Goonhub
10-13-2022, 10:21 AM
(This post was last modified: 10-13-2022, 10:23 AM by Mirodir. Edited 1 time in total.)
I just talked about genetics with a friend the other day. (Edit: Look who ninja'd me)
For me the biggest issue is how repetitive it is and how there is no room for experimentation. A good geneticist, despite the RNG, can easily get the important couple beneficial mutations in 10-20 minutes, 90% of which are spent staring at the pop-up, and is then bored for the rest of the round as nobody will want to have anything to do with them anymore.
I came up with 3 three things I'd like to see (other than a complete rework, which I think would be best, but probably too big in scope):
1. I think taking a book from Artifact Science's page would be very beneficial. Mutations spawn without names and it's the geneticists job to figure out which mutation does what. Once they give it a name, the computer will label that gene the same name for everyone. To simplify it a little, maybe the computer is gonna spit out, say, 3-5 possibilities for a given mutation and the geneticist has to figure out which of the three it is by either activating it in the monkey, the person in the booth, or in themselves and then observing what happens. That way Geneticists would actually be medical scientist. They have a hypothesis, test it, and check the results. Also to spice it up a little they could sometimes spawn already empowered, stabilized, reinforced, etc.
2. This would would be a whole other can of worms in terms of complexity and effort to implement: Make "empowered" not available at the click of a button and not binary but instead each mutation would have a scale from 0% empowered to 100% empowered. (The code already kinda supports this already with regular being power=1, empowered being power=2, but most mutations I looked at yesterday just do a check if power>1 for their empowered versions). In addition to what we have now, there would be a few "bonus" base pairs that you could experiment with and the more of them you get right, the closer you get to 100% empowered. But there's no actual feedback from the computer telling you how close you are to 100% empowered and you'd have to test it experimentally by seeing which strings of base pairs make a mutation stronger. (Maybe getting half or 75% of them correct would already give you the full power or something because getting 100% of them correct through experiments alone for the full effect sounds like hell.)
3. This might be very controversial, but I think the gene booth is a horrible idea. Especially on maps where the booth is off screen from the gene lab, it completely removes you from interacting with anyone. I do have to say that I mostly play on RP so maybe this is completely different on the classic servers. My suggestion to fix this would be to remove the gene booth completely and instead have a Injector fabricator IN YOUR LAB. It should be easy to tell it to spit out a desired number and type of a mutation you have in storage (similar UI to current fabricators?), but you'd then have to either do the injections yourself or coordinate with the rest of medbay. E.g. bring them near the front desk, tell the doctors about them and let them do the injecting.
For me the biggest issue is how repetitive it is and how there is no room for experimentation. A good geneticist, despite the RNG, can easily get the important couple beneficial mutations in 10-20 minutes, 90% of which are spent staring at the pop-up, and is then bored for the rest of the round as nobody will want to have anything to do with them anymore.
I came up with 3 three things I'd like to see (other than a complete rework, which I think would be best, but probably too big in scope):
1. I think taking a book from Artifact Science's page would be very beneficial. Mutations spawn without names and it's the geneticists job to figure out which mutation does what. Once they give it a name, the computer will label that gene the same name for everyone. To simplify it a little, maybe the computer is gonna spit out, say, 3-5 possibilities for a given mutation and the geneticist has to figure out which of the three it is by either activating it in the monkey, the person in the booth, or in themselves and then observing what happens. That way Geneticists would actually be medical scientist. They have a hypothesis, test it, and check the results. Also to spice it up a little they could sometimes spawn already empowered, stabilized, reinforced, etc.
2. This would would be a whole other can of worms in terms of complexity and effort to implement: Make "empowered" not available at the click of a button and not binary but instead each mutation would have a scale from 0% empowered to 100% empowered. (The code already kinda supports this already with regular being power=1, empowered being power=2, but most mutations I looked at yesterday just do a check if power>1 for their empowered versions). In addition to what we have now, there would be a few "bonus" base pairs that you could experiment with and the more of them you get right, the closer you get to 100% empowered. But there's no actual feedback from the computer telling you how close you are to 100% empowered and you'd have to test it experimentally by seeing which strings of base pairs make a mutation stronger. (Maybe getting half or 75% of them correct would already give you the full power or something because getting 100% of them correct through experiments alone for the full effect sounds like hell.)
3. This might be very controversial, but I think the gene booth is a horrible idea. Especially on maps where the booth is off screen from the gene lab, it completely removes you from interacting with anyone. I do have to say that I mostly play on RP so maybe this is completely different on the classic servers. My suggestion to fix this would be to remove the gene booth completely and instead have a Injector fabricator IN YOUR LAB. It should be easy to tell it to spit out a desired number and type of a mutation you have in storage (similar UI to current fabricators?), but you'd then have to either do the injections yourself or coordinate with the rest of medbay. E.g. bring them near the front desk, tell the doctors about them and let them do the injecting.