Time for a bigger map perhaps??

[ColdSuit]

 

As seeing Paradise being towards being one of the highest population servers (80-120+ on a regular basis), would be proper to suggest a larger map to help alleviate the issue of overpopulation and lower job slots by increasing number of slots?

 

A candidate map, I would suggest MetaStation. Seems like a good sized map with plenty to do, and simply a fresh change of pace for the community.

 

First big suggestion I've made here (as a reasonably long term player of the Paradise community).

 

Your thoughts??

 

[SkyPing]

 

Metastation has been a work in progress for our code base for at least the past 9 months or so (possibly even longer). It's been taking so long to adapt because our code base is a unique, Frankenstein cross between Bay and /TG/ code, that everyone simply calls "Paracode." We've been slowly but surely adjusting MetaStation, part by part, in order to make it compatible with our code base.

 

We've run Meta Station as a map a few times; once in December, once in June/July. Both times have recieved mixed reviews and have resulted in numerous bugs being reported.

 

There are a few things that stand in its way currently. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the project head, Tigercat2000, has recently retired. I believe FreeStylat has picked up the project again to some sort of capacity, but as far as I'm aware, no ones working on it full time at the moment. There also is the fact that some people may simply not want to switch over to Metastation from Box Station.

 

Other coders/staff members/etc (I'm probably the least qualified person to talk about this) can elaborate/correct my points/toss in their comments. Just know that, yes, Meta Station is a thing that we are aware of and have made progress towards implementing.

 

[necaladun]

 

To confirm:

 

Reviews are mixed, about 40/40 for against, 20% meh.

 

Tiger was doing it, but has retired. Freestyla his picked up some of it.

 

Personally, i'm 50/50 on metastation. The bigness is nice for sure. Not sure how it'd be with lower playerbases.

 

Ultimately I'd prefer a completely unique one built with Paradise in mind from the bottom up.

 

[tristan1333]

I'd like a bigger map, that is more cramped. So walking isn't a huge journey, but with enough room for... Stuff I guess.

[Kyet]

 

I asked if I could put up a PR that increases job slots for some jobs with plentiful resources (things like Engineer, Scientist, Atmos, MD, Sec Officer, Cargo tech, Etc).

 

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to qualify as a "fix", and so will have to wait until after the freeze.

 

Edited September 20, 2016 by Guest

[Psyentific]

 

Metastation is probably the best option aside from making an entire new map, which is a *lot* of work. To date, I know of exactly three servers that run a unique map; goon, who do their own thing, bay, who have a spaceship they made as a long-running project, and LLA, who have this grid-like design but they're a dedserber so .

 

Meta is designed for 70-100 player rounds, it functions well with 50, but starts to feel empty around 30-40. Sounds about right for Paradise's population numbers, no? On the plus side, don't need to do all the work of making a new map from scratch, but downside is you'll almost certainly need to modernize it (double airlocks, etc.) and add para-unique features (podbays, karma job places, etc.)

 

[LittleBigKid2000]

I tried to fix a bunch of metastation issues, but !!MERGE CONFLICTS!!

[Purpose2]

 

I would be really quite up for exploring getting a team together to work on a brand new map.

 

Difficult and will take ages, but I think it'd be a better solution that all this time and effort reshaping the square peg of metastation to fit the round hole of Paracode.

 

[FoS]

 

 

Ultimately I'd prefer a completely unique one built with Paradise in mind from the bottom up.

 

I'd much rather prefer a custom and unique station as well. I'm not really that fond of metastation to begin with but a totally unique station would certainly make things more interesting. Even more so since we have so many custom little things and karma jobs.

 

[Da Dman234]

 

Making an entirely new map would be an astronomical amount of work, not saying it can't be done, but... You'd very much need the imput of both Staff and the Playerbase constantly, and need to have specific parameters for the map set out as well. I can't even begin to imagine how difficult it would be to get it merged too, not to mention the bitching and moaning from players simply because you can't please everyone.

 

That being said, if someone does decide to make a team for a new map I'd be interested in helping, however little time I may be able to dedicate

 

[FlattestGuitar]

 

I just wanted to put it out there: with the feature freeze around, work on a map won't get interrupted by a new aspect of the game you have to account for, making RIGHT NOW the best time ever to start working on a new map.

 

If we were able to find a skilled and motivated enough team to make this work, that is.

 

[Psyentific]

A new map would be the best solution, but as everyone has pointed out that would be a lot of work. I'm basically posting under the assumption that, while it'd be the best solution, the sheer scale of manpower and effort needed makes it not really viable. It is absolutely a community-scale project, and I don't know how many mappers Paradise has, let alone if they'd all be willing and able to work together on a fresh station. For building a fresh map from scratch in a reasonable amount of time, you're probably gonna need all of them.

[Taaketa]

 

I agree that a new map is best.

 

Meta is a good stand in if it was ready. But it's not and I think we'd be better putting resources into a map built from scratch than fixing a map that wasn't designed around the paramix that we have.

 

I also believe Neca was in favour of a bigger map which included more "off" station things that are currently on Z levels with Box.

 

For example, mining asteroid being a part of the station map, prison camp, engi outpost. Which for me, all make sense.

 

Something like Asteroid Station would be a good basis for what we should do.

 

[IcyV]

 

Making a map honestly isn't really too much of an issue. It's fairly simple once you've done it a few times. A single person could definitely crank out a decent-ish one inside of a single day or two. The real issue is making sure that it fits what the server and community needs to be. There will be a lot of conflicting feedback and opinions and it will slow down the development of it by a huge degree if the goal is majority acceptance. It can't really be an idea that hovers around in the air if it is ever going to become a reality. People would have to start on it and stick to it and make sure that the majority of the community would like to move to it.

 

As said, this freeze is the perfect time to start on it. Plenty of time to easily get it done by the time features will be accepted again.

 

[scrubmcnoob]

 

Besides just changing out the map and getting bigger spaces, concepts for new jobs should definitely be brain stormed during this feature freeze. In all honesty, there is no point in an enlarged map until we get at least a few new roles in unless you literally want to make it four of everything(Chemists, roboticists, botanists, ETC.) but I don't find that to be a very good idea.

 

And maybe make some of these new jobs some low level pleb stuff and not karma needed? If all the new jobs that get added are Karma, won't really matter when most of the playerbase can't play it.

 

Point being, more space would be nice but we need to focus on job creation. Physical station space is not needed that badly, but rather various new jobs people can play and lower overall civilian count. And yes, HOPS need to be on their ball now, opening more slots such as miner, janitor, ETC.

 

The two biggest challenges I see in new job creation is making sure it's not a carbon copy of another job with new sprites and in by making sure it's unique, we need to make sure they do not become station essential; keeping lowpop rounds viable to play on.

And then just finding the room to cram these new jobs into the station or adding in small additions.

Good thing this feature freeze gives us time as @Flattest has said.

 

[ColdSuit]

 

Great responses from all of you. The reason I suggest metastation was simply due to the fact that it was reasonably ready and able to meet the population sizes that paradise has been having for a reasonable amount of time now. I'm unaware of any large features in the pipe, someone care to explain those to me??

 

But otherwise, I'm just making a suggestion that would affect the long term stability of the community so I completely understand any reason not to go for a bigger station.

 

[duckchan]

 

Great responses from all of you. The reason I suggest metastation was simply due to the fact that it was reasonably ready and able to meet the population sizes that paradise has been having for a reasonable amount of time now. I'm unaware of any large features in the pipe, someone care to explain those to me??

 

But otherwise, I'm just making a suggestion that would affect the long term stability of the community so I completely understand any reason not to go for a bigger station.

The Yin antag type is being worked on, Pirates to replace(?) Vox T/Raiders is being worked on, Metastation has been worked on for a while now, attempts have been made at porting space parallax to the server but it was too laggy so IDK. That's all I can think of in the dev pipeline off the top of my head.

 

Besides just changing out the map and getting bigger spaces, concepts for new jobs should definitely be brain stormed during this feature freeze. In all honesty, there is no point in an enlarged map until we get at least a few new roles in unless you literally want to make it four of everything(Chemists, roboticists, botanists, ETC.) but I don't find that to be a very good idea.

 

And maybe make some of these new jobs some low level pleb stuff and not karma needed? If all the new jobs that get added are Karma, won't really matter when most of the playerbase can't play it.

 

Point being, more space would be nice but we need to focus on job creation. Physical station space is not needed that badly, but rather various new jobs people can play and lower overall civilian count. And yes, HOPS need to be on their ball now, opening more slots such as miner, janitor, ETC.

 

The two biggest challenges I see in new job creation is making sure it's not a carbon copy of another job with new sprites and in by making sure it's unique, we need to make sure they do not become station essential; keeping lowpop rounds viable to play on.

And then just finding the room to cram these new jobs into the station or adding in small additions.

Good thing this feature freeze gives us time as @Flattest has said.

 

new jobs would be to add back the old science jobs like xenoarch and anomaly research, that's two i can think of off the top of my head.

 

also you could add more fluff ones like waiters and sous-chefs. that's all i can think of right now off the top of my head though.

 

[Psyentific]

 

The two biggest challenges I see in new job creation is making sure it's not a carbon copy of another job with new sprites and in by making sure it's unique, we need to make sure they do not become station essential; keeping lowpop rounds viable to play on.

And then just finding the room to cram these new jobs into the station or adding in small additions.

Good thing this feature freeze gives us time as @Flattest has said.

 

You could probably crawl through old suggestions threads for that, or just make a minor job megathread.

 

[necaladun]

 

Making an entirely new map would be an astronomical amount of work, not saying it can't be done, but... You'd very much need the imput of both Staff and the Playerbase constantly, and need to have specific parameters for the map set out as well. I can't even begin to imagine how difficult it would be to get it merged too, not to mention the bitching and moaning from players simply because you can't please everyone.

 

That being said, if someone does decide to make a team for a new map I'd be interested in helping, however little time I may be able to dedicate

 

I think working too heavily with others would be a big problem. A map designed by committee would be terrible for the actual mappers, and most likely leave everyone unhappy.

 

I think it might be do-able over the freeze, so I might have a shot at at least getting some groundwork done on it for the overall layout, and then let people squabble over the exact amount of medkits in medbay, etc, later.

 

[Purpose2]

 

How are the maps built? Is there a separate application for doing so? Or is it done on a live server in which you 'save-state' or something to serialize everything?

 

Again - really - interested in working on this.... and Necaladun is 100% correct that you don't want it designed by the community to an extent. You want a small-ish team working on it, with a singular vision, that once a lot of the layout work is done, then it is shown to everyone else.

 

It would be good to get a wishlist going of things that people see as essential, nice to have etc...

 

If I wasn't on a train, I'd get another Google Form setup to amalgamate submissions.

 

[necaladun]

 

Maps are built via byond software. It's...not the best.

 

It really need expertise in not just the software for building it, but also knowledge of how the game will react to it.

 

[FlattestGuitar]

 

If we were to start working on a new map, we'd need to browse through all the suggestions and come up with a list of features and general design guidelines that would help us make the map suit Paradise better.

 

It's definitely doable, but as others have said, would require a massive amount of community input, not mentioning the sheer manpower needed to design the map, and then detail it properly, as well as lay out the infrastructure such as pipes and wires.

 

I'd be interested in helping out where I can if someone were to try to run a project like this, but we'd need way more than a single person on this.

 

[Da Dman234]

 

Making an entirely new map would be an astronomical amount of work, not saying it can't be done, but... You'd very much need the imput of both Staff and the Playerbase constantly, and need to have specific parameters for the map set out as well. I can't even begin to imagine how difficult it would be to get it merged too, not to mention the bitching and moaning from players simply because you can't please everyone.

 

That being said, if someone does decide to make a team for a new map I'd be interested in helping, however little time I may be able to dedicate

 

I think working too heavily with others would be a big problem. A map designed by committee would be terrible for the actual mappers, and most likely leave everyone unhappy.

 

I think it might be do-able over the freeze, so I might have a shot at at least getting some groundwork done on it for the overall layout, and then let people squabble over the exact amount of medkits in medbay, etc, later.

 

For the most part I feel the same way, while it certainly isn't ideal for multiple people to work on the map, I can't realistically see someone making even a half decent map big enough for Paradise in one month, and that's working multiple hours each day. It'd be a stretch to finish a quality map by the time the feature freeze is over with only one developer, atleast in my opinion.

But what you suggested would be a good solution to the problem. While too big a committee would certainly be a problem. If someone were to start out with a rough skeleton and assign people to do certain sections/departments, you could get majority of the ground work done, then have one or two people who really know what they're doing polish it. Whoever heads the team (should one be made) could set out some basic guidelines and the like, all while giving out assignments and stitching the map together as things were finished.

 

[Jzoid]

 

I don't know, but I was thinking of attempting to make a new map myself with a ring system. So it starts with a circle in a middle surrounded by a ring (connected by bridges) then more rings, each ring getting larger. Don't know why I thought that'd be good, just an Idea, I guess.

 

But I'd love to see a new map.

 

[Psyentific]

 

I don't know, but I was thinking of attempting to make a new map myself with a ring system. So it starts with a circle in a middle surrounded by a ring (connected by bridges) then more rings, each ring getting larger. Don't know why I thought that'd be good, just an Idea, I guess.

 

But I'd love to see a new map.

 

Something like Donutstation, with the engine in the middle? Guaranteed catastrophe if the engine goes wrong, no safe direction it can meander off to.