/tg/Station 13

With people pushing for longer rounds, my ultimate goal would be a round-time of 2 hours or so. I realized, there would be an issue however with such a round.
1, real life is a thing, and this is longer than cs:go's theoretical 100 minutes.
2, not enough depts are engaging enough to provide entertainment for 2 hours.
With people trying to solve the engagement/entertainment issue, I believe we need a solution to the real life issue.
Therefore, I propose the departures shuttle.

It's a shuttle the size of the mining shuttle, which leaves once every 5 minutes.
It only leaves during code green, or if the emergency shuttle isn't called.
If you leave on it, the game checks your mind's role, and your ID (in case you swapped jobs) and opens the appropriate slots.
Once you've left on the shuttle, you're sent to the lobby, but also given a 30 minute timer before you can re-join.
Keep in mind, this only applies to people who leave, not those who die, or ghost.

This seems like it'd be a big problem to reconcile with the current way traitor objectives work.

>assassination target fucks off on the shuttle
>greyshirt carrying steal objective item fucks off on the shuttle
>sec officer carrying half the armory fucks off on the shuttle

Nobody wants 2 hour rounds

Nobody wants 2 second rounds either.
This suggestion makes 2 hour rounds not as shitty as before, so while maybe people don't want 2 hour rounds now, they won't seem as bad if this is added.

Luke Cox wrote:Nobody wants 2 hour rounds

yeah no one wanted you either

cedarbridge wrote:>assassination target fucks off on the shuttle
>greyshirt carrying steal objective item fucks off on the shuttle
>sec officer carrying half the armory fucks off on the shuttle

do baystation's thing where their equipment is returned to the station for collection.

kevinz000 wrote:

Luke Cox wrote:Nobody wants 2 hour rounds

yeah no one wanted you either

dead

kevinz000 wrote:

cedarbridge wrote:>assassination target fucks off on the shuttle
>greyshirt carrying steal objective item fucks off on the shuttle
>sec officer carrying half the armory fucks off on the shuttle

do baystation's thing where their equipment is returned to the station for collection.

yeah, there's a console next to their cryostorage sleeper things that just collects all the "valuable" items in the contents of anyone who goes into storage, and pretty much all steal objectives and guns count.

People departing are also announced over the common channel (like arrivals) so if your assassination target fucks off you'll know about it. I don't imagine it'd be difficult to reassign objectives in that event either.

Either that or have security have to check and clear people before they leave, all TSA style.

Game is not built to last two hours.

This would be a bad fix

kevinz000 wrote:

Luke Cox wrote:Nobody wants 2 hour rounds

yeah no one wanted you either

brb killing myself

This seems like a really nice change, the only issue I think would be adjusting the time for departures coming along.

D&B wrote:Game is not built to last two hours.

This would be a bad fix

2 hour rounds aren't too bad, given there's time for cool projects and shit to go horribly wrong enough to make use of them.

Though any more than that and things start falling apart and not in fun ways.

After thirty minutes on a traitors round shit was fucked enough to warrant calling the shuttle. Why would allowing people to leave the station make rounds last any longer? The only greater than 2 hour rounds I've seen in the last few months have been lowpop extended/traitor, anything else would not work because the population is too high, greater chance of tide/incompetent engineers. People at low pop times generally seem to be smart enough/nice enough not to tide or blow the SM or whatever. This is what allows the rounds to last a long time, not letting bored people leave the crew. Another issue relating to this is, as you said, the departments aren't entertaining enough for long amounts of time. Most of them can be "completed" in under an hour at which point you need to find something to do with your cool stuff or validhunt which seems to be what a lot of department's end game gear is geared towards. I'm not going to detail anything about that here because I'm tired and it would belong in another thread.

There just doesn't seem much of a point to me for this. People who want to leave the round will go braindead, suicide, ghost, or whatever. They don't need a special shuttle to do that and also give them a respawn later on. (if you leave a round you shouldn't be able to come back unless via ghost roles or being revived)

We could like, make a sort of inverse station loving flag, that applies to the departures shuttle's transit space. Allowing items for traitor objectives to get moved back to their original spawn if they wind up in the shuttle's transit space.

Also, this idea is proposed to compliment not what /tg/ is, but what we're pushing towards according to kor and whatnot regarding the pseudo-freeze and the lament of our codebase being wide as an ocean, but deep as a puddle.
Again, this is meant to replace ghosting with a system that opens the job slot, and allows you to re-join
AFTER 30 MINUTES -gotta specify that part because if I don't, someone's gonna run with it being an instant re-join.

BeeSting12 wrote:After thirty minutes on a traitors round shit was fucked enough to warrant calling the shuttle. Why would allowing people to leave the station make rounds last any longer? The only greater than 2 hour rounds I've seen in the last few months have been lowpop extended/traitor, anything else would not work because the population is too high, greater chance of tide/incompetent engineers. People at low pop times generally seem to be smart enough/nice enough not to tide or blow the SM or whatever. This is what allows the rounds to last a long time, not letting bored people leave the crew. Another issue relating to this is, as you said, the departments aren't entertaining enough for long amounts of time. Most of them can be "completed" in under an hour at which point you need to find something to do with your cool stuff or validhunt which seems to be what a lot of department's end game gear is geared towards. I'm not going to detail anything about that here because I'm tired and it would belong in another thread.

There just doesn't seem much of a point to me for this. People who want to leave the round will go braindead, suicide, ghost, or whatever. They don't need a special shuttle to do that and also give them a respawn later on. (if you leave a round you shouldn't be able to come back unless via ghost roles or being revived)

Because people love it when you shove things down their throats!

The basic idea of allowing people to leave a round without killing themselves or going braindead isn't a bad idea, the tricky bit is execution.

Still pushing the Space TSA suggestion, with various convoluted means for antags and security to work around it. Make it like Papers, Please.

Luke Cox wrote:

kevinz000 wrote:

Luke Cox wrote:Nobody wants 2 hour rounds

yeah no one wanted you either

brb killing myself

Are you done yet?

Regardless of gameplay reasons not to have 2 hour rounds, there's also the fact that the longer a round goes on, the more the code decays and things break. This effect can be noticed by players around 1:30 to 2 hours into the game, and it gets progressively worse. The game's core code is literally not designed for rounds of that length. During longer rounds features and controllers literally start breaking, and eventually the server lags to infinity.

It's totally unrelated, but it reminds me of FPS death in dwarf fortress.

tacolizard wrote:Regardless of gameplay reasons not to have 2 hour rounds, there's also the fact that the longer a round goes on, the more the code decays and things break. This effect can be noticed by players around 1:30 to 2 hours into the game, and it gets progressively worse. The game's core code is literally not designed for rounds of that length. During longer rounds features and controllers literally start breaking, and eventually the server lags to infinity.

It's totally unrelated, but it reminds me of FPS death in dwarf fortress.

wait WHAT
can you elaborate on this

I like the idea of a departures shuttle being called if on green alert INSTEAD of an emergency one

Make green alert shuttle calls take ten minutes and re-name it to a crew transfer shuttle.

tacolizard wrote:Regardless of gameplay reasons not to have 2 hour rounds, there's also the fact that the longer a round goes on, the more the code decays and things break. This effect can be noticed by players around 1:30 to 2 hours into the game, and it gets progressively worse. The game's core code is literally not designed for rounds of that length. During longer rounds features and controllers literally start breaking, and eventually the server lags to infinity.

It's totally unrelated, but it reminds me of FPS death in dwarf fortress.

This is untrue. I have played rounds that have lasted upwards of 10 hours with no apparent ill effects.

tacolizard wrote:Regardless of gameplay reasons not to have 2 hour rounds, there's also the fact that the longer a round goes on, the more the code decays and things break. This effect can be noticed by players around 1:30 to 2 hours into the game, and it gets progressively worse. The game's core code is literally not designed for rounds of that length. During longer rounds features and controllers literally start breaking, and eventually the server lags to infinity.

It's totally unrelated, but it reminds me of FPS death in dwarf fortress.

This would be true, if it were 2013.
But it's not, so it's not.

Smoopadoop wrote: wait WHAT
can you elaborate on this

None needed, see above.

I heard a few years ago that the way stations are set up, one round that went like 24 hours resulted in everyone eventually moving to and fixing up the derelict since the default station ran out of air, but that might have changed somewhere with the dark monkey voodoo that is atmospherics.

We have atmos miners now that infinitely generate gases in exchange for power.
However we don't use them on station for some reason and are still resorting to the ancient hack of having each tank have its gas mixes set to ridiculous levels that aren't naturally possible.

Remie Richards wrote:We have atmos miners now that infinitely generate gases in exchange for power.
However we don't use them on station for some reason and are still resorting to the ancient hack of having each tank have its gas mixes set to ridiculous levels that aren't naturally possible.

Perhaps the most likely reason is either "Lazy mappers", or "No one thought about it yet."? I generally try to avoid touching maps, but it SHOULD be as simple as placing each miner in its respective atmos tank.

I think the idea is as much there to make maintaining the station deliberately difficult and dangerous, while Lavaland is dangerous enough on its own.

Though probably worth looking into finding a better balance between difficult and inevitably breaking down.

Wait are you guys sure? In sticky's massive marathon rounds the whole thing chugged so badly after several hours that atmos had to be disabled, and they always inevitably ended in a server crash anyways. Hardly a good test because of the massive amount of admin fuckery that inevitably ensued but I always assumed it was because the code just started to have issues after about four or so hours

one way to find out, more marathon rounds

bandit wrote:one way to find out, more marathon rounds

the true scientific method

Not hard to just run a test server with the explicit intention of seeing how long a round can go, sans interference, before the station and/or system starts breaking down, is it?

tacolizard wrote:https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/issues/27937

This is very recent, and a bug.
It will be fixed.

Professor Hangar wrote:Not hard to just run a test server with the explicit intention of seeing how long a round can go, sans interference, before the station and/or system starts breaking down, is it?

If it's just you on the server, and you're just letting it run for a while, you might not notice things breaking down. A lot of the things that I've seen reported to break in longer rounds would be hard to notice outside of an active round.

Remie Richards wrote:

tacolizard wrote:https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/issues/27937

This is very recent, and a bug.
It will be fixed.

Well that issue is most likely caused by #23818 and it seems like a fairly large issue that could be a flaw in BYOND. I don't think it's going to be fixed relatively soon, and even if it is there's not reason other similar things won't appear. The fact is that this code is rarely tested for long-round stability so there could be any number of lateround bugs that are undiscovered.