Patches Rad_Area Directional Sign
Hey there,
I was trying to do something much more ambitious, but that completely fell through. I did catch this little mistake that caused this to occur though:
This PR just makes it the correct pathing for the directional helpers.
ever see the tram take 10 milliseconds per movement to move 2100 objects? now you have
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/15794172/166198184-8bab93bd-f584-4269-9ed1-6aee746f8f3c.mp4
About The Pull Request
fixes#66887
done for the code bounty posted by @MMMiracles to optimize the tram so that it can be sped up. the tram is now twice as fast, firing every tick instead of every 2 ticks. and is now around 10x cheaper to move. also adds support for multiz trams, as in trams that span multiple z levels.
the tram on master takes around 10-15 milliseconds per movement with nothing on it other than its starting contents. why is this? because the tram is the canary in the coal mines when it comes to movement code, which is normally expensive as fuck. the tram does way more work than it needs to, and even finds new ways to slow the game down. I'll walk you through a few of the dumber things the tram currently does and how i fixed them.
the tram, at absolute minimum, has to move 55 separate industrial_lift platforms once per movement. this means that the tram has to unregister its entered/exited signals 55 times when "the tram" as a singular object is only entering 5 new turfs and exiting 5 old turfs every movement, this means that each of the 55 platforms calculates their own destination turfs and checks their contents every movement. The biggest single optimization in this pr was that I made the tram into a single 5x11 multitile object and made it only do entering/exiting checks on the 5 new and 5 old turfs in each movement.
way too many of the default tram contents are expensive to move for something that has to move a lot. fun fact, did you know that the walls on the tram have opacity? do you know what opacity does for movables? it makes them recalculate static lighting every time they move. did you know that the tram, this entire time, was taking JUST as much time spamming SSlighting updates as it was spending time in SStramprocess? well it is! now it doesnt do that, the walls are transparent. also, every window and every grille on the tram had the atmos_sensitive element applied to them which then added connect_loc to them, causing them to update signals every movement. that is also dumb and i got rid of that with snowflake overrides. Now we must take care to not add things that sneakily register to Moved() or the moved signal to the roundstart tram, because that is dumb, and the relative utility of simulating objects that should normally shatter due to heat and conduct heat from the atmosphere is far less than the cost of moving them, for this one object.
all tram contents physically Entered() and Exited() their destination and old turfs every movement, even though because they are on a tram they literally do not interact with the turf, the tram does. also, any objects that use connect_loc or connect_loc behalf that are on the same point on the tram also interact with each other because of this. now all contents of the tram act as if theyre being abstract_move()'d to their destination so that (almost) nothing thats in the destination turf or the exit turf can react to the event of "something laying on the tram is moving over you". the rare things that DO need to know what is physically entering or exiting their turf regardless of whether theyre interacting with the ground can register to the abstract entered and exited signals which are now always sent.
many of the things hooked into Moved(), whether it be overrides of Moved() itself, or handlers for the moved signal, add up to a LOT of processing time. especially for humans. now ive gotten rid of a lot of it, mostly for the tram but also for normal movement. i made footsteps (a significant portion of human movement cost) not do any work if the human themselves didnt do the movement. i optimized has_gravity() a fair amount, and then realized that since everything on the tram isnt changing momentum, i didnt actually need to check gravity for the purposes of drifting (newtonian_move() was taking a significant portion of the cost of movement at some points along the development process). so now it simply doesnt call newtonian_move() for movements that dont represent a change in momentum (by default all movements do).
also i put effort into 1. better organizing tram/lift code so that most of it is inside of a dedicated modules folder instead of scattered around 5 generic folders and 2. moved a lot of behavior from lift platforms themselves into their lift_master_datum since ideally the platforms would just handle moving themselves, while any behavior involving the entire lift such as "move to destination" and "blow up" would be handled by the lift_master_datum.
also
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/15794172/166220129-ff2ea344-442f-4e3e-94f0-ec58ab438563.mp4
multiz tram (this just adds the capability to map it like this, no tram does this)
Actual Performance Differences
to benchmark this, i added a world.Profile(PROFILER_START) and world.Profile(PROFILER_START) to the tram moving, so that it generates a profiler output of all tram movement without any unrelated procs being recorded (except for world.Profile() overhead). this made it a lot easier to quantify what was slowing down both the tram and movement in general. and i did 3 types of tests on both master and my branch.
also i should note that i sped up the "master" tram test to move once per tick as well, simply because the normal movement speed seems unbearably slow now. so all recorded videos are done at twice the speed of the real tram on master. this doesnt affect the main thing i was trying to measure: cost for each movement.
the first test was the base tram, containing only my player mob and the movables starting on the tram roundstart. on master, this takes around 13 milliseconds or so on my computer (which is pretty close to what it takes on the servers), on this branch, it takes between 0.9-1.3 milliseconds.
ALSO in these benchmarks youll see that tram/proc/travel() will vary significantly between the master and optimized branches. this is 100% because there are 55 times more platforms moving on master compared to the master branch, and thus 55x more calls to this proc. every test was recorded with the exact same amount of distance moved
here are the master and optimized benchmark text files:
master
master base tram.txt
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/15794172/166210149-f118683d-6f6d-4dfb-b9e4-14f17b26aad8.mp4
also this shows the increased SSlighting usage resulting from the tram on master spamming updates, which doesnt happen on the optimized branch
optimized
optimization base tram.txt
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/15794172/166206280-cd849aaa-ed3b-4e2f-b741-b8a5726091a9.mp4
the second test is meant to benchmark the best case scaling cost of moving objects, where nothing extra is registered to movement besides the bare minimum stuff on the /atom/movable level. Each of the open tiles of the tram had 1 bluespace rped filled with parts dumped onto it, to the point that the tram in total was moving 2100 objects. the vast majority of these objects did nothing special in movement so they serve as a good base case. only slightly off due to the rped's registering to movement.
on master, this test takes over 100 milliseconds per movement
master 2000 obj's.txt
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/15794172/166210560-f4de620d-7dc6-4dbd-8b61-4a48149af707.mp4
when optimized, about 10 milliseconds per movement
https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/15794172/166208654-bc10086b-bbfc-49fa-9987-d7558109cc1d.mp4
optimization 2000 obj's.txt
the third test is 300 humans spawned onto the tram, meant to test all the shit added on to movement cost for humans/carbons. in retrospect this test is actually way too biased in favor of my optimizations since the humans are all in only 3 tiles, so all 100 humans on a tile are reacting to the other 99 humans movements, which wouldnt be as bad if they were distributed across 20 tiles like in the second test. so dont read into this one too hard.
on master, this test takes 200 milliseconds
master 300 catgirls.txt
when optimized, this takes about 13-14 milliseconds.
optimization 300 catgirls on ram ranch.txt
Why It's Good For The Game
the tram is literally 10x cheaper to move. and the code is better organized.
currently on master the tram is as fast as running speed, meaning it has no real relative utility compared to just running the tracks (except for the added safety of not having to risk being ran over by the tram). now the tram of which we have an entire map based around can be used to its full potential.
also, has some fixes to things on the tram reacting to movement. for example on master if you are standing on a tram tile that contains a banana and the TRAM moves, you will slip if the banana was in that spot before you (not if you were there first however). this is because the banana has no concept of relative movement, you and it are in the same reference frame but the banana, which failed highschool physics, believes you to have moved onto it and thus subjected you to the humiliation of an unjust slipping. now since tram contents that dont register to abstract entered/exited cannot know about other tram contents on the same tile during a movement, this cannot happen.
also, you no longer make footstep sounds when the tram moves you over a floor
TODO
mainly opened it now so i can create a stopping point and attend to my other now staling prs, we're at a state of functionality far enough to start testmerging it anyways.
add a better way for admins to be notified of the tram overloading the server if someone purposefully stuffs it with as much shit as they can, and for admins to clear said shit.
automatically slow down the tram if SStramprocess takes over like, 10 milliseconds complete. the tram still cant really check tick and yield without introducing logic holes, so making sure it doesnt take half of the tick every tick is important
go over my code to catch dumb shit i forgot about, there always is for these kinds of refactors because im very messy
remove the area based forced_gravity optimization its not worth figuring out why it doesnt work
fix the inevitable merge conflict with master lol
create an icon for the tram_tunnel area type i made so that objects on the tram dont have to enter and exit areas twice in a cross-station traversal
add an easy way to vv tram lethality for mobs/things being hit by it. its an easy target in another thing i already wanted to do: a reinforced concept of shared variables from any particular tram platform and the entire tram itself. admins should be able to slow down the tram by vv'ing one platform and have it apply to the entire tram for example.
Changelog
cl
balance: the tram is now twice as fast, pray it doesnt get any faster (it cant without raising world fps)
performance: the tram is now about 10 times cheaper to move for the server
add: mappers can now create trams with multiple z levels
code: industrial_lift's now have more of their behavior pertaining to "the entire lift" being handled by their lift_master_datum as opposed to belonging to a random platform on the lift.
/cl
Adds fishing and fishing minigame.
You use fishing rod to fish.
Equipping specific bait/hook/reels will affect your success chances.
You can fish out fish,items and other things.
Fishing Equipment
Fishing rods have three slots: Bait, Reel and Hook.
Any food can be used as bait but dedicated bait makes fishing easier.
You can buy hook and line sets
New bait types:
Worms : Buy can of them at cargo (alternative acquirement method pending)
Doughballs : Use knife on flat piece of dough to get five of them.
Fishing rod types:
Basic : Print these at the lathe, nothing fancy here.
Tech: Experimental tech. Provides infinite bait
Fishing rods can also hook and reel normal items.
Equipment screen and reeling video
Fishing spots
Keep in mind this PR is meant to add the basic systems and i intend to fill these with more fish in future PR's so wait with suggestions until then.
Lavaland lava (no fish here right now, just other stuff), requires reinforced line to fish in.
Maintenance moisture traps.
Beach away mission water.
Fishing portal available for purchase from cargo - This is stopgap until we fill more spots.
Difficulty depends on fishing spot, fish type, and the fish traits and rod setup combinations.
All fish types can have specific traits, most common ones being favourite and disliked bait types/categories.
Other
Fishing catalog now lists fishing related info
New admin debug verb, fishing calculator that show probabilities with different setups so it's easier to balance this.
Fish now have average weight and size. Make sure to boast if you catch a big one.
Adds tgui mouse passthrough
Screens
Sprites:
Fishing portal sprite by @ArcaneMusic
Other sprites by @Mey-Ha-Zah
Bad ones by me. (Could still use better fishing minigame backgrounds)
Sounds:
https://freesound.org/people/soundscalpel.com/sounds/110393/https://freesound.org/people/soundslikewillem/sounds/343748/
Webedit oh no!
Changed the message the user receives by getting shoved into the closet to mention that the shover shoved them into the closet instead of themselves.
* The Quartermaster is officially a head of staff, with new accesses, a silver ID, ect ect.
* The HoP lost their cargo-related equipment and access, including the Vault monitor, and frequency.
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 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)
* Fixes statue simplemob not being able to teleport, and their 3 spells they're supposed to have.
* Also repaths statues to netherworld mobs, to reduce copy paste code.
* Steam Vent Challenge (Do not meme)
* Fixes icebox, I think
* Changes to how smoke behaves appears to have removed the need for the opacity setting on the vent. Sounds.
* Mapmerge sama please
* Adds signal system, crafting recipe, and some basic crafting organization.
* Potential fix
* Apply suggestions from code review
Co-authored-by: Seth Scherer <supernovaa41@gmx.com>
* makes changes thanks anturk
Co-authored-by: Seth Scherer <supernovaa41@gmx.com>
About The Pull Request
if(tool.tool_behaviour == TOOL_WELDER)
var/obj/item/weldingtool/welder = tool
if(welder.isOn())
cmon bro
Changelog
cl
fix: reinforced windows can be heated up by things that can weld but arent welding tools
/cl
* Fuck you (refactors ur tails)
* Errors
* Wow. Pain.
* Fixes up probably everything
* finish up here
* Fixes hard del maybe
* original owner hard del
* garbage collection runtime
* suck my peen byond
* Mapped tails
* motherfucker.
* motherrfucker. again.
* Whooopppppsie
* yeah bad idea
* Turns out external organs literally just sat in nullspace forever if their parent was deleted, and didnt Remove() themselves, causing harddels.
* So anyways I repathed all organs
* Fixes
* really.
* unit test... test
* unit test-test but it passes linters this time because im a moh-ron
* I've lost track of what im doing at this point
* Hopefully fixes hard del?
* meh
* Update code/datums/dna.dm
* things n stuff
* repath from master pull
Detectives having access to gear lockers was unintended when originally put in by #66990f3c92c5b6e. Moving gear locker access to ACCESS_BRIG improves consistency in the goal of that PR.
I manually audited all 4,710 instances of airlocks across all maps for upper casing
You'll never guess what I found.
UPDATE: We now have a grep to check for mistitled airlocks, and it's in this PR!
* [DRAFT] Reformats Access IDs for accessibility and futureproofing
* replaced all the old defines and IDs everywhere
* replaced ID integers with strings, cleaned up a couple tram helpers
* replaces req_access_txt with req_access and fixes a few of my mistakes
Co-authored-by: san7890 <the@san7890.com>
Adds a space ruin called Spinward Smoothies. It's a nature-themed smoothie bar built into an asteroid. Also includes recipes for six smoothies to match the theme.
It's a cute little thing to find in space, enabling space explorers to grab a drink there and relax for a while. More things to explore.
* organizing flora file and icon states, & flags
Changes the typepath for a lot of flora, and adds new paths depending on the amount of icon states the flora had, for better modularization on mappers. Also adds flags to the flora depending on what type it was, instead of 3 bools
* Getting ready to attempt to modularize flora
Moving most vars and procs from ash flora into the normal flora type path, as a general preparation to add more here
* Weighted products & Region Messages
Rewrites flora code so a flora's produced items can be initialized with a weighted list. Also has some improvements, relating to item stacks.
Adds an option via variables to separate 3 messages into 3 possible regions, or the old method where the message changes when the value is exactly the same as the low or high harvest value
* organizing + documentation on procs
* Documentation, Organization & Modularization
(DOMing) yeah, I dom
Gives variables for tools that can harvest flora, a blacklist of them, and modularizes variables a bit.
Retypes the stump to be a subtype of a tree, which just deletes after being harvested
* Adds the ability to uproot flora with a shovel
* added eswords to the list of things that can cut
* ausbush junk
* code review appreciation + changing drag_slowdown
* more code review appreciation
* kirbyplants ComponentInitialize() -> Initialize()
* forgot glob.
Due to mini-fridges being in the pool for spawning instead of crates/lockers, if there's too many things meant to spawn in said fridge, unit tests will fail because it cannot hold it.
To fix this, I simply added more storage capacity.
- All tablets who previously had apps in a cartridge now has them built-into their tablet instead. This means it costs space for it.
- Rebalances the sizes of several apps to help them fit on Command tablets (Cargo ordering costed 20!!)
- Removes tablet cartridges, they've been reworked into a regular old portable disk (the same you use for toxins/borgs)
- Removes Signaller (the module required to run the signaller app) from tablets (likely will remove more in the future)
- Refactors the health/chem scanning app to not be as bad
- Dehardcodes detomatix resistance
- Ability to send PDA's to all is now tied to your access rather than a cartridge
- Moves 'eject disk' button to the very top of the UI
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
* Add mapping helpers for signs, make names snakecase
* Update maps
* Couple of lost signs in the elephant graveyard
Co-authored-by: tattle <article.disaster@gmail.com>
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.
Ever been bothered by why titanium glass and plastitanium glass do not drop their own shard types? Well this is the perfect PR for you! Titanium and plastitanium glass shards never existed, and it is probably because the person who made glass way back in the day didn't have time to add these shards. Luckily I decided to add them after all this time. Every piece of code created has been carefully considered and copied form other code, so then you know it is good code. Also I added more tags, I looked at the guidelines and found that adding the fix and qol tags probably boosts my pr score so it will get merged.
A lot of bugs came to my attention with bandana dyeing after #65760 was merged. This should cover all of them.
fixes#65947, by making you unable to dye bandanas while they are adjusted. You also can't dye bandanas that have skulls or stripes on them since that causes all sorts of problems with GAGS and switching from multiple layer to only 1 and same thing reversed.
When you dyed a bandana and then adjusted it into a neckerchief and back it would reset its name to what it was originally before being dyed. This was because it used the initial proc. I fiddled around with trying to catch the dyed name in a var but it would get way too complex and unnecessary so I came up with the idea to just make a visual change instead of name change, by making the bandana slightly wider like a neckerchief would be when adjusted.
refactors our disease code a tiny bit
removes permeability_coefficient variable from clothing, it decided how much stuff like chems or disease passed through your clothes, while BIO armor only decided how much you could spread diseases yourself, making it pretty much laughable
permeability_coefficient is now fully rolled into bio armor, so your bio protecting stuff will now protect you from other biological hazards like blobs
* Alright, so I'm optimizing parallax code so I can justify making it do a
bit more work
To that end, lets make the checks it does each process event based.
There's two. One is for a difference in view, which is an easy fix since
I added a view setter like a year back now.
The second is something planets do when you change your z level.
This gets more complicated, because we're "owned" by a client.
So the only real pattern we can use to hook into the client's mob's
movement is something like connect_loc_behalf.
So, I've made connect_mob_behalf. Fuck you.
This saves a proc call and some redundant logic
* Fixes random parallax stuttering
Ok so this is kinda a weird one but hear me out.
Parallax has this concept of "direction" that some areas use, mostly
the shuttle transit ones. Set when you move into a new area.
So of course it has a setter. If you pass it a direction that it doesn't
already have, it'll start up the movement animation, and disable normal
parallax for a bit to give it some time to get going.
This var is typically set to 0.
The problem is we were setting /area/space's direction to null in
shuttle movement code, because of a forgotten proc arg.
Null is of course different then 0, so this would trigger a halt in
parallax processing.
This causes a lot of strange stutters in parallax, mostly when you're
moving between nearspace and space. It looks really bad, and I'm a bit
suprised none noticed.
I've fixed it, and added a default arg to the setter to prevent this
class of issue in future. Things look a good bit nicer this way
* Adds animation back to parallax
Ok so like, I know this was removed and "none could tell" and whatever,
and in fairness this animation method is a bit crummy.
What we really want to do is eliminate "halts" and "jumps" in the
parallax moveemnt. So it should be smooth.
As it is on live now, this just isn't what happens, you get jumping
between offsets. Looks frankly, horrible. Especially on the station.
Just what I've done won't be enough however, because what we need to do
is match our parallax scroll speed with our current glide speed. I need
to figure out how to do this well, and I have a feeling it will involve
some system of managing glide sources.
Anyway for now the animation looks really nice for ghosts with default
(high) settings, since they share the same delay.
I've done some refactoring to how old animation code worked pre (4b04f9012d). Two major
changes tho.
First, instead of doing all the animate checks each time we loop over a
layer, we only do the layer dependant ones. This saves a good bit of
time.
Second, we animate movement on absolute layers too. They're staying in
the same position, but they still move on the screen, so we do the same
gental leaning. This has a very nice visual effect.
Oh and I cleaned up some of the code slightly.
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.
* refactor it back to a single organ but with different eye vars
* nOt In A LoOp
* forgot emissive overlay
* remove old obscured var
* quirk
* fine we do it like this, PAIN
* add applying_preference paramter to is_accessible and check for it when applying
* update dummy on quirk change
* client might not exist if we are applying the preference, because unit tests
* unique icon
* lazy webedit review
* revert is_accessible refactor
* mild stupid
* change the way heterochromia is applied
* better handling
* Apply suggestions from code review
* add apply to human behaviour
* hopefully fix that which the merge hooks broke
* Update code/datums/quirks/neutral.dm
* Web commit for shame
* Update code/datums/quirks/neutral.dm
* Update code/datums/quirks/neutral.dm
Co-authored-by: Ryll Ryll <3589655+Ryll-Ryll@users.noreply.github.com>
* Update basic.dm
Co-authored-by: Ryll Ryll <3589655+Ryll-Ryll@users.noreply.github.com>
* Removes all supurfolus uses of QDEL_HINT_LETMELIVE
This define exists to allow abstract, sturucturally important things to
opt out of being qdeleted.
It does not exist to be a "Immune to everything" get out of jail free
card.
We have systems for this, and it's not appropriate here.
This change is inherently breaking, because things might be improperly
qdeling these things. Those issues will need to be resolved in future,
as they pop up
* Changes all needless uses of COMSIG_PARENT_PREQDELETED
It exists for things that want to block the qdel. If that's not you,
don't use it
* Adds force and hard del verbs, for chip and break glass cases
respectively
The harddel verb comes with two options before it's run, to let you
tailor it to your level of fucked
* Damn you nova
Adds proper parent returns instead of . = ..()
Co-authored-by: Seth Scherer <supernovaa41@gmx.com>
* Ensures immortality talismans cannot delete their human if something goes fuckey. Thanks ath/oro for pointing this out
Co-authored-by: Seth Scherer <supernovaa41@gmx.com>
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
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.
