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I might ask, how is that a bad thing? As it stand right now, Mining frequently hits a poitn where they can have the ORM so impossibly stocked for materials that at around the 1 hour mark, they can fuck about on station an never need do their job ever again, barring some massive catastrophe. ((I myself have hit a point where we had over 500 of every single mineral, several thousand metal, glass and plasma and well over a hundred diamonds.)) If more resources get used by more departments then just Science then that's a GOOD thing. It means mining actually has a job and is a boon to every department beyond just Science. Medical can pull out gold/silver for possible viruses, Engineering can reliably print out sheets of plasteel, etc. And it means Science doesn't get to loot the ORM an fuck off with your ENTIRE haul moments after depositing, so people stop shrieking at miners to get them things because Science stole it all for themselves when they only needed maybe half of it. Similarly, I've seen science man the RnD console, be perfectly capable of hearing me, an simply ignore me or tell me to fuck off. Even as a miner asking for mining upgrades so I can get them more ore. With Departmental lathes, that possibility is entirely removed. You need something? go to the lathe for your department that is restricted to blueprints you need (The Cargo lathe can't make AEGs for example) and just make it. You want machine upgrades, Science still has to do that, but now at least, medical could print additional huds or their own surgical tool upgrades,etc. The pros to the Ore silo and Departmental Protolathes VASTLY outweigh the cons.

My most beautiful creation! Credit to Alffd for the images.

Hey all, TL;DR: If you're interested, some of the game files could be made smaller with assistance to keep the process ongoing for new files. Cut the current sprite source size by 27% (12.8MB), audio source by ~38% (~30.7MB), paradise.rsc lowered ~28% (~28MB) with sound optimisation, another ~12% (~12MB) with sprite optimisation (~100MB -> ~66MB total) Too long; read anyway: (thanks for reading :) ) This isn't a code thing or feature to be added, but I know someone involved in the server and through them took an interest in the game data. I have experience in image / web site data optimisation and used those eyes to look over the git repo. After I grabbed a copy of it I saw that there was some data being used up that didn't need to be in the game resources. I'm not intending to step on any toes so any issues / rejections aren't a problem, just something I managed to do relatively easily (taught myself a few things) and figured I'd offer it up to take a look at in case it was helpful to the people running the server as it can be integrated into the media workflow or simply done on a semi-regular basic after a number of updates. Basic explanation: Sprites and sound files can be optimised to keep 100% of their quality (or 99.99% in the case of sound) with, in some cases, significantly smaller file sizes. What does this accomplish? Aside from the game taking up less space (Yes, it's already extremely small by todays standards) it means that the server updating clients takes less time, the resource file can be pushed out in a shorter time in a smaller size, consuming less bandwidth for the server infrastructure etc. The savings get multiplied for every player that connects for the first time, or with a broken resource cache, or after an update etc. How is this done? The sprites can be batch optimised, I've already done a complete test to crush them as far as they can possibly go with 100% exact pixel accuracy to their originals. I've written a batch script for this but I want to add some final safety measures so that I can package it and provide it in a 'anyone can use this without necessarily knowing how it works, or risking data damage in the process' with statistics and warnings if issues arise (also without overwriting files if there's an error etc). The final step is just a safety check to confirm that the DMI metadata (The bit that tells BYOND how to render the directions and animations of the sprite sheet) is completely unaltered during the process so that it can warn if an issue arises that may need manual intervention. If a user repeats the optimisation on already processed data there will be no change and no damage, just wasted CPU time. The audio optimisations are a lot more complex and I do not have a way to automate them (and might not ever without potentially destroying quality or losing space efficiency), but someone with enough knowledge / practice and a Digital Audio Workstation (even a free one) can do some manual analysis and alterations (spectrum analysis, lowering the sample rate if it doesn't need to be so high based on frequencies used etc) to the sound files before encoding them, and testing which encoding setting provides the most accurate data for the lowest file size (basically encoding several examples at different settings and then just comparing them to the original, because 'the highest setting' is not always the best. A file might only need to be 1MB in order to be 'perceptably perfect', but higher settings may make that same file significantly larger). These kinds of optimisations must be done on the highest quality source available (not the existing ogg files unless absolutely necessary) and should only ever be done once per new sound file added. As I've gone I've also been writing the basic outline of a tutorial / best (ish) practice to guide others through the process, depending on demand that may be turned into a full fledged tutorial on the process. After the sprite optimisation I ran up a private server and had a poke around, but not being a player I was only able to run around and do basic interactions, the sprites seemed fine as far as I tested. The sound optimisation I'm not currently 100% sure will work as I have not tested that and there may be edge cases with the alterations I've made that cause some files to fail, though I am not able to actively test this myself, I have simply stuck to the limitations of the FMODex sound system that BYOND uses, so 'on paper' they should work. In reality however, I do not know and would appreciate testers if people are interested. I've forked the repo and added a testing branch to my own for this purpose until I know my alterations are sound, it can be found at: https://github.com/timegrinder/SS13-Paradise/tree/testing Currently it only has the audio optimisations as I want to thoroughly check the DMI metadata on the sprites to make sure they are all intact before uploading them. The process can also be backported to the other stations / code bases if people care, whether just them finding out your data is in a better envelope and pulling it, or them processing their own in some way. Hope you survived the rant! Any responses or comments / questions etc are welcome, I might not respond terribly quickly or sometimes forget to check back.

Essentially an idea for a new game mode. Have a one or two antags of each ic race set with the goal of embroiling their specific ic race to eliminate the others or a specific one on the station. A couple of ideas for how to spread it could be a proximity-based thing where if a player is a certain amount of tiles away from a player fighting a player of a different race he gets an ic prompt that he feels an uncontrollable urge to help the player of his race. Or just make it have the same mechanics as a rev rounds where that antag has a flash and if he uses it on other players of the ic race they join but on others it just functions as a normal flash. Could even have certain players who would be forced to play as peacekeepers and their goal was to keep the peace. Players would scramble to gain control of their department from the other groups in it work with other allied departments to attain total domination. There could be a number of justifications for the antag like nonhumans being upset at humans rapid expansion or humans being members of the "old guard" looking to preserve human supremacy as the wiki describes them. I think this would at the very least add something new to spice up the game and even not as a game mode maybe as a midround thing to add instead of the mid-round terror spider or blob rounds that happen when a round lasts more than an hour. Now I know most players don't really play racist characters IC but I think it would be a relatively good chance to RP differently for a lot of players and put something fresh into the server. That said I can see how this could burn down really quickly and just dissipate into a lot of server rules being broken. Adding to that I do not have a good idea for how this would play out for low player count races like drask or kidan. Would love to hear your thoughts on this!

two bad biceps wolfs

THREAD this is NERD, counting ZERO - one EDIT: Somehow it showed me only to post number nine, so I originally typed here one-zero. The same issue on my previous count failure. Totally not explaining an inability to count. Secman does not need that skill anyway... 101, 201, 308, bah, numbers are for nerds, we're going to perma you anyway, clown.

Gentlemen Behold! As I take all of your hard work in counting and reduce.... IT TO ZERO! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAhAHAHA!

Whoops, premature enteration and left it too long to edit the previous. main.ogg - Original: 884K - Contains audible sound only below ~8-10KHz, this is after removing the frequencies too quiet to hear via filter and encoding accordingly to match the original audio Sample rate -- Quality -- Size 44.1KHz -- Q 1 -- 421KB 22.0KHz -- Q 6 -- 511KB song_main.ogg - Original: 1,948K - after noise removal. This one is an example of how lowering the sample rate doesn't affect the sound while lowering the file size 22.0KHz -- Q -2 -- 400KB 32.0KHz -- Q -2 -- 506KB 44.1KHz -- Q -2 -- 560KB They're all relatively the same spectrum wise, just the 22/32 ones are very slightly quieter as they have a lower range There's also the benefit of lower encoding quality levels on higher quality / higher sample rate sources being able to carve out frequencies that are closer together without damaging the sound (ie the spectrum would look like /\/\/\/\/\/\) because the closer some frequencies are together the harder it is for the listener to be able to discern them from each other, and the sound test would end up sounding the same for the largest population of players. Ogg Vorbis itself has a low pass filter built into it, so keeping the sample rate high ends up with better results as the filter settings carve out the upper frequencies based on sample rate and drop the max frequency dramatically as quality setting and sample rate go down, though I'd prefer to do the filtering manually. A side effect of going through the audio and processing is I've been collecting proper attributions for anything I've been able to rebuild from a higher quality source, so that can actually be kept somewhere properly (I didn't see a list, only one single entry, though I didn't look horribly hard either). If I could output a list of 'used resources' instead of having to look them up in DM it'd be useful for targetting file optimisation as there's a lot of audio to optimise and some of those files actually aren't even used.

15 bullets left for the detective's revolver

Космическая станция 13 does not exist

K so you know how mining never gets diamonds and RnD has to turn down everybody who wants crap and can't print quad caps/femtos/bs bins? Well, with kudzu being the only other option than mining, I looked a lot into kudzu farming and got it down to an efficient science. It has got to be the hardest most annoying friggen thing to do on the station, so basically RnD is screwed without mining. So I wanted to think of another way for RnD to get diamonds. Immediately I knew any attempt at this and I would receive relentless hate from the developer community, as does any buff to this game receive. They'd shoot me down saying it would remove departmental reliance between mining and science and give science, and the most overpowered department on the station, a farther buff. So here's my counter to the inevitable oppression. Departments involved in the diamond maker machine (please comment a better name): RnD, Toxins, Xenobiology, Botany, Command, Cargo, Engineering (possibly), Chef, Medbay, and the friggen CLOWN (possibly). In order to make the diamond maker thingy, one must order the circuit board from cargo, achieve engineering 7, toxins 7, and power 7 to print the necessary parts, as well as get glowcaps from botany, charged slime cores from xenobio, and other misc garbage stock parts. If yall want this, I could also make it so that engineering has to build a special room for this to be able to be constructed (kinda like the DNA machine but mandatory). Once it's built, one must insert 50 sheets of metal, 10 sheets of bluespace mesh, a brain burger (to crush the carbon from the brain into diamonds), a charged slime core, and 50 glass per diamond. Once you load up all your junk in (you can load multiple at a time for multiple diamonds per creation) the captain must swipe their ID to authorize the machine, then the god damn clown has to honk their horn to make it work (alright that's a stretch probably not actually do that), then a massive explosion happens forcing the activator to have to retreat to medbay, and possibly blow a whole the ship (also requiring engineering to build a separate blast proof room or like I said a required special one). I wouldn't make it big enough to go through reinforced floor tiles though, so chemical research testing chamber should work fine. Since I'd be the one coding this, and there is no way in hell anybody could argue it's overpowered, why not add it? Comment below suggestions/changes, and if you find a loophole to somehow call it overpowered fight me.

To try and summarize the issues you're bringing up: 1. Limited supply of minerals. 2. Departmental Protolathes will still be dependent on Research doing their job. 3. Scientists are sometimes at the R&D desk to handle requests. To respond to each of these in turn: 1. I'm not sure what evidence you're basing a lack of resources on, because the only times I've seen a sustained lack of resources is when Mining has had multiple traitors or been completely incompetent. Those incidents are functionally irrelevant to the question of an ore silo, because the issue is upstream of ore distribution. Miners usually end up goofing around on-station with teleportation jaunters or oodles of minebots by the 1-hour mark, because they've so oversupplied the ORM that there's more resources than the station could use. The paradigm of mining supply is "feast or famine:" either the Miners are somewhat competent and rapidly stock the ORM with gobs of resources, or they're terrible for some reason or another and provide nothing. In both cases, distribution is not an issue. Even assuming that mining stocks were depleted, that logically implies that nearly everyone is getting the kit they needed. That's hardly a problem, is it? 2. Yes, I agree that departmental Protolathes will still require Research to do their job. I thought that was the idea, no? Aren't we supposed to be encouraging inter-departmental cooperation and the like? 3. Yes, Scientists are sometimes at the R&D desk. Believe me, they aren't there for all two hours of the shift. Even if someone had the stamina to sit through two hours in a crowded room, they'd be swarmed by oodles of requests - the Janitor wants a floor buffer, Medbay wants IMSes, Engineering wants loaded RPEDs - which are draining and largely un-rewarding to deal with. Why go through the effort of making someone have to do a deliberately-terrible job when you could just make department-specific Protolathes to take the bulk of the work off of them? Logically speaking, having departmental Protolathes would eliminate the regular requests like the ones mentioned above, and cut things down to either greytiders or someone with a very unusual request (an Engineer looking for a crew monitor, for instance). That means many fewer yells of "; SCIENTIST TO R&D I'VE BEEN WAITING FOR TEN MINUTES DAMNIT," and less-frustrating gameplay for everyone involved. I still don't really see where the issue is here.

three space(d) engineers

One, Three, Two? Learn to count! Start from ZERO!

4 assistants with toolboxes robusting the clown

Alternatively just allow a borg without a battery still talk and be conscious. Because what powers an MMI or Posibrain that lets it talk without a battery? It's not much of a stretch to assume those functions would still work.

6 out robusted Nukies thanks to Wolf

Message To: CENTRAL COMMAND Message Sender: TOODLES Message Title: HELLO CENTRAL COMMAND ITS ME TOODLES! Message Body: HELLO CENTRAL COMMAND, Its me Toodles! I managed to sneak my way into the Internal Affairs Office and the Fax machine was still logged in. How are you guys doing over there? I have a question of the most importance importance that it had to go straight to the Central Command! I cannot bug our Captain with this, nono. I hope you guys are the right people to ask the question to, but if not try to answer it anyway okay? OH before I forgot! I have to say that I think the Clown should have access to those cool new DONK Machineguns! I have no idea where they come from, can I even buy them? I would love to buy them using some of the money I make on the uh... CiyberYiad! Phew, hard to write that thing. Pieces of paper are so old. We should make those little drone technology more advanced and have direct communication chips in our brain! That would be c... Sorry I digress - I had this important message to all of you, and I just need to find the paperclips. Ah yes, here found them! Can I be captain? Like... just for one or two shifts. I would do it for free! What do you guys say? TOODLELOO - HAVE A NICE DAY. (OOC: I am so sorry, but this is in character ><)

ALL NEW BLUESPACE ITEMS ARE CONDEMNED ON THE SERVER. This post is void but I'll leave it up since the sprites look cool. https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/pull/10771 I really want to code some new bluespace upgrades, and want some neat, not over-powered ideas to occupy my coding cravings. Almost anything could be bluespace and protolathe printed, so comment below what you would like me to code! Coded/Finished items (All sprites were created by @Ionward) Bluespace Medical Hypospray - Holds 100u instead of 30u. Can also inject through hardsuits. Bluespace Handcuffs: A pair of rechargeable handcuffs that has a max of 3 charges to dispense energy cuffs with the same breakout time as zip ties. Vaporizes when broken out of. Suggested by@xeroxide Bluespace Emergency Oxygen Tank: Has a volume of 10 rather than 4. Suggested by @xeroxide Modular Hud Attachment Device (MHAD): Can hold two huds of any type to allowing the user to use two huds at once. Suggested by @xeroxide Bluespace Defibrillator - Able to revive after a patient has been dead for 2/3rds longer than normal. Also gives a little bit of health (more than the base amount) after successful revival. Also can revive through hardsuits. q Bluespace Bone Setter: A bone setter and bone gel combo that's just the IMS for bones. Suggested by me originally than @Pckables made me rethink. Y'all gotta fight for it to get added when I post the PR. Definitely going to code (in a future PR) Bluespace Jumpsuit: Allows walking through players with harm intent. Also provides an ambient glow, possibly a flashlight replacement. Suggested by @Splgrk Bluespace Swiss Army Knife: - All tools of a tool belt (minus multitool and devices) in one "convenient" item. Suggested by @Medi Bluespace light replacer (Non-emaggable): Can replace and pick up lights from range through walls, (like RnD's Bluespace RPED). Can dump stored broken lights into lathes in a similar fashion. Suggested by @Pckables Bluespace Bandolier: Holds more shells. Suggested by @Denthamos. Bluespace RCD: Long range RCD. Costs more the farther the target. Also in borg module form. Suggested by @Denthamos. Link to my github so yall can see the code, item names, and descriptions. https://github.com/ParadiseSS13/Paradise/compare/master...Jazz23:Bluepace-Upgrades

Oh boy, I finally have a story for this thread, even if it's kind of short. So, I decided to play my grey Seven in science for a round. Everything's going good, it's a rather quiet round for me so far. Then we get spiders. I start walking around welding vents and stuff, and come across a spider in experimentor that's standing there trying to attack a wall because it can't get to me, so I just stand there and stare at it for a moment. Another scientist walks up with a monkey and suggests feeding the monkey to the spider, and I decide to humor him, so I point to the door and he opens it, so the spider immediately attacks me. We manage to kill it, but being a fragile grey, I die as a result of it. And here's where the shitcurity comes in; the scientist who was with me drags me to medical through genetics, to get me to cryo, but another doc momentarily steals my corpse and scans me in the cloner, then the guy continues to drag me out of cloning to cryogenics where a random sec officer cuffs my corpse while they're trying to defib me. Then I pop out of cloning, naked and confused, and a doc lets me out, so I immediately notice my second body in the cryo pod and scream. I walk over to cryo to try to get my body back, and the officer from earlier attempts to cuff me despite the fact I've very obviously just gotten out of cloning. Doesn't even try to give me a chance to get some clothes on. He fires disablers at me but I run and hide behind the other people in cryo until my body pops out of the pod, at which point I drag it away to cloning so I can get dressed. The officer, of course, follows me and tries to arrest me AGAIN while I'm trying to get dressed. I can't exactly talk fast to him because I only speak wingdings, so I just back away repeatedly while putting all my clothes back on and dragging around my second body, which is alive because it was defibbed. Then... As I'm getting all my stuff, the officer harmbatons my second body, cuffs it, and drags it off to the brig, and it dies soon after. He doesn't even seem to realise he's arrested the wrong person, let alone the fact I followed him all the way to the brig. Or the fact there's two of me. I decide to chill in processing while the officer "processes" my corpse, and then the warden shows up, and the officer tells them that the HOP thinks I'm a changeling, and then starts punching my corpse a few times. I telepathically explain to the warden that the officer arrested my corpse instead of me, and that they have no reason to think I was a changeling. So the warden tells the officer he arrested a corpse, and then says to let me go. The officer never even seemed to realise he arrested the wrong body...