/tg/Station 13

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ohnopigeons wrote:

CPTANT wrote:I don't know what happened to that engine and whether it was a fluke or if it was logical, but pretending the sing didn't get released all the time from stupid shit happening is just dishonest.

There is a difference between "stupid shit" and "arbitrary unpredictable mechanics", do I really need to have to spell it out for you?

What arbitrary unpredictable mechanics? If it gets hot it delaminates, if it gets overpressurised it delaminates, if it gets hit by objects it delaminates.

If you pump in oxygen, plasma or CO2 it gets hot and powers up.

How fucking hard is it.

Do you think the sm exlodes more often than the sing got loose?

CPTANT wrote:What arbitrary unpredictable mechanics?

This one

CPTANT wrote:Do you think the sm exlodes more often than the sing got loose?

I've seen more SM delaminations than I've seen loose singulos.

ohnopigeons wrote:

CPTANT wrote:What arbitrary unpredictable mechanics?

This one

Spoiler:

CPTANT wrote:Do you think the sm exlodes more often than the sing got loose?

I've seen more SM delaminations than I've seen loose singulos.

How am I supposed I tell you what happened to that engine from just a screenshot? It got pretty stupid delamination and like I said the only thing that I can think of that should do that is rapidly hitting the sm with objects. Another thing that should cause very rapid delamination is a low pressure enviroment consisting of solely CO2.

And I call bullshit on the second part and I would love to see the statistics.

In the screenshot you're supposed to see an instant delamination, so instant the Instability levels jump to absurd levels, which goes completely contrary to the intended design of the Supermatter and arguments made in this thread.

I'd love to see SM statistics too and they've been talked about by coders/admins but for some mysterious reason they've never implemented it.

ohnopigeons wrote:In the screenshot you're supposed to see an instant delamination, so instant the Instability levels jump to absurd levels, which goes completely contrary to the intended design of the Supermatter and arguments made in this thread.

I'd love to see SM statistics too and they've been talked about by coders/admins but for some mysterious reason they've never implemented it.

But you didn't actually see what happened to it?

I was literally standing right there in engineering, witnessing another engineer in the SM room who also instantly died. It's right there in the screenshot.

The only time I've seen the SM glitch like that was when it was in a vacuum

Anyways this thread is partially moot now since PubbyStation was affirmed as the singulo map on github yesterday. Maybe someone should add SM vs singulo statistics so there will be more objective argument points in the future.

Technically there are, or were, other engines but I'm not sure they're being maintained, or even if they're still in the code at all.

Replicated:

Is indeed caused by supermatter in a vacuum. I destroyed all the floors around the supermatter, turned on the emitters then put one floor back and it jumped to 1000% delamination

You know, the Chief Engineer should decide which engine to bluespace onto the station roundstart. And if there's no CE, then it could either be random or just singuloth/SM

Armhulen wrote:You know, the Chief Engineer should decide which engine to bluespace onto the station roundstart. And if there's no CE, then it could either be random or just singuloth/SM

Armhulen wrote:You know, the Chief Engineer should decide which engine to bluespace onto the station roundstart. And if there's no CE, then it could either be random or just singuloth/SM

Muthafukken Armhulen out the gate with a fukken bangin' idea, though I still prefer the weighted random choice idea where the most weight any one engine has is 60%, and the rest filling in from there.

That stuff with the SM in the vacuum is a bug and is being fixed, it's not a mechanic.

engine should be a pref like maps.
then when the round begins the game gets said pref from engineers (only engineers) + CE, and then uses that as a weighting.

eg: 3 engis and a CE:
E1 = Singulo
E2 = SM
E3 = SM
CE = Tesla
50% for SM, 25% for Singulo, 25% for Tesla.

Given that the CE is just one of a group of people who will work on the engine, this seems fairer than giving just them the decision.

that's a pretty interesting idea, actually, not sure how difficult it would be to pull off but it's probably possible

SIngulo and tesla were made too perfect at round ending glad to see their destruction relegated to a side effect.

Anonmare wrote:>10 minutes
Only if you suck at sabotage. It's easily possible to overload the SM in such a way as to produce a singularity or a tesla ball in less than ~5 minutes if you know what you're doing.

The SM's stability can be negatively impacted by over-pressurising it, over-charging it, over-heating it and just outright damaging it by tossing stuff into or shooting it.

My personal favourite method is to pipe in CO2, filter out the safety gases, set the alarm to ignore pressure checks and make it impossible for the gases to exit the chamber. Hell you can just pipe in pure plasma and filter out the safe gases and the thing will delaminate faster than you can see "DELAMINATION IMMINENT".

So still 10 minutes, while you risk someone spotting and stopping you during the preparation process, without having any certainty that whatever you do with the pipes will actually work once you do start tampering with it.

No wonder it barely happens.

100% pure plasma at 5000 kPA pressure will delam a roundstart layout engine in less than 5 minutes, and before that it'll shoot out radiation, anomalies and lightning strikes like crazy. Seriously, next time you get antag, have the N2 get dumped out as waste and filter in only plasma. Additionally, hook up some plasma cans or pipe plasma from atmos and watch the engine delam faster than you can say "George Malons griffing me halp".

Sure someone might stop you but if you want to blow up the engine, but you should have to face a little risk. Like you should have to face risk when you break into the armoury.

The only reason it doesn't happen is because people play engineer to yellowtide with easy access to yellow gloves and toolbelts. Anyone with preliminary atmos knowledge can delam the engine just as fast as snipping the emitters wires was back when we used tesla/singulo. And if you're an engineer, you can break into the CE's office and use the powerflow console to turn off telecoms and by the time anyone will notice (and if you actually know what you're doing) the engine will be at 80% instability.

Also, swap the labels on the freon and plasma cans in the secure engineering storage to really mess with those dumb engies.

Also, fun fact, ATMOS resin will freeze (weld) scrubbers and vents shut if it goes over them. You can use it as an emergrncy means of cooling the SM but you can also use it to destabilise the SM in the long term, though it's a good idea to pump in a bad gas mix first otherwise it'll take forever to destabilise.

Imagine if randomized engines becomes a thing.

And there was an extra low chance that the engine is just a cluster of PACMAN generators.

I still don't understand what people find so interesting about the singularity engine.

The fact that you are barely harnessing a celestial tool of station rape as a battery.

also autists like things that spin

Screemonster wrote:also autists like things that spin

SM a shit engine

I miss the TEG.

Anonmare wrote:That stuff with the SM in the vacuum is a bug and is being fixed, it's not a mechanic.

Lmao

CPTANT wrote:I still don't understand what people find so interesting about the singularity engine.

The first 20 or so times it's really exciting to set up, you go out into space, risk getting pulled into the forcefield, EMP can bolt the airlocks shut, etc.
Plus the whole having to watch it while it grows larger thing.

For the SME you just push some buttons while walking around in a safe area.
The only excitement comes if you have to repair it or experiment with dangerous gas mixes (that people barely do because they fear the bwoink).

Honestly my issue with the Singulo/Tesla wasn't in how 'shallow' the mechanic was, it was in how braindead easy it was to sabotage and how difficult it was to fix if you didn't catch it - Go out, snip a wire, come back before the airlocks even close, haul ass and laugh.

The Supermatter's only slightly corrected that in that now you need to go a little bit further out of your way to sabotage it, but it's still the same - go out, unwrench the one heat exchanger pipe out of the camera's view, haul ass back in. There's no complexity behind the sabotage unless you're on Omega, where sabotaging it requires you to either decon an R-wall or grab a pick and do some labour. (Having some distance between it and the nearest airlock could also have something to do with it, which might be why this sabotage isn't common on Delta.) There was absolutely no creativity until recently (you have people flooding in CO₂ now if they're in Atmos).

What makes it worse for the Supermatter is that if that sort of sabotage IS the sabotage that's done, it's difficult to correct because of the buildup of crap in the Supermatter that you're going to have to filter out due to radiation (notably pluoxium, which chokes the hell outta the scrubbers). If you filter it at the side, you'll have to worry about the canisters getting full now that they've messed with the filter code to actually stop filtering at 4500 kPa on ANY side; if you leave it in it clogs up the cooling loop with useless bullshit and chokes up the filters after that while it tries to squeeze all the gas out.

TL;DR sabotage is too braindead easy to do for the difficulty there is in fixing it

Denton wrote:

CPTANT wrote:I still don't understand what people find so interesting about the singularity engine.

The first 20 or so times it's really exciting to set up, you go out into space, risk getting pulled into the forcefield, EMP can bolt the airlocks shut, etc.
Plus the whole having to watch it while it grows larger thing.

For the SME you just push some buttons while walking around in a safe area.
The only excitement comes if you have to repair it or experiment with dangerous gas mixes (that people barely do because they fear the bwoink).

The only part of your singularity engine description that is true is that you go into space (in a sealed containment area that just happens to be exposed to space.) The only time any of those "risks" you mention after that point is if you decide to walk out into the containment after the engine has already been set up for some reason? The containment is self-sustaining and the controls were handled by a single console and some shutters. At no point did you have to interact with the singularity past the initial set up and more than not people would still fuck that up and set off a murderball in the first 5 minutes of a round.

EvilJackCarver wrote: What makes it worse for the Supermatter is that if that sort of sabotage IS the sabotage that's done, it's difficult to correct because of the buildup of crap in the Supermatter that you're going to have to filter out due to radiation (notably pluoxium, which chokes the hell outta the scrubbers). If you filter it at the side, you'll have to worry about the canisters getting full now that they've messed with the filter code to actually stop filtering at 4500 kPa on ANY side; if you leave it in it clogs up the cooling loop with useless bullshit and chokes up the filters after that while it tries to squeeze all the gas out.

TL;DR sabotage is too braindead easy to do for the difficulty there is in fixing it

it's a lot easier to stop the meltdown though, if the singularity/tesla engines go, there's no fixing it, but with the SM you usually get some warning and can dump supercool n2 into the loop (which you have prepared earlier because you're a good engineer) to halt the meltdown, giving you time at your leisure to shut vents, drain the cooling loop into space and then drain the SM chamber and restart.

cedarbridge wrote:

Denton wrote:

CPTANT wrote:I still don't understand what people find so interesting about the singularity engine.

The first 20 or so times it's really exciting to set up, you go out into space, risk getting pulled into the forcefield, EMP can bolt the airlocks shut, etc.
Plus the whole having to watch it while it grows larger thing.

For the SME you just push some buttons while walking around in a safe area.
The only excitement comes if you have to repair it or experiment with dangerous gas mixes (that people barely do because they fear the bwoink).

The only part of your singularity engine description that is true is that you go into space (in a sealed containment area that just happens to be exposed to space.) The only time any of those "risks" you mention after that point is if you decide to walk out into the containment after the engine has already been set up for some reason? The containment is self-sustaining and the controls were handled by a single console and some shutters. At no point did you have to interact with the singularity past the initial set up and more than not people would still fuck that up and set off a murderball in the first 5 minutes of a round.

the only real danger was getting hit by the emitter beams, which was nothing more than a simple timing issue.

oranges wrote:it's a lot easier to stop the meltdown though, if the singularity/tesla engines go, there's no fixing it, but with the SM you usually get some warning and can dump supercool n2 into the loop (which you have prepared earlier because you're a good engineer) to halt the meltdown, giving you time at your leisure to shut vents, drain the cooling loop into space and then drain the SM chamber and restart.

There's nothing stopping a coder from making the SM/Tesla emitter shields alert the crew if their power goes critical and risk shutting down. It would take like 5 minutes of coding.

The waste of time it would be given we've already indicated clearly that the SM is the design teams preferred engine given everything about all the engines are nearly identical save thematic elements, making those engines even similar to the SM acheives nothing.

Want to convince us? Make those engines complex, make them have more requirements than just sustained power. Show us what interactions and complexities you can come up with.

Here's a hint, you're going to end up looking at the atmospherics system for a requirement because it's one of our indepth systems we simulate.

You will inevitably end up with a reskinned SM

but whats the point, seeing as nobody actually likes the SM for being "more complicated" or "deep" (it really isnt, its just push buttons, start emitters, load cans according to formula, like every engine).

They like the SM because it doesnt destroy the whole station when you fuck up a little at roundstart (although babies call the shuttle even if the blast didnt even reach the main engineering room), and its possible to shut down engine faults before they become catastrophic.

What you actually should get people to code is some way to know those engines are going wrong before ":e THE LORD COMES", and shut them down. Thats what the SM is liked for

>implying the sm is liked

Not-Dorsidarf wrote:but whats the point, seeing as nobody actually likes the SM for being "more complicated" or "deep" (it really isnt, its just push buttons, start emitters, load cans according to formula, like every engine).

They like the SM because it doesnt destroy the whole station when you fuck up a little at roundstart (although babies call the shuttle even if the blast didnt even reach the main engineering room), and its possible to shut down engine faults before they become catastrophic.

What you actually should get people to code is some way to know those engines are going wrong before ":e THE LORD COMES", and shut them down. Thats what the SM is liked for

This. Virtually nobody actually messes with the SM to actually optimize or experiment, they all just follow the wiki and dump coolant on it if someone fucks up or a traitor sabotages it. The only real advantage the SM has over the other engines is the meltdown alarm, and even then as I just pointed out there's nothing stopping someone from just adding that feature to the other engines.

The only way I see having a diversity of engines being worthwhile is when and if power production and consumption becomes more than a binary "Yes the station is powered" and "No, the station is not powered." When power production amount beyond the base minimum required to meet station use matters for more than an epeen graph (which suffices for some engineers I guess) then engineering will have not only the motivation to experiment with multiple engine systems, intentionally monkey with larger and more complex power production systems and configurations and actually stay in engineering maintaining and tweaking the engines beyond the roundstart and fuck off to the bar ritual that we have currently (and have for years, honestly.)

That means we need:
1) Probably a refactor of power use and power consumption based on machines per room, lighting used in room, charging devices including borg chargers, (hell, lets make the lights flicker when the chef turns on his microwaves)
2) Set up power exports for engineering that feeds into the station coffers in the vault. This opens space for either engineering to demand that the surplus they're paying into cargo comes back to them in the form of more engine parts, special engineering crates for more, different or bigger engine setups, etc. Could factor later into departmental budgets or economics when and if that ever gets off the ground.
3) Probably a look at how APCs work currently. Whenever engineering fucked up, even before the SM, and station lost power to anything but a power sink, I could just print super power cells at a protolathe and slap them into every APC and keep the station running on pure battery power for hours.

Epeen is a pretty driving factor otherwise we wouldn't have had people making quad-singulo engines in cargo maint back then.

Also about number 3, aren't Inducers working against that point as well?

ShadowDimentio wrote:

Not-Dorsidarf wrote:but whats the point, seeing as nobody actually likes the SM for being "more complicated" or "deep" (it really isnt, its just push buttons, start emitters, load cans according to formula, like every engine).

They like the SM because it doesnt destroy the whole station when you fuck up a little at roundstart (although babies call the shuttle even if the blast didnt even reach the main engineering room), and its possible to shut down engine faults before they become catastrophic.

What you actually should get people to code is some way to know those engines are going wrong before ":e THE LORD COMES", and shut them down. Thats what the SM is liked for

This. Virtually nobody actually messes with the SM to actually optimize or experiment, they all just follow the wiki and dump coolant on it if someone fucks up or a traitor sabotages it. The only real advantage the SM has over the other engines is the meltdown alarm, and even then as I just pointed out there's nothing stopping someone from just adding that feature to the other engines.

I try to optimize the engine. I just did it yesterday.

People keep arguing "no one does shit with the engine." Maybe I am cynical today, but fuck that argument. I do stuff with the engine; I do stuff with atmos. People do use these features. Just because you don't use these features doesn't mean no one does.

I gotta admit, the SM is way more fun and interesting than the singularity. The singularity is only smiled upon because it's a lot more eventful when things go wrong compared to the SM. The SM, leading up to delamination, is way more eventful and interesting in nearly every way. After delamination, there is nothing interesting about it.

Hence the *virtually nobody*. There are definitely a very small group of people who fuck with the engine for giggles, but the vast majority will just copy the wiki and call it a day.

ShadowDimentio wrote:Hence the *virtually nobody*. There are definitely a very small group of people who fuck with the engine for giggles, but the vast majority will just copy the wiki and call it a day.

Virtually nobody plays security, so lets remove it and add security cyborgs instead.

Sorry I misunderstood your argument. I exaggerate, but you see where I am coming from. Despite there being a small audience for the SM, it has more features than the singularity. The people who would mess around with the SM would no longer have that option going to the singularity. All there would be to do is to keep an eye on the singularity. At least you have something to do while watching the SM, and something to do if someone fucks with the SM.

It'd add some variety. It's been so long since I've seen a singularity that I nearly assumed the iconic fuckers were just gone

Watching the thing tear through the station is a treat, and because it'd be on some maps rather then others it'd keep things fresh

If you miss singulo so much, learn to delaimate the SM by applying one of my custom setups.

Denton wrote:

CPTANT wrote:I still don't understand what people find so interesting about the singularity engine.

The first 20 or so times it's really exciting to set up, you go out into space, risk getting pulled into the forcefield, EMP can bolt the airlocks shut, etc.
Plus the whole having to watch it while it grows larger thing.

For the SME you just push some buttons while walking around in a safe area.
The only excitement comes if you have to repair it or experiment with dangerous gas mixes (that people barely do because they fear the bwoink).

PSA I allow you to test various gascomps as long as you're not purposefully sabotaging it as nonantag (100% plasma is probably not a good comp guys...).

There's no point of the experimental aspect if you're going to get banned for not following the wiki word for word (which sometimes causes delams or something so lol)

cedarbridge wrote:1) Probably a refactor of power use and power consumption based on machines per room, lighting used in room, charging devices including borg chargers, (hell, lets make the lights flicker when the chef turns on his microwaves)
2) Set up power exports for engineering that feeds into the station coffers in the vault. This opens space for either engineering to demand that the surplus they're paying into cargo comes back to them in the form of more engine parts, special engineering crates for more, different or bigger engine setups, etc. Could factor later into departmental budgets or economics when and if that ever gets off the ground.
3) Probably a look at how APCs work currently. Whenever engineering fucked up, even before the SM, and station lost power to anything but a power sink, I could just print super power cells at a protolathe and slap them into every APC and keep the station running on pure battery power for hours.

1) Power consumption is already loosely related to actual use by machines. The biggest offender here is cell chargers, which charge the cell at something like 500x (IIRC) the rate they drain the APC. It hasn't been fixed because it would either mean charging cells is either extremely slow or drains the whole room. Working around this by always upgrading the APC first means scientists would either need their APCs to start unlocked or the engineers to cooperate if they want to get anything charged. A full rebalance of relative energy costs could ameliorate the issue, but I doubt solve it.
1b) A system for easing power to lighting briefly when high-powered equipment kicks on on could be pretty entertaining.
2) I don't hate the idea but it would be hard to balance, and the general trend seems to be away from Cargo receiving tons of money for "normal" stuff (removal of mineral and tech export).
3) Power cells from science are not fully-charged when printed anymore, and must be charged via a cell charger (see #1) or by placing them in a charging APC.

Does it matter if they're partially charged when you only need 1 to have your protolathe build tons more? (also inducer but idk how that works, never used it).

if they're not starting empty then the problem will exist. Whether or not that's ok, i dunno.

SpaceManiac wrote:1b) A system for easing power to lighting briefly when high-powered equipment kicks on on could be pretty entertaining.

Speaking of, there's a "night shift" mode for lighting that makes them dimmer but doesn't actually reduce power consumption, or at least the APC didn't display it using any less.

Cobby wrote:if they're not starting empty then the problem will exist. Whether or not that's ok, i dunno.

They do start empty.

I would like maps to spawn with a random engine type.