/tg/Station 13

This pr:
https://github.com/tgstation/tgstation/pull/87983
Added a config flag that allows drones to interact in the supermatter and atmospherics area.
I propose setting the flag to 0 in config on some (or all) servers so drones can have some fun.

What kind of fun are you intending? Because the design space around drones has been to make them incapable of doing anything that sabotages the station, for very, very good reason.

I'm not necessarily against this, but I do have concerns given how hard drones have historically been to administrate, as well as this being a PR that you created and had merged, so part of me worries that the intent is to enable doing fuckshit as a drone.

I think I said as much on the PR adding granularity to the config for drones, but I believe we can now handle the administrative issues this could cause. Ghostrole bans can be doled out to those who fail to comply with their laws, and seeing a slow rise of genuine law-abiding drones on Manuel, I'm very much happy to enable them to actually do their jobs. I specifically asked them to make this a policy thread so I could remember to bring it up with my fellow headmins, and so I will do that now.

Okay, in that case, that removes a lot of the ambiguity here.

I'm not really sold on this. We've tried it a couple of times and the main issue tends to be that we really don't have a reliable way to log a lot of the things that drones are capable of that go against their laws. I distinctly recall being unable to really effectively moderate a lot of situations where a drone had taken and moved something elsewhere because we just didn't have a way to log that kind of thing.

I feel like the stuff they can get up to with atmos and the supermatter does have better logging, but I'm concerned this will enable a lot of low-effort sabotage issues when someone figures out where the lapse in our logging is that might allow them to do it and get away with it.

If the other admins agree that it's worth trying, I'm willing to give it a shot, but I can already see those same problems from before happening again.

I don't really want drones doing stuff in that area is my problem, it's the realm of atmos techs and engineers. They shouldn't be undoing sabotage or anything in these areas. I really prefer just being more lenient on drone laws but using code to cripple what they can do to make sure they aren't out of line.

Honestly though, I don't think there's a need for drones. You can easily do everything a drone does by just asking for access changes and doing it as a human. We even have revived crewmember ghost roles for this.

You should bring up the things that need logging so that the codebase can add it

grungussuss wrote: ↑Fri Nov 22, 2024 4:17 pm You should bring up the things that need logging so that the codebase can add it

The problem is that it's shit that can't reasonably be logged, unless we want to log literally every instance of someone touching, grabbing, and/or moving something. One of the big issues we've had in the past was people taking drone roles and moving corpses around, either dragging a friend to medbay or dragging whoever killed them to space. My big concern here would be a drone using their access to the supermatter to dust corpses.

I like drones. But they shouldn't be touching atmos at all. HOWEVER there is a nasty bug that basically soft locks you if you find yourself stuck in either area without gravity as you can't lay down rods to move but the answer to that is just...stay away from those areas

NoxVS wrote: ↑Thu Nov 21, 2024 10:16 pm I don't really want drones doing stuff in that area is my problem, it's the realm of atmos techs and engineers. They shouldn't be undoing sabotage or anything in these areas. I really prefer just being more lenient on drone laws but using code to cripple what they can do to make sure they aren't out of line.

Honestly though, I don't think there's a need for drones. You can easily do everything a drone does by just asking for access changes and doing it as a human. We even have revived crewmember ghost roles for this.

I agree, drones are outdated, outperformed by engineering borgs, and their laws to avoid interaction go directly against part of ss13 as a whole: the "Talking to others" which you can't do because of the drone laws.
Remove drones, or rewrite their laws.

No. Drones shouldn't be able to maintain the stations powe source. They are there to help in fixing breaches and looking funny when wearing hats

Please keep drones out of atmos and engineering.

It's always annoyed me that drones can't repair the engine room after it explodes or atmos after it burns down.
Solving active problems is a 'no', but if the room is just a massive hole they should be able to fix that.

Vekter wrote: ↑Fri Nov 22, 2024 7:30 pm

grungussuss wrote: ↑Fri Nov 22, 2024 4:17 pm You should bring up the things that need logging so that the codebase can add it

The problem is that it's shit that can't reasonably be logged, unless we want to log literally every instance of someone touching, grabbing, and/or moving something. One of the big issues we've had in the past was people taking drone roles and moving corpses around, either dragging a friend to medbay or dragging whoever killed them to space. My big concern here would be a drone using their access to the supermatter to dust corpses.

Drones can't touch bodies nowadays afaik, if they can we can fix that

I remember talking to the person themself goof a while ago about this, they proposed that it could be a time based system where the more drone hours you have the less restrictive things would get. for example a drone with 10 hours can’t pick up a fishing rod but one with 50 hours can.

the only problem is getting a person who is willing to code for ghost drones

Make drones less restricted on lowpop so that someone who wants to log in, fix the station, and then leave can do so without having to do human stuff.

Can we make it so drones don't have a bunch of arbitrary tool restrictions instead, you can build full ass rooms as a drone but some tools to do such a thing are a big no because ??????. Also make drone dispensers start filled.

SteelSerperior wrote: ↑Thu Mar 06, 2025 11:34 pm Can we make it so drones don't have a bunch of arbitrary tool restrictions instead, you can build full ass rooms as a drone but some tools to do such a thing are a big no because ??????. Also make drone dispensers start filled.

It sounds like you want to play Station Engineer. Perhaps you should set Station Engineer to high priority at the start of the round.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the purpose of drones among the drone playerbase. The intent of them was such that if you had been removed from a round, you could choose to respawn as a low stakes construction role, and could contribute to the station to some extent by doing repairs that the engineering crew didn't want to do, or just futz around with construction in maint. In reality, people are trying to spawn as drones at roundstart because they refuse the idea of interacting with the crew altogether. That's problematic and it's bad for the game. The fact that drone players are lobbying to have the intended restrictions from the role removed suggests also that they are not engaging with it in the intended manner.

The station does not need a super powered repair bot with all access and no restrictions. If that's what people find desirable about drones, and what they want drones to be, it's bad for the game as a whole.

subject217 wrote: ↑Fri Mar 07, 2025 6:29 pm

SteelSerperior wrote: ↑Thu Mar 06, 2025 11:34 pm Can we make it so drones don't have a bunch of arbitrary tool restrictions instead, you can build full ass rooms as a drone but some tools to do such a thing are a big no because ??????. Also make drone dispensers start filled.

It sounds like you want to play Station Engineer. Perhaps you should set Station Engineer to high priority at the start of the round.

Engineer is in my top three. I want drone for explicitly repair and building alone.

Drone law 3 is verbatim "Your goals are to build, maintain, repair, improve, and power to the best of your abilities, You must never actively work against these goals." Building is very much part of their experience.

If only we could install a little nerve clamp in drone players to electrify their brains when they disobey their laws. Then we could have some real perfect drone roleplay.

DrAmazing: +1, admins can fix her
Timberpoes: -1, "I'm -1. Fuck drones. Remove drones. Should have never been re-added. Literal player-controlled NPCs lawed out of any interactions at all. Trash garbage waste of resources just throw the metal out of an airlock."
Omega: I asked him twice he's busy negotiating mapping configs

Striders13: -1, "im on keep them restricted camp because they're just exclusively picked by griefers for some reason"
Rex9001: -1, "I think its fine to keep em restricted, less admin busywork and makes drone griff harder"
Iain0: -1, "dont see a lot of them and they still need the odd linecheck, keep em out of the important stuff like SM and atmos seems fine still"

Using my creative licence to interpolate votes, they tally up to a not interested, sorry!