Adding back the intent system would be nice as well.
We (almost certainly) aren’t going to tile-based movement upstream, but there’s nothing stopping a a fork from adding it, if they want.
If it alright with me asking, could I know why upstream isn’t interested in tile-based movement?
It was a technical limitation of Byond that isn’t a limitation with Robust Toolbox. It’s also just not wanted by the maintainers, for various reasons that I’m not sure of.
I could be wrong but I thought I heard something about Byond actually being capable of pixel movement.
Either way, limitation or not I think grid based movement could make the jump from 13 to 14 a lot more enticing for 13 vets.
Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions.
Not OP but what about the intent system? I can see how it would be a big project as it means like duplicating (at least) the current number of interactions in the entire game, but if undeniably opens up a LOT of depth for the gameplay and I think is a really iconic part of ss13’s unique [complimentary] controls.
So is it planned down the line or also considered a no-go?
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Pixel-based movement is indeed possible within Byond, but this comes with a pretty notable drawback: pixel movement completely hammers Byond’s maptick. This is less of an issue nowadays, as maptick is now multithreaded, but with multi-z still being heavy on maptick, pixel movement on top of that can still bring an SS13 server to its knees. This also isn’t even mentioning the performance cost in making pixel movement not feel awful; Byond’s built-in pixel movement implementation is extremely rough, and replacing it with something physics-based without tanking performance in the process requires a heavy amount of Byond wizardry (or a heavy amount of hackery, like what NSV13 had to do for ship physics).
There’s also the factor of tech debt. Pixel movement is something that’s been actively desired by many various SS13 servers throughout the years, but properly implementing pixel movement requires stripping decades (and counting!) worth of tech debt from the codebase, as many things in SS13 are under the assumption that everything is tile-based, and will malfunction when faced with something that distinctly isn’t.
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