Telescience revamp

[Miauw]

So basically, telescience sort of sucks right now. It lets you easily steal anything and everything. There's no challenge, the maths is just done using a spreadsheet or full-blown calculator program. This sucks, obviously.

So, what if telescience was completely relative?
Relative to beacons that you would have to teleport/carry around (the beacons that we have now, they would be given a label for ease of use). One would see no absolute coordinates, and could only teleport in a small range (5-10 tiles, depending on upgrade level?) around the beacon. This would even be fuzzed a tiny bit (~2 tiles?) and could be calibrated for the next teleport ONLY by sending some item through.

This serves to make telescience more involved and teamworky, and give people some sort of warning when a capped bomb is going to be teleported in.

Thoughts?

E:
This would do away with all the maths, obviously.

[Reimoo]

Whatever it takes to save it from being removed completely is fine with me, really.

[Perakp]

I had literally the same idea no pic no proof I know but damn you made a topic about it when I thought it'd be more appropriate to code it first and ask later


Anyways, it could be beacon + math, with those crystals you could increase the range but you'd still need the beacon within a few screens (max 20 tiles or so?). And teleporting to other z-levels would require the beacon was on that z-level.

And the math should be improved so it's not trigonometry where you need a calculator, but kind of a calibration, where you test few parameters, get a better approximation to try new values, and once you have the parameters as accurately as you want them you don't need to do math anymore. Think of it like figuring out the bending of space-time caused by the singularity engine.

Because not having math is like having just another teleporter room, it's not too exciting.

[Alex Crimson]

This would kinda kill the idea of people using it to collect dead bodies though. I would prefer just making certain areas teleport-proof, and limiting teleporting to the station and mining asteroid Z-levels. Hell, if you want to be fair, then add some kind of device/book that is basically an inbuilt calculator/spreadsheet for Telescience, then everyone would have access to the program so its all nice and fair game.

[Miauw]

I had literally the same idea no pic no proof I know but damn you made a topic about it when I thought it'd be more appropriate to code it first and ask later


Anyways, it could be beacon + math, with those crystals you could increase the range but you'd still need the beacon within a few screens (max 20 tiles or so?). And teleporting to other z-levels would require the beacon was on that z-level.

And the math should be improved so it's not trigonometry where you need a calculator, but kind of a calibration, where you test few parameters, get a better approximation to try new values, and once you have the parameters as accurately as you want them you don't need to do math anymore. Think of it like figuring out the bending of space-time caused by the singularity engine.

Because not having math is like having just another teleporter room, it's not too exciting.

the math sucks and does literally nothing, though. and coding meaningful math that cant be done by a spreadsheet is really hard.

also Alex that's basically what's being done right now but it makes telescience gimped and lame.
(This sort of does that too).

I wonder if we could just make the teleporter this and remove telescience.

[Perakp]

I'm thinking something like Mastermind for the "math".

Have a few variables to figure out, put in a starting guess
machine tells how much wrong you were
put in a new guess, figure out if you are going in the right direction
repeat

Kinda like genetics, except you don't know what value you are aiming for and without the RNG. Just a minigame to replace real math.

[MisterPerson]

How about something that actually involves other people at some point?

[Perakp]

How other people may get involved
- finding a hidden beacon and figuring out who planted it there and why
- offering to take a beacon to another z-level (make it so you have to deploy it instead of just throwing it out an airlock in hopes of it hitting something)
- collaborating with medical crew to scatter few beacons around station to collect bodies
- collaborating with traitors, revolutionaries or cultists to steal guns from armory
- collaborating with xenobiology and R&D to get more of those crystals
- slightly better balanced against malf and blob since someone needs to take the beacon close enough to the target.
- creating a teleportation network in extended rounds

It can work.

[Remie Richards]

This is something I just mocked up yesterday. thoughts?
some of it is probably silly, but eh, just a mock.

General:
-----------
*Remove the cap on teleports and forced calibrations (atm you can do like 3/4 before you're forced to calibrate)
*Calibrations lower the chances of failures
*Failure chances increase the more the telepad is used without calibrations
*Increase severity of failures the more times the pad is used without calibrating
*Bluespace crystals interfere with teleportation eg; bluespace crystal within range(dest, 12) resulting in the chance of failure for that teleport ramping up
this makes bluespace crystals a SOFT counter to telesci, instead of just blocking the teleport.

Failure effects:
-------------------
Negative (Higher chances):
*Landing in a wall deals 20-30 damage to the teleportee
*Random +/- from coordinates of about 10-12
*Causes EMP to spawn from the telepad
*Turns the teleportee into a statue for a short time, 30-90 seconds
*Sends JUST the teleportee, leaves equipment on telepad
*Sends JUST the equipment, leaves teleportee on telepad
*Dismembers some limbs, scatter around station
*Sets the teleportee on fire
*Send teleportee to a "fuck you" dimension with angry mobs and scary shit for 30-90 seconds, then dumps them at the telepad or target location
*Send teleportee permanently to the the "fuck you" dimension, unless they escape via a portal 20 or so turfs away
*Random bluespace mob lands at target destination
*Spawn bluespace orb that bounces around the room stunning and hurting people (Think Portal/Half life)
*Land at your destination, pick a random turf near them user.throw_at(target_turf) aka smack them into a wall
*Meteor comes through with you, oops.

Positive (Much lower chances):
*Chance to gain telekinesis
*BoH lands in your hands (if free) or on the floor where you land, 50% chance to be broken (so it's basically a tech up)
*Random assortment of ores lands at your feet, you take some damage (borderline positive/negative)
*Random amt of bluespace crystals land at feet

[MisterPerson]

I was talking about the mastermind stuff. Don't add some silly minigame there because it won't be fun no matter what it is, trust me.

[iyaerP]

Remi, RNG based "FUCK YOU" to the user is NOT good design, especially since said user has no way of knowing what the failure likelyhood of any given location is. If you do want that to be a thing, there has to be a mitigating factor beyond recalibrating every few attempts, unless there is a 0 chance of failure when the telepad is calibrated. Why not beacons since they are already used widely by the other teleporter, and thus are a "proven" technology. Proximity of a given teleport to the distance to the nearest beacon reduces likelyhood of failure by some degree. Something like if d<5, d>0, failure chance = failure chance/(6-d). The closer you are to a beacon, the less likely you are to totally fuck up and die horribly FNR, and if d==0, failure chance=0. This of course leaves open the possibility of the telescientist porting a beacon and then themselves, but anyone in the area has a good 5 seconds warning that someone is teleporting in and can pull out their stunbaton or toss the beacon out an airlock, or whatever. Upping the teleport wait time could be a balancing factor.

[Remie Richards]

iyaerP did I forget to mention how calibrating the teleporter reduces the failure rate? to either 0 or essentially 0. It basically removes the "You must calibrate to use" and makes it "You should probably calibrate, if you want to live"

also again, it's just something I mocked up.

[Perakp]

Teleportation for science access and no other barrier of entry sounds really strong though.

And by barrier of entry I mean not fun shit that you have to do to get to do something more fun, something that wouldn't be fun at all after a while without that barrier.

Like it wouldn't be fun if genetics started with all superpowers or if xenobiology started with adamantine & gold slimes.