/tg/Station 13

Situation - admin wants to run fun event.
Problem - event involves spawning a bunch of X with Y and Z modifiers (people or NPCs in certain equipment, items that do a certain thing etc.).
Previous Solution - spawn each of those things manually, taking sweet damn time and allowing a stubbed toe player to ruin the round for everyone.
Suggested Solution - programmable virtual buttons!

Virtual buttons would be like HUD elements that work like solid items or machines; you place them, and then assign a function to them which takes place every time they're pressed. As an admin, you can bring up a layer which shows all the virtual buttons created in a round - nobody else can see them unless they're an admin and they've brought that "layer" up. They come in either HUD or map flavours - ie, they either stick to your screen like other HUD elements (inventory etc.) when you have the VB interface up, or they stay in a specific place on the map that you can fly your admineye back to.

As an example, say an admin wants to create an army of cultists, but with wizard spells and wearing wizard armour, equipped with different staves. Instead of spawning the people and objects individually every time, you create a button, and put each individual element (random human body; random ghost; cultist faction; random stave; wizard armour) onto it. When you press that button, you create one of those. Simple.

And in a round, a quick admin can create a bank of these for various things, like events and so on, and use them far quicker than spawning things individually. These banks can be like toolbars on the HUD, or actual rooms in-game.

What do you think?

Additional suggestion: Make the button contents either savable or exportable+importable; This is so you only program the button once and can then use it again in subsequent rounds.

This is doable, just not trivial. One way to do it would be with a console - think cs:go console. The important admin commands can get added to the console and admins can create macros. Technically this could be done with the ingame console (the one where you write say "butts"), but I somewhat doubt it could work properly. Anyway, the console approach would be a generic solution, which would allow other stuff to be mapped to it, it's however also one that would take a long time to code, so a more specialized, narrower solution might be good enough.

This is basically the sql query stuff but as buttons, isn't it?

The way I understand it it's just being able to do multiple things with a single button press - a macro, just that you aren't typing letters, you're setting off a pre-recorded set of commands. SQL is just a language that retrieves data for you.

Yep, pretty much macros - except they're macros for spawn triggers, be they events, effects or mobs, that are easily sorted and tied to an interface which a savvy admin could even, say, allow an observer to see and interact with.

In other words, being able to see and use the otherwise invisible macro-machine "layer" of the map, which requires being in a particular state that an admin can activate for themselves or select others.

It's not just the tools - it's the environment, too.