Beltstation: could it be done?

[amaranthineApocalypse]

make the crossover spot an airbridge, with the usual undestructable unobtainium shuttle tiles. That way a) no continuity error on the crossover, and b) no walking from perfectly-safe station into literal space after an edge bombing

I was thinking some sort of security camera-style trickery could be used to allow sight across the seam.

Well, i believe the way those work is by tying your viewpoint to one of the cameras, but that does give me an idea.

I believe it would be possible to create a sprite which displays whatever is on a tile at any given time. Like a photograph except it keeps updating the contents of itself. Now, i don't believe it's possible to put sprites over the edge of the map, so what we need to do is make the last half screen (realistically slightly over half a a screen) of each side of the map impassable in some way. Probably by using a line of teleporters connecting to the other side of the map. These teleporters should handle any problems with projectiles or throwing and probably with bot patrols too.

With this, we could easily put together half a screen of updating tiles at the edge of the map. This at the very least would give the illusion of it being connected. If we make it a turf, we can have it update it's own opacity based on the opacity of the turf it's viewing solving any line of sight problems.

This does still leave a few problems though:

• This likely would not capture pixel movement properly
  
• This doesn't handle lighting across the seam
  
• Nor explosions across the seam
  
• Nor atmos over the seam *scream
  
• I haven't looked at the code, so i'm not sure whether it's possible to make it defer the right click menu to whatever tile it's linked to
  
• If it is, then examine text code will need to be modified to account for this as it would likely report as being too far away
  
• The science teleporter would make this artificial difference in map size noticeable and without a countermeasure would still be able to teleport past the seam.
  
• Non radio chat would also need to be altered to account for the seam
  
• AI targeting for space bears, guardbuddies, medbots, beepsky etc. would need to be worked around somehow
  
• Sechud/antag overlays could potentially have problems too? Could be dealt with via code in the turf though
  
• Updating the sprites every tick may turn out to be laggy as fuck
  

I think that's the vast majority of issues. If we can solve all these, then it becomes very possible indeed. Atmos, lighting and explosions are the difficult ones.