Removal of auto cloning and pre scanning

[4dplanner]

Bottom post of the previous page:

The cloner also has the advantage of not making brain-only revives a surgery intensive pain.

[oranges]

the safety net is the whole crux of the problem anyone who doesn't understand that should leave this thread.

[Shadowflame909]

the safety net is the whole crux of the problem anyone who doesn't understand that should leave this thread.

I don't understand what the problem here is in general though.

I think Auto Cloning is shit and should go away.

I think Pre-Scanning should stay for ALL. (Obviously Miner/Space-Explorer Bias.)

Yet, If the solution like previously stated here is. "Remove features until a better solution comes." Whilst no one codes a better solution, what is the overall goal of doing this?

Do we just want a Higher Standard of RP? Do we want Anti-Murderbone Rules?

I'm pretty much succumbing to slippery slope hysteria. But, isn't the reason that antags can do all of this OP junk is that the crew overall has nigh infinite chances to come back to stop them? Won't this quite literally, "Kill the antags" as they get nerfed into oblivion to prevent the shuttle from getting auto called because all the crew died 10 minutes into the ground.

Face it guys, this game is centered around insane gimmicks being made less insane by being able to come back from death. It's why 90 percent of our antags have some sort of method to do so!

Tldr; Are we getting anti-murder-bone rules?

[Ayy Lemoh]

the safety net is the whole crux of the problem anyone who doesn't understand that should leave this thread.

Not really.

You can say it's a half of the problem but if you say it's the WHOLE PROBLEM that's what fucking thread title mean then?


Nitpicking aside, pre-scanning seems a bit more harmless than alright dudes i built the auto cloner in maint now we can greytide as much as we want!

[oranges]

it's the whole problem, I dont' give a shti what some fucking nobody puts in their thread title jerry.

I approved the PR because having a safety net is explicitly against how I want the game to be.

[Shadowflame909]

it's the whole problem, I dont' give a shti what some fucking nobody puts in their thread title jerry.

I approved the PR because having a safety net is explicitly against how I want the game to be.

So, if I'm understanding this correctly. Your ideal version of /tg/ would be a version where no one had any chance at coming back to life.

Realistic Immersion, One life, if you die you aren't coming back into the round.

You kind of have a whole lot of work ahead of yourself, considering the shitload of mechanics that go against your ideas. I can name like 10 core mechanics off the top of my head that are integrated into the whole idea of "Your realism sucks ass. You're never gonna kill me!"


This game was a hugbox before it was /tg/

Edit: The point of me saying this though, is that you can't just remove the hugboxes one at a time. Like removing the Crew's before you remove the antagonists. It'll inadvertently cause you to buff antagonists in general. Allowing them to survive, a whole lot more shit then the average non-antagonist can.

I guess that's overall the main problem with how this method works though, huh. It's like putting a bandaid over an infection.

[oranges]

you can't just remove the hugboxes one at a time

yes I can, the entire games development history is piecemeal and janky, and yet we're still here.

This game was a hugbox before it was /tg/

Thanks for the history lesson bud

[Actionb]

I approved the PR because having a safety net is explicitly against how I want the game to be.

Can you then at least tell us lowly worthless players what you want your game to be?
Because threads like these pop up because we have no fucking clue what you want.

[oranges]

Sure let me expand for you this point a bit:


Point: Death should be a meaningful experience

Death has to be a serious event for players, because it leads to an increased sense of tension and criticality in decision making, which makes you feel more involved in the game and should hopefully make you feel more tense in dangerous situations.

Yes, I recognise that there are issues with people dying and having to leave the round for very long periods of time, so we do want to temper this point with options to get back in the round. However, I am of the strong belief that's it better to do this with ghost roles or significant gameplay changes like borging/becoming a pod person. These have significant ongoing gameplay impacts for you that make the death still meaningful, while allowing you to engage in the round again. I'm not convinced that simply losing gear, or your equipment on you is enough of a change to make death a meaningful experience, which was why I was unhappy with the prescanner and autoclone system in it's current form.

In general I believe that the formalisation of cloning from random bug to full game mechanic many eons ago started a bit of a trend towards a trivilisation of death that I would like to reverse in order to increase engagement with your character and their general health and wellbeing.

I'm not sure we're at the stage where a full removal of cloning would be acceptable so in the meantime I'm acting to mollify the worst of the issues by removing it's safety net factor by making it apply only after you're dead and only if your body is available.

[Actionb]

Good points, I can't really disagree.
A major problem is the extreme efficiency of cloning that is granted by tech-upgrades.
Before the time of upgrades you even had people opting out of cloning because they didnt want to spend 5 minutes watching at a black screen only to then plop out as a gibbering retard with genetic mutations. One could say, cloning had downsides back then - which are totally absent today.

What would happen if cloning was removed entirely? Defibs and ghost roles only?

[DrunkenMatey]

it's the whole problem, I dont' give a shti what some fucking nobody puts in their thread title jerry.

I approved the PR because having a safety net is explicitly against how I want the game to be.

Does it matter how other people want the game to be? Or is your vision the only relevant one? Honest question.

[iamgoofball]

you can't just remove the hugboxes one at a time

LOL you're lucky I'm banned otherwise I'd be making so many fucking removals right now

[somerandomguy]

Good points, I can't really disagree.
A major problem is the extreme efficiency of cloning that is granted by tech-upgrades.
Before the time of upgrades you even had people opting out of cloning because they didnt want to spend 5 minutes watching at a black screen only to then plop out as a gibbering retard with genetic mutations. One could say, cloning had downsides back then - which are totally absent today.

What would happen if cloning was removed entirely? Defibs and ghost roles only?

and alt revival methods like podperson, strange reagent, and borging

[Shadowflame909]

Good points, I can't really disagree.
A major problem is the extreme efficiency of cloning that is granted by tech-upgrades.
Before the time of upgrades you even had people opting out of cloning because they didnt want to spend 5 minutes watching at a black screen only to then plop out as a gibbering retard with genetic mutations. One could say, cloning had downsides back then - which are totally absent today.

What would happen if cloning was removed entirely? Defibs and ghost roles only?

and alt revival methods like podperson, strange reagent, and borging

And alt revival methods like legion cores, and wizard phylactery, and the entire gimmick of lings, and the magic revival* ability from cultists.

[4dplanner]

And alt revival methods like legion cores

Legion cores don't revive from actual death, do they?

[Shadowflame909]

And alt revival methods like legion cores

Legion cores don't revive from actual death, do they?

No, but they full heal you from crit. Which is why I brought it up because oranges is anti safety net.

Just remove anything remotely second-chance worthy at this rate

[Cik]

that seems like a straw man to me

i broadly support oranges crusade in service of making cloning less good, i also support additions to the medical system making injury more substantive, because as it is you can walk through space and spend .05 seconds in a sleeper and you're all good fam

which is lame

[confused rock]

nerfing hivelord cores is one of the things I've always been wanting to do but never gotten around to
it's not hard to figure out that a lot of shit will have to be changed if revives are to be nerfed, but one at a time is very feasible as long as it isn't in an absurd order. Thinkin of ways to nerf replica pods now myself. No real good way to make major changes all at once with no risks, been thinkin of an idea like os13 in that there's a gamemode with a separate station for a much lower pop with different major mechanics to test stuff, but there's no way in hell I'm doing that alone with my current competence. Some day, though, maybe.

[Shadowflame909]

that seems like a straw man to me

i broadly support oranges crusade in service of making cloning less good, i also support additions to the medical system making injury more substantive, because as it is you can walk through space and spend .05 seconds in a sleeper and you're all good fam

which is lame

I'm not Straw-manning I'm using the slippery slope fallacy.

Oranges wants to remove any sort of safety net for some sort of reason. Well i'm giving examples on how much of a shitload we have. Some more powerful then others.

We have sleeping coma as a replacement to fleshmend+ Viro. Yet we also have Nanites that are basically Fleshmend+++ (I literally shot a captain with 3 bullets from the 12 tc revolver and that fucker got up in 3 seconds.)

[Dr_bee]

While I agree with oranges in principle when it comes to making death count I worry about the unintended effects to other problems the game faces. There is already a shortage of people willing to play security on a significant number of rounds, and more permanent death will just dis-incentivize playing a job with the largest target on its back even more than it already is dis-incentivized.

There is also the issue with the inertia of the current combat system and its relation to cloning. the ease of murder, and the overall lack of consequences for doing so. One of the biggest consequences of hardcore murderbone is people reviving and giving information on you and coming back to fight you knowing your tactics. With restricted or no cloning what is there to stop the lexia blacks of the player-base from just depopulating stations.

I love the idea of making revival a more in depth process for doctors to give some actual depth to the medical job, but it shouldnt come at the cost of making security even more of a shitty job.

To oranges, I would love to see a more detailed view of what you think the end goal of these balance changes will look like. Consider making a full blown design document, so people can get a clearer view of what your vision for the combat system is. The band-aid over band-aid over band-aid changes way of doing things is how the combat system was developed in the first place, so untangling it might require a bit more planning, and the community would probably appreciate detail in your line of thinking.

[Anonmare]

I'd like a more involved medical system, but I think how we handle health would have to adapt to reflect things, if we make life not so cheap as it used to be, so that you can survive just a bit longer until medical help comes. I still feel pre-scans should remain, but remove access requirements for deleting them. That's my personal opinion.

We could look to ideas from other codebases: /vg/, Goon, old baymed and new baymed and see what would work for us.

I genuinely don't think a pain system would work for us and I think 90% of the playerbase would balk at wounds getting infected unless there was a ghetto way to treat infected wounds (improvised antiseptic, scraping mold off of walls and mixing it with alcohol to make spaceacillin etc.).
We'd probably need to overhaul the surgery system before we'd even be able to consider intending to adopt internal bleeding, organ damage and broken bones since our current surgical system would make fixing those conditions... Lengthy.
There's a reason you don't see doctors doing organ transplants for people whose organs have failed - it's just quicker to clone them with a fresh set.

[Steelpoint]

Surgeries to fix internal bleeding should be made simple. So you'd go 'Scalpel > Suture Blood Vessel > Cauterize incision'. Same for other surgeries where it should be simplified with only a few surgeries (full organ repairs, organ/limb transplant or augmentation) would remain more complex by nature of their more involved process.

[Anonmare]

In most servers, IB is fixed with 3 steps already, the only thing we'd need is a stabilizer chem so you don't die waiting for surgery

[iamgoofball]

yeah no lmao last time any attempts to make medical more complex were tested, you all threw a huge shitfit about medical needing to be easy, im sure logs exist on the forums somewhere idc to look

[Grazyn]

How about this: instead of removing cloning, make it require "ensouled biomass". It is made by destroying corpses with a client attached (not human monkeys or catatonics, only cloneable corpses). One corpse provides enough biomass for one clone. Let the crew fight over who deserves to be cloned and who has to stay dead.
Maybe make it require less biomass with upgrades. Or not.

[Actionb]

To oranges, I would love to see a more detailed view of what you think the end goal of these balance changes will look like. Consider making a full blown design document

Yeah I would like to see that too. But I doubt that it's feasible to do so when having to rely on voluntary, mostly unguided contributions and whatnot (see Arianya's post on this).
Creating a design model and maintaining it costs a lot of time and may not help you at all if the design keeps changing because you are working on a WIP project. In a sense, tgstation is a good example of agile development.
I have the same kind of issue at work, where I have made a concept only to then have it be obsolete a year later, because there is no clear-cut vision of what the product is meant to look like when it's finished and the requirements only become clear as you go along.

A lot of drama starts when PRs are waved through without giving a solid apparent reason. In that regard I would love to see a bit more 'professionalism' by giving a short useful response on why a PR was accepted.

[WarbossLincoln]

You people jump to hyperbole like a frog with its ass on fire. Oranges wants to make it so if you die you can't immediately respawn in a cloner, as if by magic. Someone would have to recover the body and get you to a pod, or defib, or botany.

How does that translate into:

So, if I'm understanding this correctly. Your ideal version of /tg/ would be a version where no one had any chance at coming back to life.

Realistic Immersion, One life, if you die you aren't coming back into the round.

I think this is a good change because most of the paranoia and tension that made SS13 a great game is completely gone from /tg/

tgstation is a good example of agile development.

tgstation is a terrible example of agile development. tgstation is an example of businesses who want to call themselves agile because it's a corporate buzzword. My source: I'm an agile contractor whose company works with like 90% companies like that.

Agile development has a ton of documentation and overhead. You spend a lot of time getting user stories from the users, grooming them into smaller bits of work, determining minimum viable products and planning waves of enhancements, planing sprints of what can be delivered in X time, frequent meetings to keep track of where everything is, etc. In agile you still plan out what you want, you just don't plan out 100% of every single minor detail for 1 years worth of work like the waterfall model it replaced.

tgstation has no clearly defined development structure, no sprints, no teams, no user stories, etc. Because doing agile properly takes a lot of time and it's all volunteer, it's not realistic to expect that.

[Shadowflame909]

You people jump to hyperbole like a frog with its ass on fire. Oranges wants to make it so if you die you can't immediately respawn in a cloner, as if by magic. Someone would have to recover the body and get you to a pod, or defib, or botany.

How does that translate into:

So, if I'm understanding this correctly. Your ideal version of /tg/ would be a version where no one had any chance at coming back to life.

Realistic Immersion, One life, if you die you aren't coming back into the round.

Point: Death should be a meaningful experience

Death has to be a serious event for players, because it leads to an increased sense of tension and criticality in decision making, which makes you feel more involved in the game and should hopefully make you feel more tense in dangerous situations.

If you honestly think cloning is the only thing in this game that makes death not need to be feared. You're being too closeminded!

We literally have gimmick items, where they allow you to stay alive for as long as possible in critical condition.

[delaron]

it's the whole problem, I dont' give a shti what some fucking nobody puts in their thread title jerry.

I approved the PR because having a safety net is explicitly against how I want the game to be.

Hey now... I'm somebody to you, since in the infinite possibilities of the universe we collided in a 2d space game. Take a moment to also collect your thoughts and proofread your messages. Good coding practices start with nipping typos in the bud.

What is your stance on adding pre-scanning back if someone codes it in Oranges? What is the mechanic or core mechanisms that should be in place for such a thing to exist?

[DrunkenMatey]

I would really like to see the defib buffed a lot. It just seems like a garbage item right now, I don't know what the window is on using it but short of seeing the guy die in front of me, I've never had it work.

Pre-scans coming back would be great too, most rounds if I end up in the medbay I just build more clone pods to make up for the lack of pre-scan, which I guess works.. if R&D starts rushing the tech and such, but pre-scan would be easier, even if limited to corpses only.

Maybe a possible outcome to shoot for could be: defib if the body is intact, shitty cloning if there are limbs/organs missing.

[Cobby]

it's the whole problem, I dont' give a shti what some fucking nobody puts in their thread title jerry.

I approved the PR because having a safety net is explicitly against how I want the game to be.

Hey now... I'm somebody to you, since in the infinite possibilities of the universe we collided in a 2d space game. Take a moment to also collect your thoughts and proofread your messages. Good coding practices start with nipping typos in the bud.

What is your stance on adding pre-scanning back if someone codes it in Oranges? What is the mechanic or core mechanisms that should be in place for such a thing to exist?

It’s already coded you just hit revert lol

[confused rock]

Being cloned with memories from after your scanning never made sense, if you’re in need of a safety net, be cautious or use some of the plethora of options available like tooth implants, health scan signallers, PAIS, nanites, hive implants, chemical implants, *deathgasp, or, god forbid, friendship.

[BeeSting12]

I actually find myself agreeing with a lot of oranges wrote, but the issue is that our medical system is not well suited to it at the moment. Prescan/autoclone isn't actually as big of a blow as people are making out, I feel like there's just pushback against it because oranges has announced the next step is cloning removal and that will be an unpopular change.

The problem is that it's incredibly easy to kill someone. Defibrillators need a buff once cloning's removed or it needs to be more like lifeweb's medical where you can stay alive a long time, just disabled. I really do like the way our medical systems are going though, they're more in depth without making it take hours to get out of medbay and back into the action.

[WarbossLincoln]

If cloning is removed we should be able to defib any intact body with a brain. Allow doctors to implant artificial organs to fix up a corpse to make it defib-able. Add head reattachment surgery.

head and disemboweled torso come into medbay. Fix the torso with artificial organs, reattach the had, defib it.

You could potentially have a surgery to use synthflesh to restore a badly fucked up body to a revivable state. Then doctors would be using artifical organs and muscle tissue to reconstruct a wrecked body to bring the person back to life. Scan a body with the surgery computer and it would say something like "body needs heart, lungs, 5 synthflesh to repair"

Tators and other killers could still permanently remove someone from the round by hiding/destroying the brain. Coming back to life is still doable but requires someone to work for it instead of 'hit button, fuck off'. Gives doctors more to do.

[delaron]

I am also in general agreement with Oranges outline of intent. In my opinion it will also require updates to the policy and understanding that stealing someones mask or gloves isn't a killable offense. Life is very cheap with cloning at the moment. At least a look at the escalation policy. As cloning gets nerfs and eventually removed, I would welcome an overhaul to said policy and some love to the medical procedures.

Is it possible to draft a 2019 intent of vision outline. This would be super helpful for those of us with limited time but some degree of coding experience. I want to assist with items but need a general direction of intent so I'm not bark up the wrong tree.

Sorry for softly putting you on blast Oranges but the position/title you hold in the community suggests you will provide direction and oversight. Not saying you can't quip and troll but help us help you a little?

[Anonmare]

If cloning is removed we should be able to defib any intact body with a brain. Allow doctors to implant artificial organs to fix up a corpse to make it defib-able. Add head reattachment surgery.

head and disemboweled torso come into medbay. Fix the torso with artificial organs, reattach the had, defib it.

You could potentially have a surgery to use synthflesh to restore a badly fucked up body to a revivable state. Then doctors would be using artifical organs and muscle tissue to reconstruct a wrecked body to bring the person back to life. Scan a body with the surgery computer and it would say something like "body needs heart, lungs, 5 synthflesh to repair"

Tators and other killers could still permanently remove someone from the round by hiding/destroying the brain. Coming back to life is still doable but requires someone to work for it instead of 'hit button, fuck off'. Gives doctors more to do.

There is a reconstruction surgery that sees very rare use, and a revivification surgery too. It works well past the defib's time window too.

[DrunkenMatey]

I am also in general agreement with Oranges outline of intent. In my opinion it will also require updates to the policy and understanding that stealing someones mask or gloves isn't a killable offense. Life is very cheap with cloning at the moment. At least a look at the escalation policy. As cloning gets nerfs and eventually removed, I would welcome an overhaul to said policy and some love to the medical procedures.

Is it possible to draft a 2019 intent of vision outline. This would be super helpful for those of us with limited time but some degree of coding experience. I want to assist with items but need a general direction of intent so I'm not bark up the wrong tree.

Sorry for softly putting you on blast Oranges but the position/title you hold in the community suggests you will provide direction and oversight. Not saying you can't quip and troll but help us help you a little?

Very much agree that escalation policy could use work, especially if we are making death a bigger obstacle.

[Floiven]

If cloning is removed we should be able to defib any intact body with a brain. Allow doctors to implant artificial organs to fix up a corpse to make it defib-able. Add head reattachment surgery.

head and disemboweled torso come into medbay. Fix the torso with artificial organs, reattach the had, defib it.

You could potentially have a surgery to use synthflesh to restore a badly fucked up body to a revivable state. Then doctors would be using artifical organs and muscle tissue to reconstruct a wrecked body to bring the person back to life. Scan a body with the surgery computer and it would say something like "body needs heart, lungs, 5 synthflesh to repair"

Tators and other killers could still permanently remove someone from the round by hiding/destroying the brain. Coming back to life is still doable but requires someone to work for it instead of 'hit button, fuck off'. Gives doctors more to do.

There is a reconstruction surgery that sees very rare use, and a revivification surgery too. It works well past the defib's time window too.

This is a good point, these high level surgeries are great, and I find doing them much more interesting than just tossing people in the cloner, especially since few people are even aware of them.

As for concerns about people dying too easily, these changes should get more use out of the cryotubes for stabilizing patients while working on others at the same time, maybe sleepers should have some sort of patient stabilization built into them as well, but epipens and bandaging usually handle it already when you need to work on someone. If anything, if these changes force people to rely on the many tools medbay has already instead of just saying 'lol just clone them', I'll be happy, since that's the most boring way to play MD in my opinion.

[DrunkenMatey]

If surgery starts getting used frequently having one surgery room might not be enough :X

[Dr_bee]

If surgery starts getting used frequently having one surgery room might not be enough :X

Other codebases have 2 surgical wings for this reason.

[Shadowflame909]

If surgery starts getting used frequently having one surgery room might not be enough :X

Holodeck, Robotics, Medical Borgs

[Steelpoint]

Do surgery on any roller bed.

[Shadowflame909]

Do surgery on any roller bed.

Or just a regular table with a toolbox

[Not-Dorsidarf]

Do surgery on any roller bed.

Or just a regular table with a toolbox

you madman, someone might use sterilizine

[confused rock]

Blah de blah it's a player issue, people will hide a corpse in a locker in medbay and that'll viably hide it nowadays, if sec actually interrogated murderers to help their victims instead of just bapping them on the head with a no captain approval, then maybe finding bodies wouldn't be so tough.

[Dr_bee]

Do surgery on any roller bed.

Or just a regular table with a toolbox

you madman, someone might use sterilizine

Spraycan of Bacchus' blessing is the true big brain ghetto surgery strat.

[confused rock]

it's also incredibly easy to make a surgical table, I don't think you even need tools, you just need like 2 rods and silver.

[Anonmare]

Plus with departmental lathes and bluespace material storage - it's easier than ever to get materials.

[Dax Dupont]

honestly I think having prescanning with expiring records would be good.

Like a max of like 5-10 minutes and it becomes unusable.

This change has a huge QoL loss for medbay players, body management in the cloning room is hectic as is usually, i'd like to be able to scan and strip people, then throw them in the morgue and clone them one by one

[DrunkenMatey]

Any time I go near medbay and I see the cloner in use with a body waiting for a scan, I just get annoyed and build 2-3 more clone pods.

[Dr_bee]

honestly I think having prescanning with expiring records would be good.

Like a max of like 5-10 minutes and it becomes unusable.

This change has a huge QoL loss for medbay players, body management in the cloning room is hectic as is usually, i'd like to be able to scan and strip people, then throw them in the morgue and clone them one by one

Pre-scanning is fine in my opinion. It was autocloning that was cancer. Relying on another player to save your ass with the cloner is fine to me, as it requires people know you are dead and also be willing to resurrect your ass. It also still makes destroying cloning a good tactic.

Cooperation should be rewarded with powerful abilities, as in a game focused on paranoia, trust is the most valuable resource.