It’s easy to die by not finding a spare oxygen tank in a chaotic environment, let alone to remember to keep checking tank pressure before you notice you’re out completely.
IRL, you’d definitely have low pressure alerts, and we’re in the future!
Here’s my main idea:
Low-range beeping when a suit detects low pressure inside the tank with internals on or outside the wearer with internals off
Design considerations:
the pressure threshold could be customizable in a menu or from presets
it could only beep when internals are toggled on (but this would require changing internals to stay on even if there’s no pressure in the tank), or only when a present tank has low pressure
it could also beep when the suit isn’t pressurized and there’s low external pressure
beeping when spaced but helmet is off is honestly something I’d expect to happen, especially helpful when under adrenaline
it could apply to suits and masks that would realistically have electronics in them, or to all suits and all masks for simplicity
the alert could only be heard by the wearer
the alert could also be heard within a tiny area, so that a rescuer can notice there’s no oxygen in an unconscious player’s EVA suit
This would immensely improve the quality of life of all crewmembers, especially salvage specialists and species that don’t breath station air.
And last but not least, we’d be better than SS13 and on par with Barotrauma
IIRC, internals do stay on while there’s no pressure in the tank - that’s why someone with an empty tank + internals on will gasp even if there’s an atmosphere, or a vox with an empty tank will suffocate rather than be poisoned. So while this is still a change, it’s a slightly smaller change than you may think!
My O2 alert is when I gasp.
But I’d be happy to see this give some upgrades over gas masks and medical masks. Atmos gas masks coming with it built in would be cool, and it could create an interesting choice for those who prefer using the welding gas mask - do you keep the welding variant on or swap to the electronic one? Do you plan to weld soon, do you need to keep an eye on oxygen?
I’ve observed this happen in-game, and just tested it myself to make sure - if you have internals on and your tank runs out of gas, your internals stay on. Yes, I checked with the gas analyzer, there were 0 mols of gas in the tank.
My localhost is a week or two out of date, to be fair, but all that means is that if we’re both correct, it’s worked this way for months and has broken within the past week without a changelog entry - meaning the behaviour you describe is probably a bug.
EDIT: You can even turn on internals while the tank’s empty, apparently?
This may be a new bug then.
I’ve specifically tried turning on empty tanks because i assumed it would just cause CO2 poisoning instead of plain suffocation.
When I hold an empty gas tank and open its UI, it says Internals: Disconnected and the Toggle button is greyed out, while clicking the internals hotbar icon displays the message “You are not wearing a gas tank”. Tested on a master fork from 9 days ago, but I’ve just synced and observed no changes.
as long as you can toggle this off in the menu I see no reason not to. adding a alarm setting on gas tanks would be a nice additional feature where you can set when it notifies you as if im salvage about to go out on a misson and only have 300kpa in the tank i’d like to know even if its not ‘low’ yet. Aleratively make a advanced air tank by combining air alarm eletronics 1lv 1 steel and a tank, use the same model as air tank but give it a toggle UI that shows current air pressure, what gas is in the tank (as if using an gas sensor) and warning and danger settings as an air alarm.
