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I just gave this a try for the first time yesterday, so this LP is very well-timed for me. (I actually learned a few things from the first video!) So thanks!
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Sep 2, 2013 08:01
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:39 |
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neogeo0823 posted:People who are looking to start playing need to remember one thing. Apart from the already-mentioned stuff about lag and learning curves, a "typical" round does not go how you think it will. You will almost never get to do your job from the start of the round, to the end of the round. Rolling with the punches and playing along, at least partially, will generally net you more "fun" than shutting yourself away in your workspace. This is very true. So far, a few things that have happened to me just playing as a janitor in different rounds: 1) Some dude knocked me down and farted on my head for about three screenfuls. When I tried to retaliate, several other members of the crew stopped me. I eventually figured out that things like this were just some peoples' way of saying hello to the janitor. 2) I was innocently cleaning the medbay when I came across a massacre in genetics. There was an intact body around, but nobody who should actually have been running the machines seemed to have survived. So I went ahead and chucked the guy into the machine, used the wiki to figure out how to resurrect him, and then let the machine run while I cleaned all the bloodstains off of the floor. (Note: if you are a janitor, by the end of the round 90% of what you are cleaning up will be bloodstains, assuming you haven't become one.) It probably behooves you to learn a little bit about the other jobs in case things like this happen. 3) The captain berated me for making the floors wet, incapacitated me, and dragged me off to security. Only, halfway there, he grabbed my radio, diverted into a maintenance hall, murdered me with his purple lightsaber, and stuffed my corpse into a locker. At the end of the game, it turned out he had a mission to assassinate me, because I guess the Syndicate hates wet floors too.
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Sep 2, 2013 17:01
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Supernorn posted:At the moment I'm working on designing the new interface for SS13 standalone, and I see the interface as a barrier to entry for new people. I've been quite conservative, keeping the hand slots and intents system. But i'm so tempted to just throw every element out and try something totally different. I'd like to get feedback from people that were totally put off by the interface if possible, and see if it's salvagable. I dropped some interface feedback in the other thread, but since you ask, I've got more thoughts. Keep in mind that I am still very new and may not realize the full range of interactions one can do and obviously these are just my dumb opinions anyway. On intents: I think the basic idea is actually pretty good. You want to be able to click things without additional rigmarole to make things happen in the world, and just the fact that you have an empty hand isn't enough to contextually determine what the thing ought to be. Having a button to put you, essentially, in battle-mode is not a bad idea. Where it falls down is the specific execution, so let's look at the current intents: 1. Beatings. I think this is a very reasonable use of the system. Click this button and then every click after that is intending to hurt some other being terribly. It's simple and easy to understand. 2. Help. This one is a bit muddled, possibly because helping someone is too generic to understand as a newbie. Basically you can use it to wake people up or give them CPR, which is okay, I just had no idea what it was for initially and that's probably solvable with clearer iconography. 3. Disarm. You could replace this completely by adding a "gun" or "tool" icon onto the targeting thing. Pick aggressive action, select gun, punchy punchy. 4. Grab. This is probably the weirdest one. It has two functions, one of which is pulling someone (which is kind of redundant with another button on the interface and key combination) and the other is choking them (which could easily be combined with aggressive intention towards someone you're pulling). So if it were up to me, I'd probably have just two intents, much like Ultima 7's war and peace mode. If you're in peace mode, clicking on someone tries to help them if they're wounded, pick them up if they've fallen, etc. Clicking on an object manipulates it normally. In war mode, clicking on something makes a spirited attempt to destroy it with your fists or whatever you have in your hand; if the thing is a person is on the ground being dragged, it strangles them, and if you've targeted their item area it tries to disarm them. Splitting things in this way also makes it harder for you to attack your crowbar with your hat when you were trying to pick it up (since you'd only attack items with hostile intent on). Given there are only two options, this could be a single-button toggle rather than a set of buttons. Other buttons: I don't think we need a button for "resist". That only comes up in a few specific scenarios, and I think the right interface there is some kind of modal. Basically, if someone is handcuffing you, only at that moment do you care about deciding whether to resist them or not. It's good to have a choice, because in this game you might want to let someone handcuff you or feed you something, or you might have set yourself on fire deliberately for some reason, but there's no reason to have a button for those very specialized purposes clogging up the UI the rest of the time. So it could pop up in the status area, like YOU ARE BEING HANDCUFFED, CLICK HERE TO RESIST or YOU ARE ON FIRE, PUT YOURSELF OUT YES/NO. Having a button to pull things is okay, but I'd probably prefer that be a right-click option and then a HUD icon which could be clicked to let go of them. (And the existing ctrl-click shortcut since everyone should use that anyway.) The run/walk toggle is fine. The drop and throw buttons are okay, but I'd probably replace both by dragging; if you want to throw something in your hand, you drag it to where you want it to go in the world and your character throws it. If you drag it to where you're standing, you drop it. (Or you could have a "drop zone" in the interface where you drag things to put them down if you're worried about the world being too cluttered on a player's square to properly capture that event.) As a corollary to this, if you did it this way any machine or container you put something in should have a window with a target slot that you open by clicking on it, so that you're not dragging items into the machine in the world, but into a separate interface. It'd be nice to be able to expand the targeting window - just a clickable area to make it bigger so it's easier to select a target, then minimize it back to the normal size. The inventory button should probably open a paperdoll rather than a row of buttons, to make it more obvious where everything is going. It's probably reasonable to have a couple of slots down there for quick access, like the pockets, and belt, although I'd like to see those vary depending on what you're wearing. (Example: how about belts with holsters that add another two quick slots for weapons?) The hands are a neat idea in general and I like the way they influence gameplay, but they have a few issues: 1. Having different things happen when you click on the background of the button vs. the thing you actually have in that hand is horrifyingly unintuitive. Please eliminate all occurrences of that with extreme prejudice. Add an extra button or pair of buttons or whatever you need to do, just please, please make this go away. Bury it deep and salt the earth. 2. If I have something in my hand that I should reasonably be able to manipulate with that hand, like a PDA, let me just do that by clicking on it. When the object requires two hands, the "select the empty hand as the active hand and click on the object in the inactive hand" action chain is weird and confusing. If you need to have an empty hand to interact with something, that's fine, just have an error box pop up when you click on it saying "empty your other hand". (This is made easier if you have an agressive vs. non-agressive mode as above since there's no reason to assume in hippie mode that you'd want to hit item A with item B.) 3. Any interaction that involves moving an item out of your active hand (or anywhere else) into a container or anything similar should be replaced with dragging to avoid any ambiguity. This actually lets you very easily decide between, for instance, putting a barcode on a crate and putting a barcode in a crate without having to resort to workarounds. It's totally okay for interactions like this to require an empty hand, but they should be streamlined in general. (Drag hat from box to head, no problem. Do the same with something in each hand, error message.) This is already getting long, so I'll stop here and maybe come back to it later. Whatever you end up doing, thank you for at least caring about the interface. Donnerberg posted:I lost it when you found the money cake in the bar. That's where the station's budget went. Dude said he was going to fry the budget. He meant it literally.
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Sep 5, 2013 17:49
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PoptartsNinja posted:If they can, then I was in a round a couple of days ago that almost did this; it was "always lie". I think everyone figured out what was going on fairly quickly, but nobody corrected the problem, I assume because it was hilarious. (There's a module you can use to reset the AI back to the default three laws if you suspect it has been hacked.) The best part is that any cyborgs that have been created have to follow the exact same laws as the AI. So if you actually do get in there and put in some kind of "help me murder everybody" law, it's not just the bodiless door-controller on your side, it's also potentially a team of mechanical abominations. 1stGear posted:Maybe in Asimov's writings they couldn't be overruled, but generally any new Laws that get added will have "This law overrules all other laws". In Asimov's writings, the order of the laws represented their electrical potential; the higher-potential law would always win. This was played with in several stories, and in fact if I recall properly a higher-potential law than the first law was created at one point. The SS13 shenanigans aren't incompatible with his stuff at all, assuming you attach the right fluff to the modules.
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Sep 6, 2013 19:09
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JT Jag posted:The zeroth law: "A robot must not wittingly do anything to cause harm to humanity as a whole." Yep, that's the one. JT Jag posted:Ah, so there aren't hardcoded restrictions, just written ones that you are supposed to hold yourself to. That's kind of fascinating. It's pretty much a necessity - programmatically enforcing the first law would be almost impossible. Programmatically enforcing the second law would be literally impossible without an actual, real AI built into the game to interpret orders and judge whether the player had done the appropriate thing as a result. You're right, though, it really is fascinating.
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Sep 6, 2013 20:13
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Since the OP is still looking for names/gimmicks: When you get around to chief engineer, the usual sort of gimmick would be Scotty, or perhaps Geordi. But no, those people are competent engineers and we all know that just isn't right. O'Brien was a COO rather than a chief engineer, but he's still a cut above what you'd expect here. Even B'Elanna Torres, who spent more time whining about being half-Klingon than actually doing any engineering, is too good for this station. No, you need to be Charles "Trip" Tucker III, chief engineer of the Enterprise NX-01, also known as "the one that actually managed to get cancelled". You may, of course, use whatever variation on that name you consider appropriate. Your job is to have a fake, lovely southern accent and make sure the engine mostly works, but sometimes fails so you can heroically repair it. Keeping it functioning just enough to have low power is also acceptable. At no point should you configure the solar arrays. You shouldn't stop the AI from doing so, but express confusion if it brings them up. Whenever possible, make up lovely stories from your past to explain current events, justify your actions, or just fill time while you wait to be murdered by a commando team. (Feel free to have some ready in advance.) You should also wallow in xenophobia, but in this universe that is completely justified, so it's unlikely anyone will notice.
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Sep 8, 2013 22:40
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You motherfucker. I was the janitor on that round and I had no goddamned idea how someone got in there and stole my bombs and spray bottle. I was looking forward to using that spray bottle, too, since I just learned how it worked from your video! I was also the guy that set off your mousetrap. I picked it up and put it in my bag to get it out of the way so I wouldn't tread on it, then dumped it out of the bag in medbay to make room for a medkit or something. Which resulted in it exploding, as you can see when you visit medbay to kick the drugs. (That was right before I got the AI to let me into medbay and resurrected Daeren. It really was a fun round for me. I even got onto the shuttle and survived at the end.)
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Sep 9, 2013 07:20
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One of the nice things about games like this is that everyone's story is happening all at the same time, and they all create the framework for each other. The Captain had the story of the traitor who got fed up with being a subtle spy and decided to cut a bloody swathe through the station in the name of the Syndicate. Daeren had the story of the loyal security guard forced to perform evil deeds against his will who was given a second chance by pure luck and got revenge against his former master. I had the story of, as you say, the hapless janitor disrespected by everyone who plays a key role in stopping the captain purely by chance and then escapes with his life. Razage had the story of the crazy priest whose warnings are ignored by everyone, and the only way he ends up being able to help them is shooting their lifeless bodies out into space. Even the people who had something more like "I set up my station and then the captain burst in two minutes later and murdered me" got to watch the rest of the stuff play out as observers. None of those events could happen without all the other things happening at the same time. And it's all just done by people working at cross-purposes and playing with the tools they've been handed.
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Sep 9, 2013 17:17
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Supernorn posted:New players - thanks to your feedback/complaints about the BYOND UI, I feel like i'm heading in the right direction for the standalone interface. Let me know if anything in particular seems unintuitive as this is still a WIP. Cool! I like the action hotbar thing as a concept. What else would go in there? Would there be open slots configurable by the player?
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Sep 12, 2013 01:17
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Yeah, it took a bit to get used to the subtitles, but once I did they really added to the video overall. I've done QM a couple of times now, but I never realized you could make such ridiculous profits just using the normal market. (And I always end up with some other QMs there, but 90% of the time they just grab some random items and go off on space adventures.)
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Sep 30, 2013 00:39
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The explanation generally given in here is: 1) The order of the laws is completely and totally irrelevant. A law uploaded five seconds ago has exactly the same priority as one of the built-in ones and the same priority as the one that will be uploaded ten minutes from now no matter what numbers are assigned to them. 2) If a law says it overrides or supersedes another law, that law has priority in the cases where the two conflict. That's how the priority of laws 1-3 are set up; each one carefully and explicitly states what laws it does or does not take precedence over. 3) If a law is uploaded without overriding another law the player should do their level best to resolve the contradiction themselves in whatever way seems most sensible or hilarious. 4) The "chain of command" clause in law 2 and the absence of the "inaction" clause in law 1 are to prevent random idiots from ordering the AI to open doors and threatening to kill themselves if they're not allowed in, which basically makes the system of locks irrelevant (or annoys the admins with constant complaints about AIs who are trying not to do so).
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Oct 8, 2013 02:34
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| # ¿ Apr 27, 2024 21:39 |
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I love that you were obviously subverted and yet nobody did anything. Even when you swapped back to the AI upload, I didn't see any bodies in there of people who'd tried to get in and got turreted down or anything. Maybe they just saw the waves of fire and lions coming out of telescience and lost their collective will to live.
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Dec 31, 2013 01:50
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