* Fixes tablet lights
Makes tablet lights properly be directional lights like PDAs were.
I also replaced some single-letter vars for no particular reason.
* re-adds action button updating
* New illiterate quirk that makes a person unable to read or write. This applies to books, PDAs, paper, computers, and other electronics.
* New brain trauma dyslexia that makes you illiterate until fixed.
* Ashlizards are now illiterate as a default starting trait. The mining shuttle computer has been updated to compensate illiterate mobs randomly smashing buttons that causes a shuttle launch.
Co-authored-by: Kylerace <kylerlumpkin1@gmail.com>
bout The Pull Request
Was working on a different fix and noticed the Captains Fountain pen was missing so i went through some other jobs on a pre modular PDA build and found that QMs survial pen was also missing. Ignored the fountain pens for all Heads of Staff i presume that was intentional.
Why It's Good For The Game
Minor Fix, gives the Captain back back his Unique Pen and dignity
QM gets their survial pen back as well.
Changelog
Captains and Quartermasters now receive their unique pens in their PDAS again.
cl
fix: Restores Captains pen and QM survial pen in respective Pdas
/cl
* [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>
They were subtypes of crayons and cigarettes which allowed them to be fit inside. To fix this, the tablet can only hold tiny items and spray cans and pipes have been changed from tiny items to small.
OpenDream can detect BYONDisms that BYOND or SpacemanDMM miss. This PR fixes all of the issues it found in TG. Each change is explained in code comments below.
Lawyers and Captains spawn by-default with the ability to send mass PDA messages, but the Wirecarp app (so Research Director and Captain) can grant/revoke permission to send PDAs to everyone
Removes CPU, Sensors and Identify parts from modulra computers.
This is in effort to simplify how tablets and tablet apps are, while removing barriers to download specific apps. Limiting apps needed for your job, through hardware, is a terrible idea, and just limits departmental stuff to being there roundstart/latejoin, punishing people who job change through the in-game HoP system, devaluing the job as a whole.
- 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
Destroyed player PDA / tablet drops half of the steel_sheet_cost as a stack on destruction. Having this set to 1 creates zero sized stacks of iron. Rather than fix the code that drops, I just upped this to make it drop 1 sheet on destruction, which is probably the intended effect.
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
I would imagine this was left in from some development testing ; if it serves a useful purpose I'd request it as expanded with a more meaningful message.
Materials got removed from the PDA that all crew members spawned with when we switched over to tablets.
This readds that as that was originally done in #57923 (2e309d4ead)
Allowing players to interact through obscure mechanics to bait each other to blow up a microwave in an attempt to charge their tablet is fucking hilarious.
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.
lets you uhhh scan papers i nto your notes app and also uhhh gives all heads the techweb app and also uhhh removes some role tablets because they dont really like need them anymore yeah cool awesome
coming one step closer to orange's vision of having techweb be heads only
due to the way the program is initialized computer is not set to the proper value until the ui is interacted with, whereas beforehand it is null. this means, that when you receive a message roundstart without first opening your messenger app for the first time, you won't get the chat notification for the message
oh also some qol
About The Pull Request
actually makes the damn action button for the flashlight on your device work, as well as fixing clown/silicon/mime names properly showing up
fixes not chunky finger people not being able to use pdas
Why It's Good For The Game
tweaks to make the tablet more user friendly
Changelog
cl
fix: actually makes the flashlight action button work, and fixes silicon/clown/mime names showing up properly on tablets/messenger
/cl
Converts PDA functions and applications over to modular tablets and devices, namely the messaging function. HREF data code is quite honestly clunky and difficult to work with, as I've definitely experienced whilst working on this. By moving from this system over the easier to read (and frankly, easier to add to) TGUI system, you get cleaner looking and more user friendly UIs and a greater degree of standardization amongst other UIs.
Co-authored-by: Seth Scherer <supernovaa41@gmx.com>
Co-authored-by: GoldenAlpharex <58045821+GoldenAlpharex@users.noreply.github.com>
Co-authored-by: Aleksej Komarov <stylemistake@gmail.com>
Removes old janitor cartridge app and replaces it with a tablet one.
Also adds the pimpin' ride to the list of tracked items, too.
Makes Janitors spawn with said app, too.
About The Pull Request
https://imgur.com/a/pMMEi4ihttps://imgur.com/a/xCrIcz4
Title, really.
Adds an ingame guide to atmos. Currently hooked to the atmos monitors, analyzer, and the tablet app.
Lots of reaction data not implemented yet, banking on the cleanup to get merged first, so drafting.
Done, all reactions in. Haven't double checked them though.
Code is pretty much finished, feel free to take a look. Ill probably retidy them while adding stuffs so no rush.
Might add a reaction handbook obj later Implemented in analyzer.
Dotted tooltip idea shamelessly stolen from preferences.
Lots of the diffs are from breaking the sensor file up, dont worry about it.
Why It's Good For The Game
Less need to open the wiki in another page I guess.
Changelog
cl
add: Added an ic atmos reaction guide. Available in your atmos control consoles/monitors, ntosatmos app, and analyzer.
code: Some changes to how gas canister descriptions are generated.
/cl
This PR moves the in-game Newscaster over to TGUI, which is one the most bothersome html to tgui projects on the codebase being that it's gone untouched for like... over 4 years now after the introduction of tgui. Newscasters are widely used in-game by players wanting to be deranged whistleblowers, noir detectives, and journalists. They're flavorful, fun, and we still use an html window to make them run so it looks like it's from 2003.
About The Pull Request
Simply converts all instances of soundkeys that use get_sfx from strings into defines.
E.g. "sparks" is now SFX_SPARKS
Why It's Good For The Game
It makes life a lot easier when you're looking for a sound effect. You just type SFX_ and you get suggestions in VSC. Plus, it looks better.
image
Changelog
Not player facing.
About The Pull Request
Continuation of #64375, extracting tool behavior from attackby() and moving it into discrete _act procs. This is about as many files as I had in the last version, as I still want this to be reviewable.
As before, I've tested everything in game and it works as it previously did.
Why It's Good For The Game
The more code moved out of attackby, the more modular things become.
Changelog
cl
refactor: Moves more tool behavior out of attackby().
/cl
How do I play/test/operate this?
Download NT Frontier on any modular computers. It should debrief you on what experiments are available and how to publish.
If you want to do a bomb experiment, make sure it's captured by the doppler array (as usual) and then print the experiments into a disk and publish it.
If you want to do a gas experiment, make the gas and either pump it into a tank and 1) overpressurize it with a "clear" gas like N2 or 2) overpressurize tanks with the gas itself. Make sure you do the overpressurizing in the compressor machine. When tanks are destroyed/ejected leaked gas will get recorded. Print it into a disk and publish it.
For publication, the file needs to be directly present inside the computer's HDD. This means you need to copy it first with the file manager.
Fill the data (if desired, it will autofill with boiler plate if you dont) and send away!
Doing experiments unlock nodes, while doing them well unlocks boosts (which are discounts but slightly more restrictive) which are purchaseable with NT Frontier.
If you are testing this and have access to admin tools, there are various premade bombs under obj/effect/spawner/newbomb
A doc I wrote detailing the why and what part of this PR.
https://hackmd.io/JOakSYVMSh2zU2YL5ju_-Q
---
# Intro
## The Problem(s)
Ordnance, (previously toxins) seems to lack a lot of content and things to do. The gameplay loop consists of making a bomb and then sending it off for credits or using it to refine cores. Ordnance at it's inception originally relies on players experimenting and finding the perfect mix over multiple rounds, but once the recipe for a "do-everything" mix got out, the original charm of individual discoveries becomes meaningless.
Another issue with ordnance is the odd difficulty curve. As a new player, ordnance is almost impossible to decipher, but once you watch a tutorial or read a wiki and can mail a 50k into space, there pretty much isn't anything else to do. Most players will be satisfied at this point without the gameplay loop encouraging them to understand or play more. The only thing you can do afterwards is to sink your teeth in and understand why that particular mix explodes the way it does. This again has a significant difficulty curve, but if you do that, the department doesn't acknowledge or reward that in any way. There are pretty much two huge spikes, with the latter one not really existing inside the department.
TLDR:
* The content being same-y over rounds.
* Odd difficulty curve:
1. A new player is oblivious to everything.
2. Those in the middle can repeat the final goal consistently without needing to understanding why
3. There is nothing to justify spending more time in the department after reaching the midgame.
## Abstract
Scientific Papers aim to add a framework to run multiple experiments in ordnance. Adding more experiments scattered across various atmospheric aspects might allow players of various knowledge levels to still have something engaging to do. A new player should have an easier challange than to mail a 50K. While those that already can make bombs should have an easier time understanding why their bombs explode the way it does. Once they fully understand why, they can set their sights on taking advantage of another reaction to set their bomb off or hone one particular reaction down.
## Goals
* Have some intro-level challanges for new players.
* Have some semblance of late-game challanges for more experienced players.
* Explain the mechanics better for those in the middle of the road.
* Incentivize trying new things out in the department.
* Better integrate Ordnance with Experisci
## Boundaries / Dont's
* Do not incentivize people to learn ordnance by using PvP loots.
* Do not shake or change the reaction system by a huge amount.
* Disincentivize having a single god-mix that does everything.
****
# Main design pillars
## A. Framework surrounding the experiments
### A.1. New experiments
Add new experiments to the ExperiSci module. These will come in two flavours: New explosions to do, and various gas synthesis experiments. Both of these are actually supported by the map layout of ordnance right now, but there is no reason to do anything outside of making a 50k as fast as possible.
### A.2. Rewards for experiments: Cash and Techweb Boosts.
Scientific papers will add a separate experiment handling system. A single experiment will be graded into various tiers, each tier corresponding to the explosion size or amount of gas made. Doing any tier of a specific experiment will unlock the discount for that specific reactions. A single explosion **WILL NOT** do multiple experiments (or even tiers) at once.
On publication, a partner can be selected. A single partner only has a specific criteria of experiments they want. The experiments will then be graded on "how good they are done", with the criteria being more punishing as tier increases. Publication will then reward scientific cooperation with the partnered partner. Players can spend this cooperation on techweb boosts. Techweb boosts are meant to be subservient to discount from experiments and will not shave a node's price to be lower than 500 points.
**Experiments will only unlock nodes, discounts are handled through this boost system.**
This is more for maintainability than anything.
### A.3. On Tedium
*This is a note on implementation more than anything, but I think this helps explains why several things are done.*
Due to the nature of atmospheric reactions in the game (they're all linear), tedium is a very important thing to consider. An experiment should have a sweet spot to aim for, but there should not be a point where further mastery is stopped dead on it's track with a reward cap.
Scientific Papers attempts to discourage this behaviour by having the "maximum score" scale off to infinity but with the rewards being smaller and smaller. The sweet spot is always there to aim for and should be well communicated with players, but on their last submission of an experiment topic players should be encouraged to do their best. There should always be a reward for pushing the system to it's limit as long as it doesn't completely nullify the other subdepartments. This is the reason why there is a hard limit on the number of publications and why the score calculation is a bit more complex than it needed to be.
## B. Gas Synthesis (Early-Mid Game)
Scientific papers will add one new machine that requests a tank to release x amounts of y gas. This will be accomplished by adding a tank pumping machine which will either burst or explode a tank, releasing the gas inside. The gas currently requested are BZ, Nitryl, Halon and Nob.
The overarching goal of this compressor machine is to present a gas synthesis challange for the players and to get them more accustomed to how a tank explodes. The gas synthesis part can always be changed in order to reflect the current state of atmospheric reactions.
## C. Explosion Changes (Mid-Late Game)
### C.1 Cause and effect.
The main theme of the explosion changes is establishing cause and effect of explosions. Reactions that happens inside a tank that's going to explode will be recorded and forwarded to a doppler array. Some experiments will require only a single cause to be present (think of it as isolating a variable). This is currently implemented for nobliumformation and pressure based bombs. Having other reactions occuring besides noblium formation will fail the first one, while having any reactions at all will fail the second one.
Adding more explosions here will be a slight challange because as of now the game has only two reactions that can reliably make an explosion.
### C.2 Tools upgrade.
Doppler array has now been retrofitted to state the probable cause of an explosion, be it reactions or just overpressurization on gas merging. These should help intermediate players figure out what is causing an explosion.
Added a new functionality to the implosion compressor:
Basically performs the gas merging and reaction that TTV does in a machine and reports the results back as if someone uses an analyzer on them. Here to give players feedback so they can try and understand what is actually going on in a bomb.
## D. Player Interaction
There should be more room for more than 1 player to play ordnance simultaneously. Previously players are also able to split tasks, but this rarely happens because tritium synthesis needs only the gas chamber to be reconfigured. Now, different players can pick different experiments and work on them. Players can also do joint tasks on one single experiment. Gases like noblium will need tritium production and also a cooling module online.
Ordnance can also coordinate with their parent department on what they really need, be it money or research bonuses.
# Potential Changes
The best-case changes that can be implemented if the current roster of content isn't enough is more reactions that can be used in bombs. Eliminating bombs entirely goes against the spirit of the subdepartment, while adding new ones will need a lot of care and consideration.
Another possible change is to implement a "gas payload" bomb. Bombs that has a set number of unreacting gas inside that will increase the heat capacity, reduce the payload, and neccesitates more bespoke mixes.
Adding more gas synthesis experiments is discouraged. The main focus of ordnance should be bombs, with gas synthesis being a side project for ordnance. These are present to ease the introduction to bombs and provide some side content.
There should be a somewhat well-justified goal in adding new synthesis experiments: e.g. BZ is there as a "tutorial" gas, Nitryl to introduce players to cooling/heating mixes, Halon to a more efficient tritium production, and Nob as a nudge to nobformation bombs and mastery over other aspects.
# Conclusion / Summary
Add more experiments to ordnance that players can take, accomplish this by:
1. Making the players perform gas synthesis or make bombs.
2. Have them collect the data, see if it fits the criteria. Explain why if it fits and why if it doesn't.
3. Have the player publish a paper.
Reward them based on how well did they do, give players agency both on the experiment phase and also publication phase.
---
TLDR: Added new experiment to toxins, added the framework for those experiments existing. Experiments comes in gas synthesis and also bombs but with more parameters. Experiments needs to be published through papers, various choices to be made there.
Implementation notes:
Because of how paper works, ordnance experiments are handled outside of experiment_handler components. My reasoning for this is twofold:
The experiments will be completed manually on publication and if the experiment isn't unlocked yet it will still be completed.
Experiment handler datums have several procs which require an atom-level parent, and I figured this is the most sensible and cleanest way to implement this without changing the experiment handler datum too much.
Small change to /obj/machinery/proc/power_change() signal ordering to adjust the state first and then send the signal. Didn't found any other usage of this signal except mine but barge down my door if it broke something.
Rewrote the ttv merge_gases() code to be slightly more readable.
A small code improvement for thermomachine to use tofixed (my fault).
Ordnance have been updated to enable the publication of papers
Several new explosive and gas synthesis experiments have been added to ordnance
Anomaly compressor has been TGUIzed and now supports simulating the reaction of the gases inside the ttv.
New tank compressor machine for toxins. You can overpressurize tanks with exotic gases and complete experiments.
Several techweb nodes are locked and require toxin experiments to complete.
Toxins can purchase boosts for various techweb nodes.
You no longer need to anchor doppler arrays for it to work.
Doppler array and implosion compressor now supports deconstruction, implosion compressor construction added.
Doppler now emits a red light to denote it's direction and it being on. Doppler not malf.
Implosion compressor renamed to anomaly refinery.
Created a new program tab "Science" for the downloader app. Removed Robotics.
Reworked the code for bombspawner (used in the cuban pete arcade game)
About The Pull Request
Closes#62528Closes#64229#60805 added \improper to a number of area names. This broke cameras for these areas, as apparently tgui does not respect \improper. This wraps the improper area name in a format string before it is assigned to the c_tag.
In this PR three mappers write one line of code. Thanks to @Sealed101 for doing the legwork.
Why It's Good For The Game
Security players will appreciate having their cameras back.
Changelog
cl Vire, san7890, mrmelbert, Sealed101
fix: Autonamed cameras should no longer show static in camera consoles.
/cl
