So a couple weeks back collision got added to Vulture. At first we though it was the normal “testing” stuff but at this point it has really outstayed its welcome, 80% of ppl i see dont like it, so I made this topic to collect all the problems with it so maybe this way it will be remover sooner, or at least made better.
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I’ll start with some of my points:
-med suffers greatly from this, with everyone sticking to each other and interrupting injections at some times its unplayable
-any antag that builds an army (RK, dragon) can barely move due to their minions, it feels like a river of molases is following you and pushing you around if you dare stay still
-evac pods are now 2 person only, this may be a good outcome as thats what they are inteded for, but still getting flung out of the pod into hypersace is only funny once
My proposition: Either remove it fully(ideal) or only add it when the intent system is better so we could toggle it with harm mode, like in SS13. Also make them hard collisions and not soft so it doesnt feel like we’re all covered in glue. And if it is added in we need basically all maps to be redone around this, bigger hallways etc.
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This is just people that have not gotten used to it.
I welcome tweaks, but we REALLY needed collisions.
SS13’s where god awful and people loved it regardless, these are pretty natural in comparison. Like, if you wanted to be in med, you had to stay away from medical personnel because you could bump and interrupt them, and people just learned to use common sense. In some servers, evac pods would literally explode if you tried to overload it, and people just learned to not do it.
People just have to learn to stop walking into others instead of doing it anyway and complaining when it doesn’t work. A room crammed to the brim of people should be actively discouraged. Otherwise it causes the equally annoying (and actually problematic) issue of someone just stacking their sprite with the crowd and throwing a bomb or similar, or just making it difficult to click on stuff because they try to step on what you wanted to click.
Changes that would be useful are:
- Make people unmovable while they are doing a do-after (it is the one time where you cannot just push against the one pushing you).
- Make large mobs not be affected by other entities pushing them back (more mass, harder to push, makes sense).
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Yay, the collision feedback thread.
80% of ppl i see dont like it
80% of people you see talk about it don’t like it, yeah. I believe there is a sizeable chunk that doesn’t care. When I see people talk about collision negatively, I overwhelmingly see people just say they hate it and want to get rid of it without really saying anything else.
I think this change could be good with some tweaking. SS14 so far was built entirely around a lack of collisions, and maps/player behavior reflect that. Evac shuttles and medbays in particular are bad. There’s no denying that. But I think we shouldn’t abandon the entire thing without trying some stuff at first.
I think small mobs (mice/carps/bees) not having collision would already lifting a major pain point. A lot of doafters get interrupted by a random morty in medbay or something and that’s annoying, and it would fix the AI issues with Rat Kings and space dragons if there’s no other solution.
SS13’s where god awful and people loved it regardless, these are pretty natural in comparison
I really think we have to judge SS14’s collision on its own merits. Given that SS13’s movement system is different and Byond makes everything shittier.
Make people unmovable while they are doing a do-after
Well, depends on the do-after. Moving people while they’re uncuffing themselves is the current common sec way of preventing people from doing so without hitting them. But for medbay this is basically essential.
Two things I really appreciate about collision are:
- It actually improves combat, like, a lot. People are MUCH more aware of their positioning. As a result I have been friendly fired much less during hectic moments since people will just hold fire instead of trying to phase through you and shoot at whatever.
- This finally puts an end to the extremely annoying case where you’re trying to baton someone as sec and someone puts their sprite on top of the person you’re trying to arrest. I hated that.
Afaik we are not going to have hard collisions because prediction between two arbitrarily moving entities is a nightmare and/or impossible
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Ive not interacted with this system yet as im a mander crew member, but it sounds aweful and I hope it doesn’t move over.
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I don’t know what i hate more between collision (even butterflies have collision, it makes botany a pain too) and the 5 minutes round pause. But yeah, lately i don’t really want to play vulture because of these 2
last i was aware it was turned off so you should be safe to go back to your regular vulturing
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Oh great to know ! Thanks ! Might get in for a game tonight then
Collisions have been temporarily turned off for now until they get a bit more time in the oven. It was always meant to be a test for now
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While I understand that there’s a meta issue with the current limited collision, I really like that current live collision allows for more tactile-while-not-being-punishing usage of objects with collision.
For example, I once had to soft-barricade Medbay because someone decided to try and hold us hostage for the CMO’s array. After it was dealt with (between me as an ex-maint-turned-doctor (because there were a massive amount of people in engie and captain and hop both took over for what engineering was missing and we only had 1 doctor and 1 chemist INCLUDING the CMO), I welded one door shut and then looked around for collision items that could act as temporary blocks that couldn’t be opened to ignore without putting med’s supplies at risk. If someone needed in, the blockage would be unanchored and folks would be let in as need be, and a note was left on the outside to let people know both that someone will let them in and WHY it was barricaded. (Also - none of us knew how to change how the doors react. Someone set it so doors will always open no matter who tries to enter medbay, and none of us in Med knew how to turn that off so this was our best bet.)
This is a VERY niche scenario, but it made me feel really good about the current live version of collision and admittedly collision as it was on Vulture at the time felt incredibly restrictive and frustrating and did nothing to really be impactful in a good way. If nothing else, entity collision needs to be at MOST 1/3rd the size of what it was on Vulture’s testrun of it, with some entities (like butterflies, mice, etc.) having ZERO collision no matter what where reasonable. (Under the idea that for butterflies/birds they simply can just fly higher/lower than each other or mice share the same little space in a huddle but not necessarily on top of each other)
I’d be nice for collision to remain a tactical utility where and when applicable, but I also greatly don’t want it to become a playing hazard that just makes doing what you need to do difficult or even impossible. It’s already frustrating enough having to find a wrench as Janitor because I can’t change light bulbs that are directly behind (or technically the same tile as) vending machines or water tanks.
From all the complains i have heard. The main issues are:
- All entities having the same push force (i remember the butterfly issue, and i luckily haven’t even found bees in vulture)
- Getting interrupted during a do-after (which could be EASILY avoided with basic discipline, but a small fail-safe that avoids collision-pushing while doing one could also work)
Both easy (i don’t like to presume about work i won’t do, but it SOUNDS simple) enough to implement. So after some extra touch ups i am sure people would get used to it pretty quickly.
I was already seeing people pre-emptively move out of my path with less than a second of response (turning a corner) time within the first days.
Speaking as someone who’s new enough to the game to have learned med from intern to unlocking chemist (with the long role timers) on Vulture while collisions were on, I think the tight mapping is causing the most push-back (ha! pun!) among players. However, even in pretty disastrous rounds, I was able to do my job in most med bays. It felt like the do-afters weren’t interrupted until someone moved me significantly, i.e., slight bumping was tolerated by the system. I might be imagining this. Also, it incentivizes the one-doctor-per-patient method that I feel is important to make sure slow* players still get to play med. Evac shuttles were the worst though. I never felt like a productive doctor on evac, but maybe evac is supposed to feel that chaotic and helpless?
I did feel like I was engaging in meta-/power-gaming by putting all the medbay pets in chairs though–they don’t have the courtesy to avoid getting in your way the same way a player might. It would be nice if pets or certain kinds of NPCs didn’t have collisions. Also, almost every round, I prioritized disassembling extra tables and rearranging beds to make more room in medbay to mitigate collision. Is this a desirable consequence of the collisions?
In terms of roleplay, I don’t think anyone’s interested in roleplaying “excuse me, pardon me.” I do think the soft-collisions are a good simulation of the feeling of moving slowly through a crowd. I could see hard collisions, if they were technically feasible, being abusable.
While I originally agreed with players like Zoe, I think by the time collision was removed, I was used to it being there and had adapted my play to compensate. This doesn’t address Zoe’s second point about “army” antagonists, which I agree sounds like a separate collision problem worth discussion. I agree with Nancok that overcrowding evac pods should have consequences.
*: slow in terms of actions-per-minute. Some elite players can seemingly treat four patients at once by themselves.
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