GPS handcuffs.
* To do this, also added 3 new signals to mechs when you are adding/removing mech equipment onto one.
Adds baseballs to the game (There is a baseball field in the holodeck).
You can now bat thrown objects with the baseball bat to launch them away at high speed.
https://streamable.com/471jvv (baseball is a boomerang here because otherwise this would have been impossible to test singleplayer)
Why It's Good For The Game
it could be fun to have a game of baseball, and people trying to bat an item thrown at them sounds funny
image
Changelog
cl Fikou, sprite by Mooster
add: Baseballs are now available in the Baseball Field on the Holodeck.
add: Baseball Bats can now hit thrown objects mid-air to send them back.
/cl
This PR adds the white cane.
It can be crafted using 3 iron rods. Additionally, white canes can be purchased from the medical vendor, differentiating them from the costume canes.
White canes are transforming items that can be folded down from a small size to their fully extended versions, which are too large to store in a bag.
Adds a modifier variable which can be used to increase or decrease a given items damage to structures, machinery, vehicles, and robots (including cyborgs, simple-bots, and anything else with the MOB_ROBOTIC biotype)
The two handed component, while useful, has quite a bit of bloat that gets replicated whenever a new class of 2h items is added.
This PR cuts that bloat by replacing the use ofCOMSIG_TWOHANDED_WIELD and COMSIG_TWOHANDED_UNWIELD as ersatz callbacks with actual callbacks, the replacement of various var/wielded defs on items with a check for HAS_TRAIT(src, TRAIT_WIELDED), and the removal of any now-unnecessary on_wield()/on_unwield() procs that simply toggled those wielded vars
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
Simply converts all instances of soundkeys that use get_sfx from strings into defines.
E.g. "sparks" is now SFX_SPARKS
Why It's Good For The Game
It makes life a lot easier when you're looking for a sound effect. You just type SFX_ and you get suggestions in VSC. Plus, it looks better.
image
Changelog
Not player facing.
I found out how emissives work and my first thought was "damn ants should glow that would look sick"
So now they do.
Also, having less than 5u ants in your body will make you not scream, so 0.0001u ants will no longer have that tiny chance of making someone scream for their life.
If an ant pile has a max damage value less than 1, then they won't be able to bite through your shoes. This is the same threshold as the second tier ant icon.
Makes the giant ant a hostile mob with the neutral faction, meaning they will attack anything not in the neutral faction.
Adds the foundational system for contextual screentips, which will show you what you can do with objects/items, including through context, such as what you are holding.
Provides several helper elements for most use cases, and applies it to a handful of common objects in order to show the full breadth of the system.
Changes screentips preference from on/off to on/off/only with context. Players who originally had it on off will have it migrated to only with context, though can re-disable it.
About The Pull Request
Adds an argument to typecache generation that allows specifying the whether to include/exclude types in the input list.
Also adds another argument to specify whether to remove falsey values after the typecache is generated.
Why It's Good For The Game
Might make zaps slightly faster???
Honestly I just thought it would be a good way to condense some whitelist/blacklist typecache sets.
* makes the vibro sword fun
* AND IT WILL COME LIKE A FLOOD OF PAIN
* POURING DOWN ON ME
* AND IT WILL NOT LET UP
* UNTIL THE END IS HERE
* AND IT WILL COME THROUGH THE DARKEST DAY
* IN MY FINAL HOUR
* AND IT WILL NEVER REST UNTIL THE CLOUDS ARE CLEAR
* only love is with us now
* something warm and pure
* find the peace within ourselves
* no need for a cure
* MAKING WHOLE THE FABRIC OF SOCIETY
* COLLECTIVE CONSCIOUSNESS CONTROLLED AS YOU WILL SEE
* MIND CONTROL
* WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
* YEAAAAAAAH
Co-authored-by: Urumasi <Urumasi@email.cz>
* decompose that matrix bitch ass
* sord
* you will die
Co-authored-by: Urumasi <Urumasi@email.cz>
Baseball bats now establish their direction of knockback based on the cardinal direction from the atom of the bat to the target instead of the user to the target.
Implements the Modernizing radiation design document ( https://hackmd.io/@tgstation/rJNIyeBHt ) and replaces the current radiation sources with the new system, as well as replacing/removing a bunch of old consumers of radiation that either had no reason to exist, or could be replaced by something else.
Diverges from the doc in that items radiation don't go up like explained. I was going to, but items get irradiated so easily that it just feels pretty lame. Items still get irradiated, but it's mostly just so that radiation sources look cooler (wow, lots of stuff around going green), and for things like the geiger counter.
Instead of the complicated radiation_wave system, radiation now just checks everything between the radiation source and the potential target, losing power along the way based on the radiation insulation of whats in between. If this reaches too low a point (specified by radiation_pulse consumers), then the radiation will not pass. Otherwise, will roll a chance to irradiate. Uranium structures allow a delay before irradiating, so stay away!
## 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`
Merged the item/melee/classic_baton and item/melee/baton families in this unholy matrimony.
Bad jokes aside. I have refactored the underlying code of both items with the scope of reducing potential copypasta,inconsistencies, logging, renewing some old code (like teleprods) and extending the anti-dual batoning and TRAIT_STUNRESISTANCE code** to all batons and not just security ones. Otherwise, I have tried to maintain the gameplay functionality of these items intact. They work just like they did for the most part.
** A badly designed feature that only considers one source of knockdowns - stunbatons - out of a multitude of different devices with corresponding purposes present in the game. The only thing it does is reduce the knockdown from them by 90%. The stamina damage and confusion are fully applied. The knockdown from batons is 5 seconds, standing up takes an extra 1 second and the baton cooldown is about 2.5. Doing the math, you'll have the grand advantage of one puny second of not lying horizontal on the floor with this trait before getting batoned again by the same guy because the stamina damage and the confusion have really hampered your chances of getting some distance. I wish to make the trait suck less in the future, but for now I'm including a slight gameplay change here, more for consistency than anything because as I already told you, it'll still be disappointingly bad per se.
The abductor baton is also no more a subtype of stun batons but batons, which don't use power cells to work. Its power cell is effectively infinite and can't be removed, and It overrides functions such as toggling the baton on/off. It hinders maintainability to keep it a subtype of stun batons.
Replaced the anchored check for mobs in teleprods with one for overwhelming move resistance and removed its clumsy_check copypasta (it was stunning clowns twices).
Simple_animals / mobs are the biggest lie in this code-base. They're far from simple and have an extreme god-object problem. Especially when you get to /hostile, where there is so many procs, vars, and what not, that you can't make any interesting additions without snowflaking the hell out of the code.
This PR hopes to help kill this problem by introducing a new /living subtype, /living/basic. The idea of this refactor is to slowly start moving all old simple_animals to this new system, moving over behaviors like charging and more extravagant mobs like megafauna over bit by bit similar to how newfood was implemented.
One of the other big goals of this refactor is to move many of the fringe simple animal behaviors into either AI datums, or components/elements. (Some of which still needs to be done in this PR).
As a proof of concept, I created the base mob/living/basic, and moved cockroaches over to the system. Since cockroaches have both a passive, melee and ranged mob.
This PR does slightly affect balance as the behavior isn't 1-on-1 due to it no longer running on the janky /hostile behavior, but I tried to keep the effects to a minimum, and the glockroach and hauberoach are not spawnable through many means as far as I know.
This PR kills off the transforming subtype of /obj/item/melee and replaces it with a component to handle the transforming behavior, /datum/component/transforming.
The transforming component handles updating the variables of an item when it's transformed. Things like force, sharpness, whetstone force bonus, and attack verbs. Similar to the two-handed component, but instead of transforming into a two-hander it remains a one handed weapon.
The "nemesis" behavior (dealing addition damage to certain factions) of the transforming subtype was moved to the cleaving saw only, since it was the only transforming item that used it. In the future, this can be made into a bespoke element/component as well.
The following weapons and items have been updated to use this component:
Energy Swords / Sabers / Bananium Energy Sword
Energy Circular Saw
Energy Dagger
Energy Axe
Toy Energy Sword
Holographic Energy Sword
Switchblade
Advanced Medical Tools (Laser scalpel, Mechanical Pinches, Searing Tool)
Advanced Engineering Tools (Hand Drill, Jaws of Life / Syndicate Jaws of Life)
Combat Wrench
Cleaving Saw
Telescopic Batons / Contractor Batons
Roasting Stick
Telescopic Riot Shield
Energy Shield / Bananium Energy Shield
This PR also touches up the code around the various above items.
Wooden bats are 2nd best melee weapon in game, just next to stun batons. They cost 5 wooden planks which makes them ridiculously cheap and available to everyone, and the worst thing about them is how easily they can just stunlock people out of nowhere. I did what I believe was the best way to balance them out
Implements appropriate signal handlers for /obj/item/proc/attack_secondary() - Secondary item attacks now send signals and signal handlers can now cancel the attack chain, continue it or move to the primary attack chain.
Adds a kneecapping element.
Kneecapping element replaces the item's secondary attack with an aimed attack at the kneecaps under certain circumstances. If these circumstances are not met, the secondary attack chain will continue as normal with the item's normal secondary attack.
Element is incompatible with non-items. Requires the parent item to have a force equal to or greater than WOUND_MINIMUM_DAMAGE. Also requires that the parent can actually get past pre_secondary_attack without the attack chain cancelling. Funnily enough, the Element doesn't require a blunt weapon. If admins add it to sharp or pointy weapons, they get the same aimed attack but with sharp and pointy wounds instead - Because all the Element does is add a hefty wounding modifier.
Kneecapping attacks have a wounding bonus between severe and critical+10 wound thresholds. Without some serious wound protecting armour this all but guarantees a wound of some sort. The attack is directed specifically at a limb and the limb takes the damage.
Requires the attacker to be aiming for either leg zone, which will be targetted specifically. They will than have a 3-second do_mob before executing the attack.
Kneecapping requires the target to either be on the floor, immobilised or buckled to something.
Passing all the checks will cancel the entire attack chain for the Element to handle attacking logic.
This Element has been added to the baseball bat. Any other items that wish to implement its functionality in the future are free to.
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)
This adds a rare-ish negative station trait that gives Pun Pun a weapon, fills their heart with anger, and bloodies up the location they spawn in. (Yes the weapon is even more rarely a gun)
A request for one of the weapons to be a sign meant that a random sign type was added here as well.
edits sprites for wizard cult constructs to have more sheen
fixes wizard cult constructs not working
makes soulstone code a bit cleaner i think
makes cult spells use second defines
fixes wraith jaunts being invisible
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
