Xenomorph Rework

[VynalDerp]

On 3/10/2022 at 3:14 PM, lewc said:

I'm so happy to see this coming back again! I've been playing a lot of TGMC lately so I'd be really excited to see beno gameplay get the attention it deserves on paradise.

If I may, you might want to try putting your design doc up on hackmd.io. It respects GitHub markdown (even summary tabs and stuff) and can be commented on with threads and stuff, so it might make it easier to review/go through especially for people who don't want to doxx themselves on google docs

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I might as well spitball some things here, I'd put them on the doc but I don't have a good anonymous google account. I can definitely move them over if this goes onto hackmd or something.

For a counter to mechs/robots, I feel like we're looking at some creatures that what they lack in damage output make up for in CC. Perhaps it could make sense to adopt the concept of xenos firing non-destructive sticky resin to gum up mechs, slowing them down or slowing down their weapon fire-rate? Crew could possibly burn it off with a welder, lasgun, or flamethrower, a mech won't be able to really solo a hive without literal fire support from (possibly vulnerable) humans. Something like sticky resin traps, too, or perhaps door-like structures that xenos and humanoids can crawl through, would provide some interesting environmental gameplay in the tight confines of the station. 

I really like the idea of giving xenos a speed buff on weeds but making non-hunter xenos as slow as humans off of them, if not a bit slower. Xenos are supposed to be agile, but this gives them a mobility reason to weed everywhere they can. On the topic of speed, hunters could perhaps get a speed boost out of combat, but lose that boost after interacting with something (like dealing damage or trying to drag someone off). I agree that one of the biggest gripes people have with benos is getting stunned and superspeed dragged through the halls back to the nest, and it might be nice to see something addressing that.

Regarding acid, I personally think it makes sense to keep wall-melting acid expensive. Xenos have all of these great movement tools at their disposal and so maybe it would make sense to force them to use them rather than busting down any obstacle in their way. Maybe keep it slow to finally destroy walls, but consistent (only needs one application)?

Lastly, I think there should be some sort of passive, weed-free plasma regen, though it should be very weak to encourage weeding. The regen speed would need to be slow, and perhaps its amount could be capped per xeno to only allow for a base ability. If it's under consideration at all, I feel like it's a necessity that drones be able to at least regen enough plasma to plant weeds. 

 

I really like what you've got cooked up so far otherwise! Can't wait to see what comes out of it, and I'll definitely be keeping an eye on it

 

Good point! I didn't really consider hackmd.io. It's not something I've really used before, but I'll check it out and edit my above post with a hackmd link whenever I set it up. I never really cared about google doc doxxing (oh no, my real name, there's only a few thousand other people with it or so haha), but I can see why some ppl might not want to use it.

 

The default speed for non-hunter Xenos is actually the exact same as the normal human walking speed, so all that really needs to be changed (if at all) would be a small increase in speed on weeds (or reduction in speed for humans on weed). I definitely do want to encourage Xenos to weed as much of the map as they can as 1. it's a good indicator for people as to what areas are not vulnerable to Xeno attack and 2. it adds a new and hopefully interesting dynamic to the gameplay.

 

It's an interesting idea to have hunters lose the speed buff when interacting with things... however, it seems complicated to implement. It's definitely food for thought, but hunters could also be balanced by just simply reducing speed (and increasing health if necessary). I'd say the general goal for the caste would be a, well, lone hunter who can pick off single targets. Hunters have a leap ability (practically never used on Para because it's unneeded) that gives them the ability to floor any single target if they can land their leap. Combine it with the hunter being able to stealth, and you've got a great ambush caste even without a ridiculous speed buff. 

 

Mechs are another story, though. I've not really thought of using something like resin to slow them down. Mechs are already (generally) slow and Xenos are criminally ineffective at actually damaging them currently. Stacking an effect on mechs is an interesting idea, although with my inexperience in coding I will definitely need help to implement something like that. I've had suggestions to have an acid effect which degrades mech armor the more it is applied as well. I'm leaning more on the side of enabling more damage to be done to mechs as Xenos are already universally faster than the majority of mechs. Traps and doors are a great idea however. I would honestly really like to make it so that mechs cannot pass through xenomorph doors even if they are open, as well as having traps that either ensnare or damage mechs. I'm leaning a little more on the ensnare side for traps, as a big burst of damage from something unseen may be frustrating on the receiving end, but it would definitely need testing.

 

At the moment, I'm looking at making larger, limited castes that act as a Xeno equivalent to a mech, being tankier and dealing more damage towards mechs to give Xenos a reasonable counter to them. It would be both relatively easy to implement and could provide a good solution to mechs without much hassle, although balancing them in a manner which makes them fun to play and fun to fight might be tricky.

 

As it stands, my general plan for acid is to have a weaker acid that can melt smaller or weaker objects over time and a stronger acid which is capable of melting through walls and things. The plan is to make pretty much everything take a long time to melt. Ideally, it would vary based off of the size of the object, but current acid code is an absolute mess and to be honest, it needs to be completely reworked. I'd also like acid to simply not be applicable to items or objects it cannot melt, such as applying weak acid to walls/reinforced walls and such.

 

Adding a weak regen that's buffed when on weeds is definitely on the table. It would prevent a lone Xeno from running completely dry and being helpless if it somehow got cut off from the hive (maybe it's the last one left). While it might be lore-accurate, I don't think it would be very fun for the leftover Xeno(s) after the hive is gone.

To be honest, while I appreciate the excitement it will be a while before anything here gets fleshed out. I've considered recruiting a team to work on this as it's quite complicated and I am new(ish) to coding for Byond, but I don't really know how well that's typically received on Paradise or if anyone is willing to contribute.

Edited March 14, 2022 by VynalDerp

[lewc]

Yeah! I've seen hackmd.io used a fair bit recently for design docs and such (especially on /tg/) and it seems like a pretty solid tool.

As for finding coders, I'd be more than willing to throw my hat into the ring. I'm still relatively new to writing DM, but I feel like I'm getting to the point where I feel comfortable writing things in the language, and I'd be willing to see how I can help. I can't say I've really seen any big teams working on changes like this (most of the past big antag refactors have been solo work I think) but I think it'd be worth a shot if you can get a few people together. Maybe see about reaching out in #coding-chat to see if you might be able to drum up some support there?

[Sirryan2002]

I'll throw my two cents in here.

I think Xenos are going to need more than a small rework to be put back into rotation. You offer a lot of good micro changes and a few good major changes. Thankfully for aliens they have a cool concept with cool features already coded in, they just do not mesh well at all with todays balance standards. I'd be happy to work with you (code) for this rework (after I finish my library rework PR this month) but I had some ideas for a few features added in:

• Egg-sac based queen that slowly becomes more immobile as it gets more egg sac (but increases production speed + upgrade abilities) and therefore is a mobile then stationary hive
• Plasma farming system where captured mobs are still "alive" in resin nests and produce plasma for the hive (player still gets ghosted temporarily)
  • Non-carbon or dead mobs give a one time lump-sum plasma boost
  • Idea is that players aren't gibbed and permanently removed from the round so easily and gives a large incentive for xenos to defend their hive to the end instead of just running around like terrors
• Queen can spend plasma on stuff
  • Warrior Alien Egg - 100 Plasma
  • Drone Alien Egg - 100 Plasma
  • Facehugger Alien Egg - 50 Plasma
  • Evolution/Ability Point - 100 Plasma
  • Tier 1 Evolution - 1 Evolution Point
  • Tier 2 Evolution - 2 Evolution Points
• Facehuggers no longer plant eggs inside of carbon. No longer insta-sleep but will slow down and then stun target after some time
  • Prevents really quick snowballing from spamming facehuggers and abusing insta-stun mechanics
• Evolution points are a way to "Evolve" alien types and give the hive special abilities
  • early on, abilities are about mobility and survivability
  • overtime the hive evolves to be more offensive and hive-centric
    • eventually xenos grow to be too large for vents and can no-longer vent-crawl, they're much more beefy at this point and shouldn't linger around the station in vents if their queen goes kaput.
• I'd also like to see the queen evolve into an empress/queen mother as an end goal kind of like you were suggesting
  • gives direction to the antag rather than "kill the crew"
• Also actually utilizing praetorians, Royal Facehugger, and runners as well somewhere in the mix for xeno type diversity
  • form of investment for the queen to either use low-health cheap/quick runners vs beefy expensive praetorians.

I don't mean to hijack your post to throw in my entire idea of a xenomorph rework. I think you have a lot of combat balance ideas (especially avoiding stun mechanics) which I haven't really thought out which do need to be implemented, however it would be cool to see large-scale changes to antag strategy that also hope to address issues with xenos and make the roles more fun. lmk if you're at all interested.

Edited March 15, 2022 by Sirryan2002

[VynalDerp]

14 hours ago, Sirryan2002 said:

I'll throw my two cents in here.

I think Xenos are going to need more than a small rework to be put back into rotation. You offer a lot of good micro changes and a few good major changes. Thankfully for aliens they have a cool concept with cool features already coded in, they just do not mesh well at all with todays balance standards. I'd be happy to work with you (code) for this rework (after I finish my library rework PR this month) but I had some ideas for a few features added in:

• Egg-sac based queen that slowly becomes more immobile as it gets more egg sac (but increases production speed + upgrade abilities) and therefore is a mobile then stationary hive
• Plasma farming system where captured mobs are still "alive" in resin nests and produce plasma for the hive (player still gets ghosted temporarily)
  • Non-carbon or dead mobs give a one time lump-sum plasma boost
  • Idea is that players aren't gibbed and permanently removed from the round so easily and gives a large incentive for xenos to defend their hive to the end instead of just running around like terrors
• Queen can spend plasma on stuff
  • Warrior Alien Egg - 100 Plasma
  • Drone Alien Egg - 100 Plasma
  • Facehugger Alien Egg - 50 Plasma
  • Evolution/Ability Point - 100 Plasma
  • Tier 1 Evolution - 1 Evolution Point
  • Tier 2 Evolution - 2 Evolution Points
• Facehuggers no longer plant eggs inside of carbon. No longer insta-sleep but will slow down and then stun target after some time
  • Prevents really quick snowballing from spamming facehuggers and abusing insta-stun mechanics
• Evolution points are a way to "Evolve" alien types and give the hive special abilities
  • early on, abilities are about mobility and survivability
  • overtime the hive evolves to be more offensive and hive-centric
    • eventually xenos grow to be too large for vents and can no-longer vent-crawl, they're much more beefy at this point and shouldn't linger around the station in vents if their queen goes kaput.
• I'd also like to see the queen evolve into an empress/queen mother as an end goal kind of like you were suggesting
  • gives direction to the antag rather than "kill the crew"
• Also actually utilizing praetorians, Royal Facehugger, and runners as well somewhere in the mix for xeno type diversity
  • form of investment for the queen to either use low-health cheap/quick runners vs beefy expensive praetorians.

I don't mean to hijack your post to throw in my entire idea of a xenomorph rework. I think you have a lot of combat balance ideas (especially avoiding stun mechanics) which I haven't really thought out which do need to be implemented, however it would be cool to see large-scale changes to antag strategy that also hope to address issues with xenos and make the roles more fun. lmk if you're at all interested.

Hmmm. I like the idea of a mobile egg-sac Queen. Maybe we could combine the way CM does it with your idea - have the Queen grow an egg sac (and when she does, allows for egg production), but instead of being immobile, she is capable of moving around albiet with a slowdown like we currently see in-game.

Plasma farming is an interesting idea... it's not very lore-accurate though. If the goal is to incentivize Xenos to defend the hive, we can achieve the same goal by allowing hosts to break out of their nest, thus requiring guards to prevent them from causing damage or freeing other hosts. We could also introduce penalties for Xenos when the Queen dies to encourage them to stay with the Queen and defend her from host breakouts/attacks too. A sort of plasma-as-cash system is definitely not something I had even thought of before, though.

Changing Plasma to cash would require a complete and total overhaul of a fair bit of Xeno code. As it stands Plasma is a pretty important piece of each Xeno, being what allows them to use abilities and said code is also tied to organs to determine how much Plasma each Xeno has as well as regeneration rate. The current system also lets us hard cap the usage of spells/abilities to prevent them from being spammed the moment they're available (similar to Vampires) for another tool to balance out OP Xenos and underpowered Xenos.

I actually like the idea of the Queen being able to spend points or something of the sort on upgrades. Perhaps something like being able to unlock the ability for Tier 1 Xenos to evolve to Tier 2? The more evolution points put into that, the more Xenos of a higher tier the hive can have? For upgrades, it may be best to have them be general upgrades for a particular caste instead of being universal. If you have a lot of drones, or need more building done, upgrade drone movespeed, plasma capacity, etc. Notable that I'm currently planning to not allow any evolutions to be capable of ventcrawling. The general plan is to have Tier 1 Xenos focusing on speed and skirmishing (hit & run tactics) and Tier 2 Xenos being bruisers, capable of going toe to toe with Mechs or multiple crew at a time.

Facehuggers are definitely an interesting case. If I recall correctly, sunglasses actually prevent facehuggers from attaching... and in general, masks/headwear makes you pretty much invulnerable to them, requiring Xenos to strip you of your helmet before they can even attach. Reducing the spam is something I've already done by forcing huggers to only be carriable by non-combat classes, so it's also a bit of a risk-reward for Xenos to pull off, and each Xeno is hard limited to 2 facehuggers each. I don't plan on adding Carriers from CM to Para as it would pretty much make combat facehugger spam much worse.

We could also take a look at changing the way facehuggers themselves stun targets - maybe it has to take time to knock someone out, giving them an opportunity to take the hugger off if they are quick enough? Would remove the insta-stun and require Xenos to stick with the victim until the facehugger stuns them and they can be sent back to the hive. Ideally, this would let us keep lore-accurate facehuggers and not have BS gameplay relying on insta-stuns.

I definitely like the idea of an alternative end goal for Xenos, although it's something that's hard to really nail down. If the goal of the antag isn't tied to the crew suffering in some way, then there's really no incentive for them to fight (see: cortical borers). Also, if the goal is something such as "Evolve to Empress", how should the round be handled past that point? Go to end screen, or let it play out even though Xenos have already achieved their objective? Maybe have it be similar to other antag roles, where they have a list of objectives to achieve to give a bit more direction than simply killing crew.

It would be awesome to add in runners as a role, although it would have a conflict of interest with hunters. Hunters are a role designed for capturing isolated hosts throughout the station. If runners do the same without the potential stealth, then generally by the time hunters roll around, crew is sticking together and vents are getting welded. One of the two would definitely need a redesign. New spriting is also a concern, unless it's okay to lift the sprites from someplace like CM (there was a leak of the code 4 or 5 years ago iirc, tons of old and now unused sprites and sounds).

And to be honest, I would love to see Predators and Predaliens in Paradise but that would be a completely new can of worms that I don't even know if we want to consider opening at this point lmao. Maybe as an admin-only "ERT" spawn or something.

Also, don't feel bad about posting your own ideas! I definitely love the feedback, and new and interesting ideas are exactly what we need for the Rework if we want to get people on board and interested in it. Even if they don't get implemented in some way, they can still influence design & thought by opening new and interesting avenues to explore. Thanks for the feedback :)

 

On the note of a larger team, I'd like to note that I don't have Github premium so I can only make 2 or so people able to contribute through commits. I suppose it can be done through pull requests and the like, although as it stands all of my changes are on a branch and not the main Paradise clone repository. Can't say I've personally done a pull request from a branch, so I don't know how to do it properly... and I'd need to figure out a good way to organize and keep everyone on the team up to date (if it's more than a couple people anyways).

If either of you two are game, PM me and I can hook you guys up with some stuff I need some help getting done whenever you're ready/willing to help out. I'll look at reaching out in Discord too. I'll also edit the main post with a link to the Rework's Github branch to see the current changes. It still needs to be updated to the latest Paradise version, but I'm still in the process of backing stuff up incase I mess up the merge. Also set up a HackMD too, and I'll be editing the main post with a link to it as well.

[lewc]

12 hours ago, VynalDerp said:

On the note of a larger team, I'd like to note that I don't have Github premium so I can only make 2 or so people able to contribute through commits. I suppose it can be done through pull requests and the like, although as it stands all of my changes are on a branch and not the main Paradise clone repository. Can't say I've personally done a pull request from a branch, so I don't know how to do it properly... and I'd need to figure out a good way to organize and keep everyone on the team up to date (if it's more than a couple people anyways).

iirc that's only the case for private (hidden) repositories. You can have as many contributors as you want for public repositories, so realistically anyone you want can help pitch in.

 

12 hours ago, VynalDerp said:

It would be awesome to add in runners as a role, although it would have a conflict of interest with hunters. Hunters are a role designed for capturing isolated hosts throughout the station. If runners do the same without the potential stealth, then generally by the time hunters roll around, crew is sticking together and vents are getting welded. One of the two would definitely need a redesign. New spriting is also a concern, unless it's okay to lift the sprites from someplace like CM (there was a leak of the code 4 or 5 years ago iirc, tons of old and now unused sprites and sounds).

 

If runners were to get added, it'd make sense in my eyes for them to be the evo of choice once vents get welded and that clumping up happens. Something that can get around the station quickly without the need of vents.

As for spriting/licensing, I'm no expert so take this with a grain of salt, but the licenses on sprites on TGMC seem to generally be CC-BY-NC/CC-BY-NC-SA, while sprites on CM are CC-BY-SA. If we want to port sprites, I believe CM's license would be much more compatible with our existing license.