Wintermote

That can't be right - it flies in the face of personal experience for the entire time I've been playing on /tg/. Can you link me to the code? I need to compile and test this.

Fox, you can't honestly tell me this is the way it's always been when I've been playing over three years with a 7-8 tile range and had to go out of my way to learn about it for mapping on /tg/-station At most it's the way it's always been on paradise - but even that doesn't seem right to me, because Sigurd has been using Paradise's codebase for awhile and the problem did not manifest itself there. This is a change that seriously affects how fun AI is to play, and now I understand why the AI lipreading was added - because the intercoms everywhere else were nerfed to hell. Why even bother with giving the intercoms any range at all? 2-3 tiles is worthless. AI lipreading or intercoms that can actually overhear a room are a necessity and you've actually made AI more supercop with the change than without by removing other options the AI has with interacting and playing with people. The only reason to play AI now is to literally be supercop, and your stated goal was to make the AI less of a supercop. Or to put this another way: My favourite job in ss13 has been, for years, to play AI - and this one change is actually convincing me not to bother with it anymore; it's not fun except when you're locking down revs and traitors. You've removed one of the only thing the AI could do to pass the time and roleplay.

One shot taser is too easy, it makes the taser the Go-to weapon. Tase, then laser. The previous system forced a choice of lethal or non-lethal. Now? No brainer to tase them first. And then when coders try to balance this, they'll make the taser stun shorter, at which point tasers go from OP to worthless. I know this because that's exactly what happened the last several times I've seen this exact scenario play out.

Firing weapons without hearing protection should cause small amounts of hearing damage. Yes, including lasers and affecting anyone within 1 tile of the person shooting. More if it's a big gun. If you do a lot of shooting without any hearing protection, you should go deaf. Even better if we can have machinery in engineering that's so loud it makes talking impossible and causes gradual hearing damage.

Allow people with some basic tools to change a taser into a makeshift unstable laser/energy weapon that may or may not malfunction Or maybe just let it be modified to explode when fired.

Place a bomb on a roller chair with an extinguisher. Set bomb, trigger extinguisher roller chair jets around in random directions until the bomb goes off

It's mostly just an oversight by mappers. With that said, the holopads are really clunky to use. I think the original proposal for them when they were introduced on /tg/station was to make it so that any room with a holopad was a room the AI could walk around in. So rather than activating a holopad for each room, you'd just activate your hologram. Something similar to star-trek style holograms.

It's a change which is a serious detriment to AI players. I'm not familiar with the exact status of when things were changed or not on Paradise, but I am familiar with how it worked on both baycode and /tg/station code, as I experimented with both regarding this exact thing. (Specifically testing intercom ranges while I was mapping for /tg/station and sigurd in particular and designing rooms around it) AI's are basically forgotten and ignored by the crew, though you might be looking at people having a conversation they will never know you're there until you chime in, and without the ability to hear their conversation, you can never really chime in. This is a serious detriment to the AI's ability to actually engage in RP with other people - most don't even acknowledge its existence beyond having it open doors and nothing of any RP interest is ever spoken over radio.

I would like vox with head feathers or quills

Somewhere along the line, intercoms received a nerf and presently have only a 3-tile range from their original 7 or 8 tile range. A patch or two ago the AI lipreading was also nerfed and the AI no longer has this. I am fine with one of these nerfs, but not both of these nerfs, and my personal preference would be to have the proper intercom range back - especially considering much of the map is designed around 7-8 tile intercom coverage. During low-pop or extended rounds, literally the only interesting thing to do as the AI is listen to people's private conversations. Actually, even during regular rounds there's not much else to do except listen to people. Players have the option already of disabling intercoms, whispering, writing on paper, or going into areas the AI cannot see, in order to have clandestine conversations. Traitors can also grab gear that tells them if they're being watched by the AI, and can grab equipment that even allows them to listen to the AI binary channel. The options to avoid the AI "supercop" are plentiful. The issue isn't that the AI can hear private conversations, it's that nobody takes any actual precautions to prevent it when they are traitoring. Please return the intercoms back to their original settings so that I can go back to amusing myself with whatever random RP is going on around the station, instead of being nothing more than a glorified door-opener and 'supercop'.

Sounds good to me, even if customs is removed.

I think the best option is some kind of obvious indication when you examine the robot and when you look at the sprite. The examine verb should indicate that the cyborg is shut down. The sprite itself should be slumped over, lights turned off, certain parts no longer glow. Same case for when the cyborg dies - it needs to be made more obvious that the cyborg is out of commission, at a glance, to players who run by.

I don't, frankly, see any gameplay issues at all here. What? Do you want space to be a hugbox that gently caresses you when you go sailing through it? You are on a space station in a lethal environment. It's one of the defining features of the gameplay environment and it should remain lethal. Instead of nerfing space to be friendlier to people, give them tools to deal with the environment. At some point you have to ask whether or not you even want a challenge in this game. One of the reasons I enjoy and play ss13 is specifically because you can have stupid random and sudden deaths from being careless. You KNOW space is lethal to you. You should not be able to throw on internals and go traipsing around in space, and moving away from making space cold, to simulating the actual effects of a vacuum only makes the game more interesting. This gamist philosophy is why we get dumbed down simplistic and shallow shit in videogames today. I hate it, I don't want something simplistic, shallow and easy. I want complicated, chaotic, hard and interesting. My issues with this new lung code extend only as far as the player not being aware of what is happening to them and why - and no further. More lethal environments are a good thing and space in ss13 has been far too kind to players for far too long.

It's what actually happens to the human body during rapid (within milliseconds) decompression. The lungs expand within the chest cavity before the body can even react to it, stretch past what the lungs and pleural membrane can handle and tear, causing blood to fill the lungs and preventing the lungs from properly functioning anymore. During slower decompression you can continue to hold your breath - it's actually the speed of the expansion of the lungs that causes damage, rather than the fact that they're expanding too much. (though expanding too much can still damage your lungs, it's more likely that the person would simply exhale when it began to hurt) Decompression itself causes your lungs to work in reverse, so being in a decompressed room, or space, without a pressure suit, should knock the player out within ~20-30 seconds as deoxygenated blood from the lungs reaches the brain. Considering all of these things, I have absolutely no issue with severe lung damage as a result of decompression. It's a fact of how lethal a vacuum can be. The only thing I take issue with is how poorly communicated the issue is to the player. I've ruptured my lungs in game before and thought it was a problem with my internals not properly engaging, when really it was just that I'd suffered traumatic internal injury.

Players need some kind of in-your-face indicator that the borg has lost power and that someone other than the borg needs to take responsibility for fixing it. Having the borg just sit there with no indication to other players that anything is wrong is just poor game design and player communication.

Some updates to engineering. Needs more work still, might be issues with the design I'm not aware of. Will probably put Engineering EVA to the right of the supermatter.

Design change/proposal: - Give Janitor all-access, like the captain.

Design changes/proposals: Keep players out of maintenance - Low-levels of ambient radiation in all maintenance tunnels - Engineering jumpsuits fully protect against this radiation - Maintenance tunnels are still the go-to place for safety during radiation storms Better lighting - Make certain objects, like APC's or computers, give off a soft glow.

The primary trouble with admins is that the best way to get them is for someone competent and person-savvy to select the best people from the playerbase. A good 70-80% of players are not admin material, and selection has to look at a lot of different values that a person has. As your playerbase shrinks, your pool of potential admins also shrinks. Speaking from experience though, unlisting has largely been a bad idea. You need to have the server pimped somewhere in order to keep fresh blood churning through. If you don't have that going on, the server WILL die. Whether it's listed on the hub is immaterial - it doesn't matter if it's on the hub or 4chan or reddit or wherever else. So long as it's generating an influx of new players that's greater than the outflux, it'll keep the server alive. If nobody knows about the server, it will simply shrink and vanish. Old players don't stick around forever - there is a constant amount of attrition regardless of how well the server is doing.

As one of the former head admins of Sigurd, I do think my own opinions would be fairly pertinent here. Just letting a player know that the issue is being looked into is extremely important. I know I can get sidetracked talking to three or four people at once to figure out who did and why, but when someone asks me something, I don't intentionally leave them hanging, I let them know that I'm busy and either looking into their issue or can't look into it at the moment, and if I'm getting overwhelmed, I ask other admins on skype to get online and help. An admin that is afk on the server might as well not even be there. There may be some benefit to players thinking they're being watched, but an admin who's logged on and doing nothing to solve a situation because he's afk just looks incompetent, which makes the entire admin team look bad. I tried to generally always be available while I was on the server. I might not be paying attention to the round, but I kept my headphones on so I could hear any adminhelps while I did whatever else, because that's what I'm there to do. It's part of why I'm an admin. As both a player and an admin, I hate this response. It's a typical way of offloading blame for incompetence: "b-b-but I do it for free!" If you can't respond to players, you shouldn't be an admin. It is literally the responsibility you took on by being an admin. If you don't want to handle players, don't log on, don't be an admin, or temporarily demote yourself from admin while you play. If you need a pat on the back to do what you do, or get tired of being called shit by players for what you do. Stop being an admin. Flat out. There are a dozen people who will gladly take your place in a heartbeat. If the "stress" of answering adminhelps or putting up with the shitflinging gets you to leave, it's not the sort of thing you were ready for anyways. It is a thankless job (for the most part) and those of us who do it, should be doing it knowing that. Do I get tired of the bullshit from players? Yes. But I enjoy solving issues, and whether it's recognized by someone or not, I'm a little happier every time I smooth out a problem. This attitude of "I do it for free, so you better respect me" has always rubbed me the wrong way. You can't demand respect from players, you can't tell them you deserve it because you're a volunteer. If people bitch about admins not doing anything, they aren't wrong. You aren't doing your jobs if you ignore them. It doesn't matter how much of a volunteer you are.

It's... not a matter of admin approval. It's a matter of whether or not anyone is interested in coding it. I can't code worth shit, but I can lay out what I'd do with it if I could; so that's what I did. If it were coded at some point, and it functions more or less as described, it'll have a place on sigurd, even if it doesn't make it onto paradise. Admin approval isn't really a concern here.

I'm not using that map anymore, so the amount of windows, the park and kitchen and bar, borg stations etc. are irrelephant. There are no airlocks in maintenance or medbay because I hadn't placed any airlocks anywhere. There's no reason to have windows against the wall except for aesthetic reasons, and aesthetically I prefer them without glass against the wall. It's entirely placeholder in atmos. Primary concerns with piping is to ensure it's fairly easy to reach and covers each room properly. Vents and scrubbers always placed at opposite sides of the room. These are some of the last things I add to a room. Most important are layouts for movement. Players need to be able to move around and interact with things without feeling claustrophobic or trapped. Atmos alarms, fire alarms, holopads, cameras, lights, etc. are extraneous details when the concern is to get the layout working. I usually keep mental track of where I want to place these things while designing the room. There are only two ways into space on that station: The docks and EVA in engineering. There are no airlocks into space anywhere else. This was a conscious design decision to make random people getting into space significantly more difficult. I might revise that with the new map. I had some worry that nuke ops would have a difficult time breaking in - but they've got c4 and bombs, they could break in anywhere they like. Yes, they work perfectly. APC's need to be placed on the defined area for that section. All I do is define the tile the APC sits on in maintenance as whatever room it's supposed to be for. I have some concern that atmos changes may be applied to all the area tiles in a room, and that could include area tiles on the other side of the map. It's something I haven't tested yet.

Here's the new arrivals/departures. Customs on the middle left and right side, HoP in the middle. I wanted to keep this entire section close to the core of the station so that the HoP and so on don't feel isolated. Placing some civilian stuff (chapel, library, maybe holodeck, dancefloor and bar) in the arrivals/departures area should also keep it a little more active than it is right now. I may also include blueshield/NT reps in the area. Embassies aren't being included as they are essentially never used, take up a huge amount of space, and don't really make sense when the station isn't politically important. It makes sense for a capital city to have embassies, it doesn't make much sense for a small research station owned by a private corporation to have embassie; thus I'm excluding them from a lore and gameplay perspective. Library is on the left - only concern here is that you have to go through the arrivals checkpoint to get into the library. This'll probably make it more secluded and I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing. Arrivals and departures will likely be separated from each other; this means people on the left arrivals section will not be able to cross over to the right-side departures section without passing through customs first. I'll likely keep all the station shuttles (science, security, mining, etc.) on the right side docks.

Here is a floor plan I'd like to use for departure and arrivals. No, not down to the exact layout, but the general shape. I'd likely place a few things in the center (HoP's office/Customs, small bathroom, maintenance, chapel?, library?) before you get into the station proper. Likely rotated 90 degrees clockwise and placed at the top of the station. I'd like to have only one dock/undock area on the station - no more shuttles sitting at mining, engineering, science, security - if you want to leave the station on a shuttle of some kind you have to go to the docks.

I'm working on a new map, not for this server specifically (it's intended for sigurd), but I'm interested in input and ideas from players here. Things that are useful: - Sketching out floorplans and layouts for jobs you are familiar with. Show me what your perfect medbay or science lab looks like. - Suggesting additions in areas that would make it more efficient. Anti-radiation drugs on a dispenser in genetics? - Suggestions for new design principles. APC's be in maintenance? Floor tiles on top of pipes indicating this via sprite? Pipes never run under walls? etc. - Suggestions for combining/removing unused or rarely used areas for greater space efficiency Here is Sigurd's previously worked on map: I intend to take various elements from this map with a new overall design. Something more similar to a starburst shape. And here is the present core/center of the new station /map I am working on: