Goonhub
09-01-2022, 03:52 PM
(This post was last modified: 09-01-2022, 03:54 PM by Nerkson. Edited 1 time in total.)
Azrun - a good PR change, but perhaps I'm not fully sure on a few details.
I'm going to make two core assumptions here:
1. This PR is designed to slow down the rate of making chemicals and stop copy-paste sheets, and
2. This PR is mostly done to help affect Classic Servers, though it will inevitably trickle-affect the RP servers.
Regarding point 1: Science is in a bit of a weird place now. I made a comment elsewhere that Medical, Engineering, Quartermasters, and Security play a massive role in keeping the station running even when there are no antags. People get hurt on the job so they go to medical. Quartermasters make money and can order nearly anything with it, and people want things. Engineers fix the station, add quality of life items like teleporters, and largely repairing it during accidents. Security acts as a sort of mediator on events and to mete out justice when rules are broken.
Science, by and large, doesn't do anything meaningful to the station by default. If every other role *but* science was picked, nothing would change. Even science things, like the teleporter consoles, are freely open to every job role. It's a wonder that people start out science wanting to do good and be a helping hand, and then just devolve into making more horrifically potent death mixes and overdosing on meth/cyanide before blowing the department up from a watercooler filled with black powder that was carelessly left next to a heater after the previous breach.
Chemistry is the department where you mix chemicals and create things no one has ever seen before, and yet Medical has their own science area called the Pharmacy that does everything science does (even the bar has a chemical mixer!), and even botany can make fruits and veggies that create a frankly absurd level of chemicals themselves.
The Chemicompiler, unique to science, is another "copy paste" machine that is a joke. There are probably only a handful of people here who are capable of creating Brainfuck code without the aid of third party sites or copy paste lists, and it is arguably the most powerful machine in science's toolkit. And no one uses it.
This change doesn't aim to fix those issues and wasn't intended to fix those issues, I agree. It won't be the hay needle that breaks the camels back either. It just feels a tad excessive in light of everything else with the department.
Want to balance it out? I have a few ideas.
1. Give the Science chem dispensers unique chemicals that the bar and medical bay don't have access to. Welding fuel, Oil, maybe some possibility for new chemicals down the road- something that lets science have a specific niche that would actually make people want to go there for specific chems.
2. Floppy disks - have a drawer with floppy disks that have pre-made groups of chems on it. Let people swap 'em in and out. Trade them like pokemon cards, discover them in the wild. Create their own floppy disks. (Heck, I even had the idea of a series of small encounter rooms that are randomly generated every map start that telescience can access to quickly smash and grab stuff, and disks could be rewards from that, but one thing at a time.)
3. Combine the Chemi-compiler with the science chemistry dispensers. We're already mostly there, could multiple beaker prompts and more buttons for "Do X, then Y, then Z" be added? The recording feature is actually powerful if we can get more prompts added to it.
I'm going to make two core assumptions here:
1. This PR is designed to slow down the rate of making chemicals and stop copy-paste sheets, and
2. This PR is mostly done to help affect Classic Servers, though it will inevitably trickle-affect the RP servers.
Regarding point 1: Science is in a bit of a weird place now. I made a comment elsewhere that Medical, Engineering, Quartermasters, and Security play a massive role in keeping the station running even when there are no antags. People get hurt on the job so they go to medical. Quartermasters make money and can order nearly anything with it, and people want things. Engineers fix the station, add quality of life items like teleporters, and largely repairing it during accidents. Security acts as a sort of mediator on events and to mete out justice when rules are broken.
Science, by and large, doesn't do anything meaningful to the station by default. If every other role *but* science was picked, nothing would change. Even science things, like the teleporter consoles, are freely open to every job role. It's a wonder that people start out science wanting to do good and be a helping hand, and then just devolve into making more horrifically potent death mixes and overdosing on meth/cyanide before blowing the department up from a watercooler filled with black powder that was carelessly left next to a heater after the previous breach.
Chemistry is the department where you mix chemicals and create things no one has ever seen before, and yet Medical has their own science area called the Pharmacy that does everything science does (even the bar has a chemical mixer!), and even botany can make fruits and veggies that create a frankly absurd level of chemicals themselves.
The Chemicompiler, unique to science, is another "copy paste" machine that is a joke. There are probably only a handful of people here who are capable of creating Brainfuck code without the aid of third party sites or copy paste lists, and it is arguably the most powerful machine in science's toolkit. And no one uses it.
This change doesn't aim to fix those issues and wasn't intended to fix those issues, I agree. It won't be the hay needle that breaks the camels back either. It just feels a tad excessive in light of everything else with the department.
Want to balance it out? I have a few ideas.
1. Give the Science chem dispensers unique chemicals that the bar and medical bay don't have access to. Welding fuel, Oil, maybe some possibility for new chemicals down the road- something that lets science have a specific niche that would actually make people want to go there for specific chems.
2. Floppy disks - have a drawer with floppy disks that have pre-made groups of chems on it. Let people swap 'em in and out. Trade them like pokemon cards, discover them in the wild. Create their own floppy disks. (Heck, I even had the idea of a series of small encounter rooms that are randomly generated every map start that telescience can access to quickly smash and grab stuff, and disks could be rewards from that, but one thing at a time.)
3. Combine the Chemi-compiler with the science chemistry dispensers. We're already mostly there, could multiple beaker prompts and more buttons for "Do X, then Y, then Z" be added? The recording feature is actually powerful if we can get more prompts added to it.