fludd12

How did none of you bring up the glory that was IPCs not processing reagents, meaning any IPC with a syringe had a 300u beaker on hand. I'd fill myself with tricordrazine and go around making medical an afterthought. That and Potassium Chlorophoride being intended to cause heart attacks, but heart attack code was unfinished and nonfunctional, so the chemical just permanently stunned you for as long as it was in your body above 10u.

@FPK, those effects were not touched, they are already lessened before the rework.

This kind of thing happens, it's nothing to worry about, really.

Would that not make it official, though?

/tg/ tablecrafting is probably the best choice here, if anyone's willing to port it. Also stops the unnecessary machines which do nearly the exact same thing.

Hello, wiki/lore-team. I've been in touch through discord, but figured I should compile a list of changes I have made to Greys in my first of many PRs which will make your lives harder (Sorry.) In this PR, not too many changes should affect the wiki or the lore of the Greys, but I'll put the ones that do in bold. Remote talk can now be used on creatures in a radius of two screens from the grey, removing the line of sight restriction, but not buffing it to its previous capabilities. Psionic Hivemind (the Grey language) is now Z-level wide, but requires at least one hand to be able to hold an item, justified IC-ly by having them press their finger to their temple. Greys are once again allergic to water, but not water derivatives, such as Holy Water. Fire extinguishers and showers are now deadly weapons. Greys treat sulfuric acid as if it were water, taking no damage from it at all. Remote Talk can now be formatted slightly, allowing for slightly better usability in the consistently blue notification chat. Notably, there is one final change I'd like to make, but it will not be included in the current Grey Rework PR. I intend to give Greys the ability to create illusions which living humans can see, but not interact with, giving them more mental control over a situation to build upon their lack of physical strength.

Will do.

Odd, it didn't used to do that, and I can't find any PRs that modified that intentionally. Shouldn't be a terribly hard code change for anyone who's willing to pick it up - I've got essays to write and code on my plate, unfortunately.

Notably, the Tribal tab is based around objects which could reasonably be produced in Lavaland, at least going by /tg/'s standards (where we adopted the crafting system from). This will be fleshed out as we port over more Lavaland changes, but likely not in the way you'd want. Give a bit more in-depth examples of how things would work, and coding might happen.

I'm working on this right now. All races will get a complete overhaul, starting with the Greys. You can track the progress and changes I've made on Github, and if I recall correctly, there is a post in the code discussion forum about discussing the code.

I sorta prefer the old sprite, really. The thinner sprite just makes it look awkward with arm position, and notably, given our pixel limitation, the breasts now look a little bit too massive. Consider that in most natural reference pictures of the female body, the breasts are practically flush with the upper body, with minor deviation given breast size.

Rather than limit it's - er - limitless shot capability and range, I suggest changing the effect of being hit with it; Maybe even nullifying it. There's no point to having a portal gun if you can't actually use it as a portal gun, but if you're using it as a weapon without doing cool and interesting things like shooting one below and above a person and laughing at their pain, you're using it wrong.

By that logic, one would drop all of their belongings upon becoming a FOINE RED MYST. Seems like, for balancing, it'd be all or nothing.

I think something I definitely want to see is a Grey make it look like there's a hole to space in the center of the room, since that's a major deterrent for most people.

With my work on the Grey Rework in its final stages, I was wondering if anyone had any other ideas they'd like to see considered for Grey species differentiation. Following by my design doc, here's the intended goal of the changes: If you have any suggestions that follow this, or any arguments that changes I'm currently making go against this, please discuss!

Sounds are handled by a really horrifyingly bad .ogg system which requires a separate .ogg for each note, sharp/flat, and octave combination. Godspeed. As for soundfont, there's Boy Band for male "do's" (think Temmie) Can't find a female version, but other races will be slightly easier. I imagine bird chirping for Vox, bubble popping for Slimes, etc.

Preface I'm sure I've beat this lich-horse back to dust several times before, but I realized a few things which have recently tinted my point of view on species differentiation in a different way; something many suggestions do not appear to take into account. I guess this is a sort of open letter to suggestion-makers and such on how I personally believe racial abilities and species differentiation should work. Take it with a grain of salt, I suppose, since I haven't done any true studying into the topic of game design at any school, but I've been attempting to hone my talent in the field with textbooks and such. The Problem Currently, the general term used for how our race system works is "Human+," or the dreaded label of "Humans with Gimmicks". Each race is a subset of the base human, but with certain traits, such as telepathy, or needing nitrogen instead of oxygen. This is very easy to design for, and makes sense with how our code works - each species is a subset of the human class. However, you all seem to be unhappy with this arrangement - indeed, there's been several complaints about how species should be more than just humans with traits. Some of those complaints have come even from me. How it is now The current strategy people are using is developing abilities or traits. Giving slime people the ability to regrow limbs. Giving Kidan the trait of more armor. These are all easy suggestions to think of, provide for more varied racial code, and yet are easy to code for. And, in most cases, they're not particularly bad ideas! However, this is not the answer you are looking for. Giving species more abilities and more debuffs, or even less debuffs, will never make species truly different from humans. They'll always be humans with traits and abilities, which, to be fair, is what we know. We know what humans are, so it's easy to extrapolate "That, but different." Now, his is a bit of a strange thing to bring up in a species topic, but you'll see why in a moment. The other big complaint I see popping up with increasing regularity is the slow but sure loss of character species variety on the station, as well as the progressive decline of the 'medium' in our purported Medium Roleplay, which our staff has been trying pretty hard to maintain. Form follows function My personal view on this subject has changed a bit, but here's how I see it: Roleplay starts with how one plays their character. This is fairly obvious at face value, but it goes a bit deeper. Your character is defined by the ideas you have for it, yes, but also by the way your character plays in the game. It's why there are character archetypes for different playstyles; why the bulkier, heavier looking races are generally better fighters in fantasy games. Part of this is design affecting gameplay, but another part is gameplay affecting design. It's the latter topic we want to look at here - because, what better way to get someone to roleplay as an alien, than to get them to feel less human. We need to stop thinking of species as having buffs or debuffs. This will make balance much harder, but it will result in a much, much more rewarding experience for players. The species you play should influence the decisions you make, resulting in a change to the way you behave, resulting in a change to how you play your character. A Grey, currently, could go the whole round acting exactly like a human, and nobody'd bat an eye. In fact, so long as their needs are met, most species can do this, with exceptions being IPCs to some extent, and Diona. What we do right What we want to ensure this changes, and that races feel truly alien, is to change this. Have a race play so radically differently from human, that your instincts to how to play the character changes. Not only that, but everyone else's instincts will also have to change regarding your character. This is part of why I support the idea of vulpkanin/tajaran colorblindness, though perhaps I don't 100% agree with the way the current PR handles it. Suddenly, your perspective of the game changes RADICALLY. At a glance, you can no longer tell some things that you used to, while other things stand out surprisingly more. For IPCs, it's a little bit less pronounced, but still there. You no longer care about the same materials or supplies humans do, but care a lot more for basic tools. A lack of a chef means lack of food for a human, but a power outage threatens your ability to move at full speed in a fight. Diona also have this concept - a blow from an energy sword would spook any other species to running to the medbay, but you can walk it off - in fact, you're forced to walk it off, making you put a lot more consideration into where you're going and how. What I can do I'll be doing my very best to release pull requests following this sort of design logic, but it'll be a long road - both because of my [lack of] coding prowess, and due to the sheer intensity of the task I am undertaking. I'm sure my opinion is not a universal one; any changes I make according to this, I'll take some extra consideration into public concern over, so if you want a say in how this goes, a Github account is free and will let you make comments directly on the code I change. Feel free to post thoughts, suggestions, or complaints - this is one massive text wall I wrote while sleep deprived at 12:50 AM.

I hate to Thread Necromancer, but shows off how I think races should be balanced. Not that it'll be an easy change, but this is a good explanation of what I was vying for when I said not everything needs to be balanced.

I consider this an interesting form of emergent gameplay - I don't have an issue with people feeling kinship among their race, but I think there should be incentive for people to play races to a certain equal degree. Alternatively, we could provide ways to disrupt the usual banding together, to form even more diverse groups - for example, the little-if-ever-roleplayed fact that Unathi have an immense divergence between tribal and technological culture, and how females are generally considered property, or how administrative bickering and paperwork - with a bit of world war involved - nearly caused the extinction of the Vulpkanin species.

I vote also being able to put a photograph in front of a camera lens, but have it be pretty freaking obvious that something's wrong upon closer inspection. ...Of course, that's practically impossible.

To clarify, what I said earlier was not to imply that racial strengths shouldn't exist, just that they shouldn't completely offset their weaknesses without very clever play. For example, if Greys had the ability to make illusions of objects, but took more brute damage and dealt less melee damage, they could, with preparation and circumstance, seem far more well equipped to handle a situation than they are, providing a cover for their weaknesses without actually minimizing them. Races that are intended to be more human can still be quite human without losing this weakness/benefit balance. For example, the mostly-human Vulpkanin could have a similar colourblind overlay to the detective's glasses, but without blood highlighting. Otherwise the same as humans. This gives them a weakness, technically without a benefit, but this weakness isn't nearly as pronounced as, for example, a 2.5x damage multiplier on IPCs - Not only that, but it gives some interesting roleplay/gameplay interactions, such as a vulpkanin not being able to tell from what species a blood pool comes from.

I take the exact opposite perspective, Dadols. The primary diversity of races, in my opinion, should come from their debuffs, not their buffs. I'd be fine with IPCs taking damage like wet tissue paper, taking the multiplier to insane levels like x3, but being able to be put back together fairly easily like they are now. Just because a race has a downside without a balancing upside does not mean it is a bad race, it just forces players who use that race to adopt a different playstyle to compensate - thus giving the player a bit of a subconscious sway to act occasionally wildly different from humans.

When I play Captain, I do what someone in a high-up bureaucratic position should do. Absolutely nothing, looking pretty for the public while designating tasks for lesser peons. If I have to do something important as the captain, I generally consider it a failure on my part. ...That's just my playstyle, though, not saying this is or should be the norm.

Finally complete!

Figure I should make one of these, given how insanely large my character list is, and how I don't get to play many of them that often... Without further ado, my list of characters I have played / do play with semi-regularity. I'm sure there's a forum thread for a few of them, but I should just compile 'em all in one place. N.O.V.A To Walk Beneath the Void Case Mod Nagi Masa Chakiyayahakithahakita (AKA Chaki) Spirit Mari Fraise Lael Rook Lawrence Hassium Hansa Primpiyat Aril Rose Mishi Traxu Nano Marie Rook Phew, that was a lot of writing. Hope you enjoy!