disclaimer, did not read any of the comments so if a point that was already brought up sneaks in here, that’s why.
from the outside this seems a bit too restrictive IMO and posits itself on integrating abilities to the suit, which currently do not exist. i’m assuming this is going to be related to a hotbar action, otherwise i’m not sure what intrinsic abilities you could be referring to other than damage/environmental resistances and requiring a battery for that seems goofy to me.
it’s also feels like a step backwards since it sounds like it makes softsuits (EVA and variants) the new de facto suit, just on the premise of it being the fastest option and no extra resource management. if there’s provisions for this in the DDOC please let me know.
additionally it’s probably going to shaft multiple roles both antag and non-antag related considering that it would also open up suits to being EMPed, in which case good luck nukies/RD/HoS/captain i guess?
i do think hardsuits need to be looked at in terms of trying to make them optional for most of the shift but i don’t think this is the way to do it.
This is partially the point of Powered Hardsuits and a good thing in my eyes; Salvage will be forced to spend breaks on the station managing resources or interacting with departments, which would allow any person (including antags) to interact with them. The current problem with Salvage right now is that attempting to interact with them, as an antag, is a very difficult endeavor, as they are always off-station.
Its true it would help antags, but im not sure the opertunity cost is worth it. we’re talking about helping some antags sometimes complete kill objectives vs Salvage Always being inconvicanced and always having artifacial downtime. I forsee a future where salv seeks out normal EVA just to avoid interacting with the mechanics introduced as its a ‘hassel’ for them
We’re currently tweaking Salvage’s gameloop to tie them to the station more. You can see these efforts in the recent Job Board addition. Salvage doesn’t have “Artifical downtime” if they spend their time well, talking to departments (ex. chem, med, sci) as to what they want, as well as purchasing equipment, processing salvage (they have to sell/scrap certain items) and more. This doesn’t require the suit, and as such they can locker it up for that short amount of time, and retrieve it when it’s time to head back out.
Besides, we can always see what works out through balancing and playtest runs - I don’t think that the core concept of Powered Hardsuits is bad. I think it’ll be a good addition to the game.
No i think power hardsuits are a good idea for sec, medbay and anywhere the core gameplay doesn’t require being in spaced areas (including antag spce suits). In those situations being in power suit all the time is kinda power gamey and not really intendended, but not a good idea to force salv and engi out of the suits where the core gameplay and even the core identity of there station is the power suit.
Why would salv need to talk to chem med and sci? they know to bring back all carps they find, they know to bring back clone stuff and they know sci wants materials always espically silver or uramium.
Droping materials off is a more valid argument. they do want to bring resources to sci and they could move there faster this is espically true if RD hasn’t portal linked cargo (on some stations like plasma medbay is the more common link) and when they drop materials to sci thats when they normally ask about upgrades (mass scanner, drills, ore scanner sometimes)
Selling materials.. honestly i’d just stick it on a box on the shuttle and let the cargo techs handle that, no reason I should stop my work to sell scrap when cargo techs need to run ATS for bounties anyway.
The core idenity of these roles in power suits is so strong that I think most players when they think about either salv or engi they conjure the picture of the power suit rather than the uniform.
shouldn’t cargo techs also be handling material deliveries for salvage, considering they also handle mail deliveries and, in the past, could handle deliveries for specific departments if those departments had something waiting
realistically speaking the only time salvage and science ever have a genuine need to interact is if science has material-specific requests or salvage has upgrade-specific requests, both of which are simple enough to do over radio (in an ideal situation). the only reason it doesn’t happen that way is because rarely do those departments actually listen to each other’s radio comms which prompts the in-person interaction requirement at that point
Basically every concern that has been listed so far is about the specific implementation of the feature, and I still think that
a, we are not going to work that out on paper in a way that alleviates all theoretical concerns
particularly since there are various things we could try to address them, but we will see that better when we can actually test it in dev
b, even if it turns out we can’t cause the desired restrictions with this without causing negative impact, we can still have the feature thematically, such as all hardsuits run out in 1 hour of use. That would not meaningfully impact anyone’s gameplay loop, but having hardsuits where battery charge just EXISTS would already give flavor for the game.
(And making them ginormous and hard to transport makes sense in any case)
So I propose that we give tentative approval for the doc, to facilitate better testing. We want the underlying systems for sure, but we are not sure yet how it will be applied, right?. So let’s start with implementing suit-bulkiness and the charging infrastructure, give all suits a 1 hour battery life. Salvage will survive having to recharge their suits once per round. Nukies should have chargers on their ship.
I think powered hardsuits would cause more problems than they solve.
The underlying issue is that we don’t want players to wear them the whole shift, as it means you don’t have to care about spacing or other environmental hazards anymore. Especially antagonists are encouraged to simply space the whole station to easily kill everyone not wearing a suit. Partially removing their downsides and giving them additional abilities could make this worse.
Having to regularly recharge means you loose control of when you wear them. Running out of power at a bad timing would be at best an annoyance, since you have to crawl back to a recharging station and you cannot just remove the suit in a hazardous environment. And at worst it means a death sentence due to bad luck, for example in combat. And since you absolutely need the suit for many tasks, having to regularly wait for it to recharge is not enticing gameplay either. Borgs have this as well, but at least they can get power cell upgrades (which I would not want for hardsuits because then you can just carry a bunch of extra charges with you).
Feature-wise welding protection, built-in magboots, playing music, appraisal tools etc are already provided by their respective items, and having one single clothing item handle all of this is both extremely powerful and makes gameplay less interesting than with having specialized tools you have to select for your desired loadout.
From a technical perspective this will require power cell prediction first, or things like movement speed modifiers would mispredict.
I think they are closely connected. Someone wearing a hardsuit is completely immune to environmental hazards and can space areas without a drawback. If you are not spaceproof you will have to think twice about doing massive sabotage like this or you will take damage as well. A good example for this working is the raidsuit.
And spacing is just one type environmental hazard, the same is true for fires, heat, cold, radiation, slipping hazards (if the suit will include magboots) and so on.
I just don’t think a powered hardsuit is a good idea. It makes softsuits better.
If someone is complaining that they’re too slow and are wearing it all shift it really is a user error.
After the following discussion I can see how the ddoc can be skeptical, and the points brought up are valid.
The problem is when players just don’t realize this, and perform the following actions:
They complain eternally instead of getting the pole stuck out of the proverbial bike tire. They do this on the upstream server and on GitHub discussions, usually completely unrelated to the PR at hand.
They make an actual PR which usually gets denied for various reasons.[1]
I’m fine with this just being something that engineering has to learn eventually, however in terms of “tugging” a player or having a good player experience, I’d like a mechanical incentive. Otherwise the player keeps shooting themselves in the foot. We’ve learned this in a lot of instances.
Usually microbalanced to death or buffed to extreme values. Generally engineering suits don’t need a buff. ↩︎
Yeah.. Its very much a symtom of gameplay that salv and engi’s main focus is fixing spaced area’s or mining/scavenging spaced area’s highly encourging them to use the hardsuit for the entire shift. Even if we dont want them in hard suit all shift we’d need to treat the underlying issue that the gameplay of those two roles requires space-proofing if we wanted any fundamental change in how they play said roles. Of course that would modify their identity all together as jobs.
For now folks need to just do as I been doing and accept that when your engi or salv your just gonna walk slow that shift.
I don’t understand how a powered suit solves this at all. Arguably it comes with a warning “power is out” and you’re slower.. but people are just going to keep using it and it makes engineering gameplay worse now that you have to deal with:
a) Lugging a suit around to a spaced place
b) Going back to engineering to grab your suit, which then means you’re slowed down dragging it or wearing it to where you’re going to fix.
c) Needing to worry about recharging the suit in between emergencies (can be extremely annoying needing to do that if there’s multiple)
d) Needing to upkeep oxygen/n2 because it runs out fast
e) Needing to bring welding protection with you if the suit hardsuit helmet doesn’t have it innately
f) Needing to bring materials and/or an RCD + cartridges with you
g) (When implemented) needing to bring materials and/or RPD + cartridges with you
h) Needing to rebuy cartridges for said RCD and RPD
It gets way too much to deal with. we’re trying to make engineering smoother not more difficult.
Atmos and engi start with engi goggles, if you remove your eye wear slot protection its on you.
I can tell you every job other than engi i use scatchel for speed, on engi though I have to use duffle and its always full as to fix a room you need; Rods (holes), Tiles (holes), Steel (Girders, atmos stuff) Plaststeel (walls or shuttle windows) Reienforced glass (Windows/Shuttle windows) and RCD (Wires/doors) so thats 6 of 2x2 objects. this is an agreventing factor of the slow down to be sure as not only do you need the heavy atmos suit to fix the spaced areas but also need heavy bag to carry all the stuff to do so.
I feel like part of this can be solved by making the RCD accept any material like it does on TG/Citadel instead of just carts.
Carts are interesting and have a limiting factor to it, but the lack of material recycling on the RCD really hurts it.
One could argue that gives too much reliance on the RCD/RPD for engineering/atmos and honestly that’s the point. The RCD/RPD are good at doing what they do - basic construction. The RPD barely falls under this as well because all pipes are basic, it’s the setup that makes it complex. The RCD is more you can make reinforced/windows, grilles, fill in holes, tiles, doors, and regular walls, but anything specialized requires construction (reinforced walls, and any material-glass or material-wall). It’s mainly meant to be a quick build/repairing tool and to cut down on the amount engineering needs to carry with them.
I’d like to see us pivot more towards that and enabling material recycling for the RCD is going to easily be the biggest factor.
This is a tangent away from the Hardsuit, but it’s important in terms of streamlining engineering.
Well, now what lol. Not a huge turnout, but 3 votes to close it and 3 votes to merge it, even if they are not in exact agreement about how to merge it. Limbo it is.