* New station event: Gravity Generator blackout. Similar to Telecommunications blackout, but it takes Gravity out instead.
* Also adds this functionality to the gravity anomaly, if it isn't neutralized in time, gravity will go out.
* Lastly, added a gravitational anomaly vox sound.
Why It's Good For The Game
Ninja code is pretty bad, I think it's best to move away into nice modular stuff instead.
Changelog
cl Fikou, PositiveEntropy, Nerevar, InfraRedBaron
refactor: the ninja space suit is now a modsuit
fix: fixes dash beams not working
/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
Changes the cascade walls from turfs to objects to improve the performances of the roundending cascade.
The issue was that ChangeTurf() was a pretty expensive proc to be called that many times so i moved the cascade wall into an object. It doesn't delete anything other than living mobs and the portal to prevent edge case runtimes.
Plus remove a span_bold() from the announcement text since it wasn't making the text bold but was leaving behind
* Moves APC Mapping Checks to Mapload rather than New
We've been dealing with this issue for a few months now, and I've grown tired of explaining the problem after I figured it out and decided to finally fix it today.
Basically, this check ran at _all_ times, rather than just on mapload (even though it logs to log_mapping). Not good, let's fix that by shuffling some stuff around. I tested this code and I was able to organically create an APC, and all the APCs on load didn't appear to be absolutely fucked in some horrific way.
* dmdoc
Centcom managed to open the rift during a cascade to bring you to safety, now it will teleport you there instead of dusting you. The cascade duration has been changed to make it so that people can still reach the portal in time. Once the portal gets eaten, the one minute countdown starts.
To try and prevent the rounds from going too long, the number of walls spawned has been increased to a random between 4 and 6 all around the station.
* [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>
Fixes the check for antinob+hypernob cascade for the total amount of gases from the combined_gas to the environmental one.
Allows more damage to the crystal while the cascade is going
Made the antinob and hypernob heat penalty in similar but opposite amounts (15 anti, -13 hyper)
Added transmit modifiers to both gases (-5 anti, 3 hyper)
Increased the amount of crystal shards that spawns from the explosion to a max of 5 and min 2
Added light breaking and random light on emergency mode + maint emergency access when the cascade occurs
* Revamps oldstation
- Adds a supermatter chamber (very barebones to allow players to set the SM up themselves
- Adds a Gravity generator (the ruin is no longer magically given gravity)
- Adds a custodial closet
- Adds an external exit to Deltastation, so you don't have to blast a hole in the wall to move machines over due to them not fitting in the transit tubes
- Replaced Plasma canisters in SM storage, with SMES parts and an emitter reflector
- Shuffles around Beta storage room
- Moves the emergency power room's cables/APC around
- Adds plumbing
- Fixes lack of vents in the bathrooms
- Adds a third RTG
* adds area over the third RTG (lol)
* Adds a biogenerator to botany
* adds a plating to help gravity gen users
* removes repeat cable coil
* sets vendors to off-station mode
* multi cyclelink + dirtier SM room
* Requested san fixes
* airless, firelocks and AI sat floors.
Oldstation is one of my favorite spawners and my biggest problem with it is people leave when they feel they 'beat' the ruin. Adding more Engineering stuff and improving Service stuff could potentially help with this, as it would feel more worthwhile to spend your time on working towards these projects and goals, rather than just leaving.
There also used to just have 2 rooms in the northwest that just didn't have anything. I assume the hallway left is supposed to be 'alpha' station which is completely gone, but the room north (which is now going to be gravity generator) had no real purpose other than to accidentally depressurize the only pressurized room in Beta since it had no firelocks. It just wasn't really worth being there.
Cascade walls were processing on object subsystem, they are now in their own subsystem that ticks once per second and should be more reliable even in case of high td
better description for the walls to be more interesting
A new anomaly is here! the Delimber anomaly!
contrary to its name, this anomaly doesn't do you dirty by removing all your limbs.
It will instead improve your body by randomizing your limbs with every species known! Isn't that amazing?!
Incredibly enough it can also change your organs, improving them and expanding them! (we think this is amazing!)
Now you can also harness that power by constructing a reactive armor with its core, but be aware to not get hit by an EM pulse, our insurance doesn't cover that.
A note on safety, this anomaly doesn't stop, will keep on pulsating until eliminated.
This PR adds the resonance cascade to the SM (idea ported from vg but with total rewrite)
The resonance cascade will turn reality into crystals that devours and destroy everything.
It can be triggered by delaminating the SM when is in contact with hypernoblium and antinoblium, both at over 40% and with as many moles to trigger a singulo delamination. The cascade can't be triggered if the SM is already under 80% integrity and if at any point any of the gases gets under 40% or the total gets lower than the amount for singulo, it will stop the cascade and can't be retriggered unless you reset the SM to over 80% integrity.
Lower the amount of anomalies spawned from the SM delamination
Lower the probability of getting a flux anomaly
Flux anomalies spawned by the SM in this way will have the explosion size reduced by 4
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
This PR refactors the "charge" spell to be signal based instead of looping over held items + istype checks.
This was atomized out of my proc holder removal PR. Figured it was small enough to handle on its own.
I've noticed some complaints regarding the explanation of the new turbine and its parts, and while I don't think it's that unclear, it could be better. I figured I'd improve the text slightly to be clearer, and fix some small grammar issues while I was around the relevant files.
Change how opening a hole in the chamber will affect the SM, increasing the dangers it will have by having more damage dealt, increase the power of the SM by 250 and stopping the SM healing from low moles/cold.
Increased the heat released by lowering the THERMAL_RELEASE_MODIFIER from 5 to 4
Increased the plasma released by lowering the PLASMA_RELEASE_MODIFIER from 750 to 650
Lowered the oxygen released by increasing the OXYGEN_RELEASE_MODIFIER from 325 to 340
Increased the REACTION_POWER_MODIFIER from 0.55 to 0.65 increasing the power generated
Slight nerf to the tesla coils stock parts upgrade going from a max 85% efficiency to a max 50% efficiency when converting power from the zaps with t4 parts. Roundstart setups remains untouched, but just upgrading the coils will yield 35% less power.
* Firedoor optimizations
Ok so firedoors were eating up a lot of cpu.
They were doing this for one main reason.
Clearing a fire alarm in an area involved doing a
for(var/obj/machinery/light/light in src) loop.
For those not in the know, in src in the context of areas involves
filtering ALL the objects in an area. This is REALLY nasty.
This fix reduced the total cpu of firedoor closing by a factor of 100.
I am not kidding
Edit: I was kidding, ghil fixed the oversight that caused this in the
first place already
My change is still good tho, it wasn't good even if only called
occasionally
I replaced it with a signal that lights register for on area change.
I had to do some finicking to make the existing area sensitivity that
machines have behave with this, but it's not too messy.
I did the same signal treamtment to firealarms to clean them up a bit.
I also did some futzing around in firedoor code to make changing behavior inside it easier.
* Changes how fire alarms work slightly
Rather then fully resetting alarms, and relying on the door itself to
close back up, they will force all doors open for 3 seconds (down from a
cooldown of 5 because 5 felt way too long) and then drop again if the
firedoor has any well, actual problems.
This meant adding two new vars, active and ignore_alarms.
It also meant sightly changing the meaning of alarm_type, from the
alarm that's activating us right now, to our current alarm.
I think this is generally positive, since it makes the variable a bit
easier to reason about.
Oh and I reworked an existing cooldown to make it fit better into this
mold.
Ah and we can no longer drop atmos problems. This was an issue before,
it was possible for a firelock to be in a problem state, but be unable
to reflect that because of something that blocked the event reception,
but no longer
* Pain
* Ensures area sensitivity will only be added if we do not already have the trait from innate state
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
New anomaly, the hallucination anomaly. It has small bursts of hallucinations while alive followed by a big one in the moment of the end.
More anomalies are fun, i'm planning to add more of these
added the hallucination anomaly, spawnrate similar to the flux one, can spawn from the SM if eer are over 5000, can spawn when the SM delams (higher rate than the grav one), you can make the hallucination reactive armor
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.
* rebalance sm delamination anomalies amount
* changed from 0.01 to 0.005, so at 1500 MeV 8 anomalies will spawn around the station
fixed grav anomaly weight
added vortex anomaly at 1 weight
* is called bhole
* Adds MC initialization stages. Earlier stages can fire while later ones init.
Removes TICK_LIMIT_MC_INIT config for barely doing anything to speed up init and being inconvenient to work with if fires and inits can happen at the same time.
Canister tiers were first introduced by me when canister fusion was still a thing. Now they have become only a nuisance and tedium since the main reason they were added is gone. current limits are higher than old t1 but lower than old t2
I've now added an option in the UI to every canister to become shielded and consume the APC power so that its contents won't be able to destroy it, the higher the temperature and pressure inside, the higher the draw (it should peak around 25 kW)
Canisters now have a cell that can hold the shielding in areas without power for a time, can be upgraded, removed, replaced
Increases players (old and especially new) quality of life, removes tedium and follows the oranges will of canisters should draw power to contain high heat and pressure
remove canister tier, you still need to build a frame and use iron on it but nothing more.
canisters now have a toggle for shielding that will start to consume power if the temperature and pressure go over the labeled one (current limits are higher than old t1 but lower than old t2). Peak draw should be around 25 kW with fusion Canisters have an internal cell that allows it to hold shielding in areas without power for a time, powercells can be upgraded, removed, replaced.
shield sprite by @SnoopCooper
When a supermatter delaminates there will a blanket spawn of anomalies all across the station.
The anomaly spawn will be determined by the power of the SM plus a good dose of randomness.
Half of the anomalies will spawn instantly, the other half will spawn overtime with a 5 to 10 second delay, some of those will have an extended delay from 5 to 15 minutes so be aware!
The spawned anomalies have longer lifespan than the regular ones that the SM spawns while dying or with high enough eer and might be more dangerous
Ghil never wrote a full desc for this so I'm doing it myself -Lemon
I told him to use this weird atom color like system because I forgot we already had a way to block superconduction, which is what he wanted to do.
This pr rips out the old code, and just uses the existing system. It's better, and this time it actually works (it didn't before because isnull is not isnum)
Small dusted objects = low power increase
Big dusted object = very high power increase
the radiation pulse following consumption will be influenced in the same way
SM consume many object and it feels weird that the mass consumed doesn't matter, this fixes that and balance some cheecky behaviours
This PR rework the atmos turbine into a 3x1 multiblock machine.
The calculations are now done by simulating the flow of gases and expansion work that they do inside the turbine (heavily simplified), now a pressure differential between the inlet and outlet will heavily change the output of current that the machine is able to deliver.
The machine will not use stock parts for upgrades, but instead it will use 3 main components that are to be made by hand (except for the first tier that can be printed)
Those are compressor part, rotor part and stator part.
There are 4 tiers to them where the last one will use metallic hydrogen to be made, but will significantly increase the output and resistance of the machine.
-- Docs for the turbine:
A work based engine that “simulates” the flow of gas to calculate the energy produced by the moving gases.
These gases cool down while passing through due to the work done on the turbine blades and the expansion it get inside the machine
The new turbine
The machine will be expanded into a 1x3 multiblock machine that will accomodate 3 parts to it:
An input compressor
An output turbine
A core rotor
There are 3 other main component that are:
The Compressor Blade part
The Rotor Shaft part
The Stator Generator part
These three are the main (and only) upgrade path the machine can follow.
Parts
Input Compressor
It handles the input of gases inside the machine, it contains the Compressor Blade part.
This part moves the gas in, compresses it and increases its temperature by the amount of work the compression of the gas does.
Output Turbine
It handles the output of the gases outside the machine, it contains the Stator Generator part.
The gases moving through will expand 6x the initial volume and cools down before getting expelled.
Core rotor
Main part of the multiblock machine. It contains all the logic for building and processing the turbine.
Can be connected to a computer for control.
Contains the Rotor Shaft part.
Upgrades
The three installable parts can be upgraded with specific sheets to improve their efficiency and resistances. Each tier up will increase the max RPM reachable by the turbine and the max input temperature that the machine can take before starting to be damaged.
Each first tier part can be printed in any Lathe (proto/auto) but it requires hand crafting with different materials to be upgraded.
Compressor Blades can be upgraded with plasteel, titanium and metallic hydrogen.
Rotor Shaft can be upgraded with plasteel, titanium and metallic hydrogen.
Stator Generator can be upgraded with titanium, metallic hydrogen and zaukerite.
-- End docs
Fixes#50667 (Infinite power generation by piping turbine output into its input. This worked because there was no temperature threshold, and the cost of applying pressure via pumps was lower then the power generated -Lemon)
Better turbine in many aspects, preparation for SM rework
GuillaumePrata
