* Makes flags properly check themselves
Byond ref: https://www.byond.com/docs/ref/#/operator/&
Basically, flags should use & instead of ==
We can have more than 1 slot on any item, so it's preferred that we do this instead. Even if it doesn't immediately fix any problems, it's something that should be the standard anyways to prevent it from ever being a problem.
Co-authored-by: MrMelbert <51863163+MrMelbert@users.noreply.github.com>
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
Not without the help of my friend spriter, I added cucumbers, their seeds, the cultivation itself, so that they could be pickled and washed with a brine jar. I also added a Danish hot dog because it required cucumbers (perhaps that was the end goal), changed a couple of recipes to include cucumbers or pickles. Cucumbers have been added to both cargo orders and bounty cubes, as well as for the food order console
I think the Cucumber Update deserves its plush toy.
gg18b4b2cab0
Why It's Good For The Game
I think more food and drink... would add quite a nice role playing experience, and additional gameplay for hydroponics.
Changelog
cl Vishenka0704 and Ying-The-Pando
add: Cucumbers and pickles
add: Danish hot dog
balance: add cucumbers in dishes where they need
qol: add to bounty cubes, orders - new vegetables
/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
Bananas now have a 1% chance to be bananarangs on initialization. The description is altered to make it slightly easier to notice, but otherwise there is no indication beyond throwing it.
bananarang hehe :)
Can be used for entertainment, bargaining, or engaging with a rarely seen component within the sandbox.
Bananas now have a 1% chance to be boomerang-bananas. These look identical to normal bananas, aside from a slightly unique examine text. Make sure to check your bananas before peeling it to slip the HOS, you may just have a rare item on your hands.
* - Fixes storage mass transfer
- Brings some sanity to storage procs
- Implements a griddle feature that never was
* Uncomment this
* Right-click attack fix
* Scoop fix
* Smartfridges use silent
* Restores some lost checks
* Fixes storage implants
* 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
* 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>
About The Pull Request
Mood was abusing signals and get component pretty badly, so I redid it as a datum to stop this.
Why It's Good For The CODEBASE
Better code pratices, also gives admins easier tools to manage mood
Changelog
cl
admin: Added two new procs into the VV dropdown menu to add and remove mood events from living mobs.
/cl
* Splits up 'gross' food from 'carrion'
* Adds a couple of missed burgers.
Moths dislike Carrion rather than it being poison to them.
* BEES is now BUGS
* It's always safe and a good idea to use find/replace
About The Pull Request
replaces a ton of log_game with user.log_message so the log is added to individual and global logs.
adds a few logs for individual LOG_VICTIM, LOG_ATTACK etc logging.
adds logging for bluespace launchpad's tele coords being changed.
took the word "has" out of log_combat, as it's extra and just lengthens the log.
Why It's Good For The Admins
It's extremely laggy to open game.txt so an alternative is individual game logs
Changelog
cl
admin: A lot of game logs will now also be in individual game logs, for convenience in log diving.
admin: Added logging for bluespace launchpad x and y offset changes, which go to individual game logs.
admin: Attack logs will now be slightly shorter, one useless word was removed.
/cl
* Fixes seed extractors not taking seeds from plant bags.
- When refactored, it accidently changed it from taking the seed "from its loc" to "from the extractor itself", which always failed
* Unit test
* Genericises it a bit
* 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.
* Main
* Added deconstruction and better rotation
* Open flame during usage, emagging
* Wording fix, sound fix
* Extra-indestructable check
* Storage is now a normal datum instead of a component? Noice
* Updated harvest.dmi after bell pepper resprite
* The new atom storage broke the emag capability, added a small fix
Currently, storage works as a subtype of /datum/component, utilizing GetComponent() and signals to operate. While this is a pretty good idea in theory, the execution was pretty trash, and we end up with alot of GetComponent() snowflake code (something that shouldn't even need to be used frankly), and a heaping load of scattered procs that lead into one another, and procs that don't get utilized properly.
Instead, this PR adds atom_storage and proc/create_storage(. . .) to every atom, allowing for the possibility of storage on quite frankly anything. Not only does this entirely remove the need for signals, but it heavily squashes down the number of needed procs in total (removing snowflake signal procs that just lead to one another), reducing overall proc overhead and improving performance.
About The Pull Request
Fixes some cases in which actual references were used in trait sources instead of keys (or ref() keys).
This can cause some rare and difficult to find hard deletes.
Trait sources should be a string key relating to the source of it, not an actual reference to what added it. References within trait sources are never handled in Destroy(), because it's not expected behavior, meaning it can cause hanging references.
So, I went through with a regex to find some cases and replaced them.
I used the following and just picked through the few by hand to find erroneous ones.
ADD_TRAIT\(.+, .+, [a-z]+\)
REMOVE_TRAIT_TRAIT\(.+, .+, [a-z]+\)
Why It's Good For The Game
Less hard deletes, probably.
Changelog
cl Melbert
code: Some traits which mistakenly were sourced from a hard reference are no longer.
/cl
* adds examine_block class and a define for it
made some outputs in chat use examine_block
* add examine block to tip of the round
clean up some ------ and ***** seperators
added <hr> tags to divide sections
cleaned up botany plant analyzer text outputs
* bullet points for reagents
* removes <hr> from mobs examines
fixes AIs and borgs having a double "That's Default Cyborg!"
removed some \n newlines
minor code edits
* removes all <hr>
bold names in get_examine_name()
cleaned up plant analyzer output formatting
adjust colors and margins of examine_block class
remove \a from borg examine()
* remove max-width from css
* changed margin and padding units from px to em
* minor edit
About The Pull Request
This is a continuation of #66946 since I have enough points to finally do so.
This PR will:
Expand upon my previous sushi PR, allowing people to use an ingredient on a sushi sheet to start creating custom sushi.
Add olives! A new type of fruit that can be grown in hydroponics. When ground, it becomes olive paste which when mixed with water in a 4-1 reaction turns into 2 units of quality oil.
Make pierogis require a dough slice to craft instead of a bun.
Make quality oil cost 50 credits to order instead of 120
Why It's Good For The Game
Since my sushi PR merged, many people have asked me to add custom sushi, so here it is. This will allow chefs to make more interesting menus with added customization.
Quality oil is an extremely expensive commodity (120 credits for one 50 unit bottle, 240 if you expedite it!!!) and can only be acquired from cargo. I feel because of this, many chefs do not make lizard or mothic foods because simply acquiring the ingredients to do so is either very time consuming, expensive, or both. This will encourage people to make those foods more often since one of the key ingredients in many lizard or mothic dishes can be made by them, too. Olives themselves can be eaten as a snack and open up opportunities for new foods in the future, and it makes sense for you to make your own oil since the process is simple yet highly inefficient in real life.
This PR originally had a way to craft cornmeal as well, but that idea was adopted yesterday in #67227 which they can keep.
Lastly, it seems more reasonable for pierogis to require a dough slice instead of a burger bun. Don't think that requires more explanation.
I believe my gbp score is at -3, but I have three PRs waiting to merge currently which will boost me way above that.
Changelog
cl
add: Botany can now grow olives, which can be ground into a paste and mixed with water to make quality oil.
add: You can now make custom sushi by using an ingredient on a seaweed sheet. The sushi will be named after the first ingredient you use.
balance: Pierogis now need a dough slice instead of a bun
balance: Quality oil costs 50 credits to order instead of 120
/cl
About The Pull Request
Makes smoke propagate the fingerprints of the last person to touch the source of the smoke.
This makes gunpowder smoke actually log the person responsible for the explosions.
Why It's Good For The Game
As of right now gunpowder smoke (and similar) doesn't actually have very good logging as as far as the smoke is concerned it's never been touched and so the resulting explosions are blameless. Obviously, scrolling up for a good minute looking for who has just obliterated the escape shuttle is slightly annoying for the admins. Ergo, making the explosions log who actually is responsible for making the smoke they originate from should reduce admin annoyance.
Changelog
cl
admin: Smoke now logs the last person to touch the source of the smoke as the last person to touch the smoke itself. Gunpowder smoke should be less annoying to log dive as a result as every explosion will log that person.
/cl
* Adds BUG food types, liked by Flypeople, Felinids, Jellypeople, Monkeys and Lizardpeople, while Moths and Podpeople hate it.
* BUG foods include moth meat, ants, ant pizza, spider eggs, canned larvae, and a few others.
* New illiterate quirk that makes a person unable to read or write. This applies to books, PDAs, paper, computers, and other electronics.
* New brain trauma dyslexia that makes you illiterate until fixed.
* Ashlizards are now illiterate as a default starting trait. The mining shuttle computer has been updated to compensate illiterate mobs randomly smashing buttons that causes a shuttle launch.
Co-authored-by: Kylerace <kylerlumpkin1@gmail.com>
Right now there is only 1 source of cloning: pod cloning-- and pod cloning is exceedingly rare. I don't think this warrants its own file anymore with the death of regular cloning a few years back.
Refactors the confusion status effect. Removes "confusion strength" and replaces it with duration, which is measured in seconds.
This also allows them to use the adjust_timed_status_effect procs instead of their own.
Fun fact! 2 years ago when confusion was refactored into status effects, all confusion effects in the game were halved in duration. They were changed to status effects, which tick every 1 second by default, from life, which tick every 2 seconds by default, without any values changing.
Have you ever noticed that the chemical smoke and chemical foam reactions are a lot less effective in confined spaces? This is because they currently attempt to spread to all tiles within n steps of their origin. If they can't expand onto a tile they get blocked and the expanding cloud/flood misses out on all the tiles that would be in range, but that can't be reached.
Obviously smoke and foam getting blocked by walls and the like makes intuitive sense, but it seemed a bit nonsensical that walls would basically delete a significant chunk of an expanding, amoebic mass. The solution I came up with is making smoke and foam expand until they cover a certain area, with a shared tracker for the target size and total size of the flood. The flood will simply expand as normal until it covers the desired target area. Blocked expansions just don't count and will be made up for with expansion elsewhere.
Attendant to these changes are a whole bunch of minor code improvement to smoke, foam, and one for wizard spells because I was already in the area and :pain:.
There have been some minor balance changes to the chemical smoke and foam reactions:
I converted them over to passing the desired area of the resulting smoke cloud/foam flood. The old equation for the resulting area was along the lines of 2sqrt(x)(sqrt(x) + 1) + 1 given reaction volume x and given unobstructed expansion. I've made them just pass around 2x instead. This is actually less than they used to try for, but now they're guaranteed to reach that unless the flood is fully contained. Not entirely certain if buff or nerf. Probably buff on the station.
Also, foam dilution is now based on covered area instead of target expansion range. Since this scales faster than it used to foam has been effectively nerfed at high volumes. To compensate for this I removed the jank 6/7 effect multiplier and increased the base reagent scaling a bit. Again, not certain if buff or nerf.
Plants that use after_plant_attack() now take being in proximity into account when using durability.
Closes#66631 (Clicking on people out of attack range with Deathnettles cause durability loss)
Plants like Deathnettle will no longer use durability when clicking on someone from a distance.
This PR refactors firestacks into two status effects: fire_stacks, which behave like normal firestacks you have right now, and wet_stacks, which are your negative fire stacks right now. This allows for custom fires with custom behaviors and icons to be made.
Some fire related is moved away from species(what the fuck was it even doing there) into these as well.
Oh and I fixed the bug where monkeys on fire had a human fire overlay, why wasn't this fixed already, it's like ancient.
Also changed some related proc names to be snake_case like everything should be.
This allows for custom fire types with custom behaviours, like freezing freon fire or radioactive tritium fire. Removing vars from living and moving them to status effects for modularity is also good.
Nothing to argue about since there's nothing player-facing
Adds two new plants to hydroponics: Green Beans and Jumping Beans. Green beans contain a small amount of vitamin and multiver, since they're so healthy. Jumping beans contain ants, seeing as how real life jumping beans contain insect larva. They also jump!
Adds two new traits to hydroponics:
Prosophobic Inclination. This trait is found in green beans and prevents plants with high instability from mutating species naturally. Wild mutation harvests and the floral somatoray can still grant access to mutations, however.
Symbiotic Resilience. This trait is found in jumping beans and prevents plants with high instability from mutating stats naturally.
Fixes a few very minor spelling errors.
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.
This PR focuses on cleaning up two procs - updateDialog and updateUsrDialog. Both of which are/were used updating for old HTML UIs. As these UIs got converted to TGUI over time, these old code fragments started to pile up, often due to coders simply overlooking them. This resulted in them being dead code doing nothing when called, or randomly opening up windows when they shouldnt, for example when a vending machine is screwdrivered and UI cannot even be interacted with.
However, there were also some desirable uses - like opening a window when an ID is inserted into civilian bounty console, which you are then gonna obviously use to pick a bounty. I kept these uses and replaced them with proper ui_interact, so they now always work, instead of them working only when you had them set as a currently used machine on mob. The list of these changes is:
Civilian Bounty Console will now always bring up its UI when you insert the ID.
Air Alarm and APC will now always bring up its UI when you unlock their controls.
Portable Chem Mixer, Chem Dispenser, Chem Heater, Improvised Chem Heater, Chem Spectometer and Chem Master will now always bring up their UI when you add or replace beaker to them.
Two old /Topic calls were cleaned up as well, as they were no longer relevant.
Removes dead or outdated code, adds sensible UX when working with certain UIs.
