/tg/Station 13

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RaveRadbury wrote: ↑Sat Sep 14, 2024 5:17 pm

FantasticFwoosh wrote: ↑Sat Sep 14, 2024 12:01 pm Fighting against future change used to be my job, but now i am made obsolete by maintainers keeping the status quo on systems by treating the the past as a adversary, rather than a community lead shift to the future, AITA?

Fwoosh I'm not sure I follow and it's been a while since I've seen you around here, would you mind going into a bit more depth?

I've always appreciated the time and effort you've put into posts around here. One more for old time's sake?

Words im sure you've come to regret probably. But this about sums up my thoughts, SS14 is already rounding out faster than its being developed with the userbase, thoughts about linux users being the annoying kind of people you could meet. Every 4 people who decide to be in that group of annoying that are turned away from it, are just going to go to SS14 to follow the pace of development which builds up its own machine without getting into the bloat-era we are in now. My position on staying on SS13, is that servers should be folded and refounded as soon as they can or run into these issues, so a longformat TG's best hope is a hop to SS14

I guess this is also my chip in about Isee's post about felenids being legacy baggage that jars up the game-feel as non-constructive historical revisionism for reverts. SS14's little blue antag reminds me very much of the Gremlin antag visually and brings me back into a time when everything was coherent.

FantasticFwoosh wrote: ↑Sun Mar 16, 2025 3:02 pm

RaveRadbury wrote: ↑Sat Sep 14, 2024 5:17 pm

FantasticFwoosh wrote: ↑Sat Sep 14, 2024 12:01 pm Fighting against future change used to be my job, but now i am made obsolete by maintainers keeping the status quo on systems by treating the the past as a adversary, rather than a community lead shift to the future, AITA?

Fwoosh I'm not sure I follow and it's been a while since I've seen you around here, would you mind going into a bit more depth?

I've always appreciated the time and effort you've put into posts around here. One more for old time's sake?

Words im sure you've come to regret probably. But this about sums up my thoughts, SS14 is already rounding out faster than its being developed with the userbase, thoughts about linux users being the annoying kind of people you could meet. Every 4 people who decide to be in that group of annoying that are turned away from it, are just going to go to SS14 to follow the pace of development which builds up its own machine without getting into the bloat-era we are in now. My position on staying on SS13, is that servers should be folded and refounded as soon as they can or run into these issues, so a longformat TG's best hope is a hop to SS14

I guess this is also my chip in about Isee's post about felenids being legacy baggage that jars up the game-feel as non-constructive historical revisionism for reverts. SS14's little blue antag reminds me very much of the Gremlin antag visually and brings me back into a time when everything was coherent.

No regret at all, Fwoosh! Thrilled to see that you've returned again and even seen my old post! Would you mind building a bit more onto your thesis? There really is nothing like an extended and well-structured Fwooshpost.

Remember when we ran 2017 code for like a week and the pop died after the first day

mrmelbert wrote: ↑Sun Mar 16, 2025 10:29 pm Remember when we ran 2017 code for like a week and the pop died after the first day

*2019

tg would be fine if we'd just kept swarmers and told people to get good anytime they got stunlocked

FantasticFwoosh wrote: ↑Sun Mar 16, 2025 3:02 pm so a longformat TG's best hope is a hop to SS14

I'm not so convinced. SS14 does have a stronger engine for the most part, but appears to have some fairly... dubious aspects as well. Weirdly, despite being built out of toothpicks, our features and QoL from a player perspective is significantly past that of SS14 Vanilla. And SS14 seems to still lack a few deeper mechanical functions that many current SS13 servers have had for many years, like robust medical mechanics, virology/pathogen mechanics, cooking mechanics,materials mechanics etc. They don't even have Multi-Z which was really baffling to me honestly given it seems like they have the camera system to possibly make that more functional. Maybe its a rendering issue.

They take so much from us and Goon, the gaps really stand out strongly. And the snails pace their development is on makes me think we would be stuck waiting a long time before it becomes comparable.

It is hard to express just how good we have it in terms of polished design by contrast. If you are an old head from like decades ago, SS14 is for you. Our playerbase NOW is possibly going to find it deprived of necessary polish. A TG fork would take a long, long time to get up to snuff. Not to mention the higher bar of entry for contributors if they need to work on the C# part of the code, though SS14 does have ways to enable low barrier additions, like recipes and clothes, which is what most people want to contribute.

mrmelbert wrote: ↑Sun Mar 16, 2025 10:29 pm Remember when we ran 2017 code for like a week and the pop died after the first day

Yeah I said that last page.

bring back the isaac clarke looking modsuits

NecromancerAnne wrote: ↑Mon Mar 17, 2025 4:24 pm
I'm not so convinced. SS14 does have a stronger engine for the most part, but appears to have some fairly... dubious aspects as well. Weirdly, despite being built out of toothpicks, our features and QoL from a player perspective is significantly past that of SS14 Vanilla. And SS14 seems to still lack a few deeper mechanical functions that many current SS13 servers have had for many years, like robust medical mechanics, virology/pathogen mechanics, cooking mechanics,materials mechanics etc. They don't even have Multi-Z which was really baffling to me honestly given it seems like they have the camera system to possibly make that more functional. Maybe its a rendering issue.

I think multi z is a bad feature that complicates navigation without really adding anything.

Then you will like SS14 I guess.

I've seen multiz done better at different place. But i understand if they respect to reserve that as not part of their vision or they just haven't figured it all out. I was all here for Dwarf Fortress in 2013, and ill probably still be around gently following my gaming rolling stones like SS(whatever) in 2030, by which case Mick Jagger will be 90 with a 100 kids or something. Time to wave and yell at clouds.

nianjiilical wrote: ↑Mon Mar 17, 2025 6:45 am tg would be fine if we'd just kept swarmers and told people to get good anytime they got stunlocked

on the right track

SS14 has a steam store page which is how most people look for games now, and even if youre sick and use prime gaming/ epic games/origin/ubisoft/etc. all of those are insanely more popular than BYOND of all things. That alone puts us in the category of you have to be looking for ss13 to find it, youre likely not going to stumble on it. If you do, youre likely going to check it on steam first, and youre just going to think ss14 is ss13 two.

Alternatively is it possible that just maybe, people are growing old of ss13? Like youd impress me if other pop was growing in droves but this just isnt the case. Even people who joined in 2018-2019 have been playing for OVER FIVE YEARS. At least with things like roguetown it has a different gimmick to ss13, but it still FEELS like ss13 and the actual player retention is worse than ours despite being much "fresher". Even on SteamDB for ss14, in the last 6 months ss14 was followed by 1.5K accounts, going to a whopping 3k in the last year. That's... not a lot even at the most charitable guess (no ban evaders, no tourists, no bots), not to mention these users get spread out thinly over the various servers that they feel align with their timezone/playstyle.

Contentious changes to the code is not new, contentious changes to the administration isnt new, so I dont think either of these are the cause. The repeated downtime during the wallening where we were getting chain ddos'd and the giga baby host freakout requiring people to uncripple the servers and are still trying to fix those kinks most definitely did not help especially during the more crucial times youd expect to get players.

Personally I think 40ish pop was fine tho and its what was the norm prior to ssethtide. I guess in that sense we ARE returning to tradition, just the clock is going back a bit farther than you wanted

yeah i dont want to actively aim to create this world but personally i do also prefer 40 player rounds to 70 and especially 100 player rounds

If anyone fed up with SS13 left for SS14, I'm not sure how long they even would stay playing there. They don't play much differently, and it is still pretty much the same experience for the most part.

I think Cobby is correct. People may either be shuffling out of our server to downstreams (happens plenty to plenty of people, we're about as vanilla as you're gonna get around here and there are alternative spaces catering to various niches), or straight up just moving onto a new game. It used to be that high pop was around the 40-50 mark when I started playing.

It's also interesting that not everyone who departs has a consistent reasoning or opinion about the state of affairs that they left the game on. I've seen people who left years ago echoing sentiments about changes far too late, that people today view as the reasons for why they may be leaving. Likewise, I've seen some view favourable changes from the past today still be the justification for why someone left long ago.

It is literally impossible to get this right in a way that pleases everyone. There is a tipping point for quite a few folk for what sees them depart. It can range anywhere from code, administrative or player culture. These are aspects that are somewhat hard to separate, and some parts easier to change by individuals than others.

Id personally leave because there was no :badtothebone: emoji for today's test of plasmamen heads if that went through.



40 year olds trying to work out the current scope of zoomer new-connect humor. Unplayable.

NecromancerAnne wrote: ↑Mon Mar 17, 2025 4:24 pm

FantasticFwoosh wrote: ↑Sun Mar 16, 2025 3:02 pm so a longformat TG's best hope is a hop to SS14

It is hard to express just how good we have it in terms of polished design by contrast. If you are an old head from like decades ago, SS14 is for you. Our playerbase NOW is possibly going to find it deprived of necessary polish. A TG fork would take a long, long time to get up to snuff. Not to mention the higher bar of entry for contributors if they need to work on the C# part of the code, though SS14 does have ways to enable low barrier additions, like recipes and clothes, which is what most people want to contribute.

all the reason we should start hosting it now and adding things gradually tbh, otherwise we're definitely gonna fall behind eventually.
We're better off starting a playerbase for people who want to play ss14, sure it won't be upto snuff but I am sure people would rather go to a tg ss14 server over a random one if they play tg even if it has less pop.

As for forking, yeah I guess, but I don't think ss14 has reached maturity enough for us to fork us at this point, but banking a little on the tg name and culture might at least draw players to ours before even have to make a lot of our own changes.

As for c# being a higher entry? hahahahahahahaha byond is absolutely terrible to work with, anyone with programming experience will be 'what the fuck' at dm code. I think it's probably easier for people to begin in a more sane language that's well documented and googable than some esoteric ''''programming'''' language from hell where we need to do things like supply our own dlls/libraries(rustg) to do things in a fast/sane way.

Things have changed since this post but euh, yeah:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SS13/comments/ ... t/dclbu1a/

Dax Dupont wrote: ↑Sat Apr 05, 2025 5:31 pm As for c# being a higher entry? hahahahahahahaha byond is absolutely terrible to work with, anyone with programming experience will be 'what the fuck' at dm code. I think it's probably easier for people to begin in a more sane language that's well documented and googable than some esoteric ''''programming'''' language from hell where we need to do things like supply our own dlls/libraries(rustg) to do things in a fast/sane way.

Things have changed since this post but euh, yeah:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SS13/comments/ ... t/dclbu1a/

those are all arguments for dm being a bad language to make a game in; it is
they're not arguments for it being hard to use

most of the reasons that dm sucks are because at its inception it was designed to be easy to use for beginners, rather than be a good language to make a game like ss13 in

anyone with programming experience will find dm sort of repulsive but also very easy to work with
anyone without programming experience won't know why it's repulsive but it's also not very hard to work with
many (not all by any means, some are just bad choices) of the footguns in the code which make it run worse such as (and especially) the stupid list structures are because they let you do stupid things with lists and still work rather than being a sensibly constructed data structure that wants to be used one specific way

ss14's component and dependency structure requires significantly more of an existing understanding of concepts in order to know how to touch than our codebase (and to be honest has a lot of its own footguns and poor choices), once you get over that hurdle then yeah you are just working in c# but the barrier to entry is legitimately higher

that said all you need to get an ss14 server setup is scriptis' buyin, you can probably just try and talk him around right now

Jacquerel wrote: ↑Sat Apr 05, 2025 5:56 pm those are all arguments for dm being a bad language to make a game in; it is
they're not arguments for it being hard to use

most of the reasons that dm sucks are because at its inception it was designed to be easy to use for beginners, rather than be a good language to make a game like ss13 in

anyone with programming experience will find dm sort of repulsive but also very easy to work with
anyone without programming experience won't know why it's repulsive but it's also not very hard to work with
many (not all by any means, some are just bad choices) of the footguns in the code which make it run worse such as (and especially) the stupid list structures are because they let you do stupid things with lists and still work rather than being a sensibly constructed data structure that wants to be used one specific way

ss14's component and dependency structure requires significantly more of an existing understanding of concepts in order to know how to touch than our codebase (and to be honest has a lot of its own footguns and poor choices), once you get over that hurdle then yeah you are just working in c# but the barrier to entry is legitimately higher

that said all you need to get an ss14 server setup is scriptis' buyin, you can probably just try and talk him around right now

A programming language is designed to be accessible to non-programmers and ends up being a dumpster fire? Gee, I feel like I've heard of that before.

Dax Dupont wrote: ↑Sat Apr 05, 2025 5:31 pm all the reason we should start hosting it now and adding things gradually tbh, otherwise we're definitely gonna fall behind eventually.
We're better off starting a playerbase for people who want to play ss14, sure it won't be upto snuff but I am sure people would rather go to a tg ss14 server over a random one if they play tg even if it has less pop.

As for forking, yeah I guess, but I don't think ss14 has reached maturity enough for us to fork us at this point, but banking a little on the tg name and culture might at least draw players to ours before even have to make a lot of our own changes.

As for c# being a higher entry? hahahahahahahaha byond is absolutely terrible to work with, anyone with programming experience will be 'what the fuck' at dm code. I think it's probably easier for people to begin in a more sane language that's well documented and googable than some esoteric ''''programming'''' language from hell where we need to do things like supply our own dlls/libraries(rustg) to do things in a fast/sane way.

I don't think you know what you're talking about RE:DM and its problems.
Havin said that, if you think there should be an ss14 server you should like, do that. /tg/ isn't an institution, we're just a bunch of different people in the same room working sort of on the same vibe.

if /tg/ ever expands to ss14 we should name it /qst/station actually no thats soulless

Jacquerel wrote: ↑Sat Apr 05, 2025 5:56 pm

Dax Dupont wrote: ↑Sat Apr 05, 2025 5:31 pm As for c# being a higher entry? hahahahahahahaha byond is absolutely terrible to work with, anyone with programming experience will be 'what the fuck' at dm code. I think it's probably easier for people to begin in a more sane language that's well documented and googable than some esoteric ''''programming'''' language from hell where we need to do things like supply our own dlls/libraries(rustg) to do things in a fast/sane way.

Things have changed since this post but euh, yeah:
https://www.reddit.com/r/SS13/comments/ ... t/dclbu1a/

those are all arguments for dm being a bad language to make a game in; it is
they're not arguments for it being hard to use

most of the reasons that dm sucks are because at its inception it was designed to be easy to use for beginners, rather than be a good language to make a game like ss13 in

that said all you need to get an ss14 server setup is scriptis' buyin, you can probably just try and talk him around right now

Fair, I just have a hard time with it because it's absolutely atrocious even after 165+ PRs.

Also I am setting up a ss14 server with the whole watchdog shebang for experimenting and I'll see if I can get an (EU) server to host once I get the experience with it and scriptis' blessing, not sure if we have the resources to put it on an existing server.

I'm not a fan of SS14 but I'd still be fairly inclined to give a tg server a fair shake if it got put up, especially if it was running goobcode instead of the default (goob adds lots of familiar antags and gameplay mechanics that help bridge the pretty daunting content gap between tg and ss14) https://github.com/Goob-Station/Goob-Station

This isnt a for-profit business, the idea the community has to "stay ahead" or trailblaze the "industry" seems a bit odd.

Cobby wrote: ↑Fri Apr 11, 2025 2:13 pm This isnt a for-profit business, the idea the community has to "stay ahead" or trailblaze the "industry" seems a bit odd.

I strongly agree with this, I don't like the idea of needing to capture a market or make /tg/ into a "brand" like I've seem some people suggest. I want to write more on this topic cause I think it's kind of the death of the greater community.

I agree with what Anne said, going from playing last in like 2015 to playing ss14 last year for the first time my first thoughts was “holy shit it’s like ss13 but it’s not laggy as shit”. I felt the love of the game come back for a slight second, until I learnt how it all basically worked and now I’m just playing the same game I played 10 years ago except I’m significantly older and I do not have the time nor the mental willpower to deal with literal children (that is 50% of the hubs population btw if you thought Sseth tide was bad you haven’t experienced steam store page tide.)


The two options for a ss14 server is be on the hub and have to deal with a clearly underage population with conflict resolution skills ranging from scream, cry and shit yourself to welderbomb at the first sign of provocation, or be not hubbed and maybe you have a marginally better population at the cost of a slow and painful death as people stop playing.

On the development side, wizards den is a hellhole in terms of how the manage projects, so using it as a barometer for how much content ss14 has is probs not the best idea, goob and other forks are far better indicators that you can reasonably change the game quite quickly if you don’t have stupid rules in the GitHub such as “don’t bother working on surgery because x person has been working on it for 2 years with very little to show for it but he’s my mate so that’s cool”

I miss old nuka cola