AI Camera, or "BAYSTATION IS BETTER YOU SUCK COG BLOO BLOO"

[shrapnel]

I've played AI primarily for years and I've always hated our camera system. A user interface neeeeeds to be intuitive: if you think, "oh, if I hit leftarrow I'll be able to see that area" and then hitting leftarrow takes you somewhere entirely other, that's a failed system. and that happens constantly on goonstation. the new systems are super intriguing conceptually, but in practice they make AIing even more hilariously stupid. I can't tell you how many times just in my three or four newcamera AI rounds I've tracked someone and -not had them on the camera.- and it's worse than that, of course; you also can't see doors or APCs if they're in meson view, which makes specific doors and APCs infinitely harder to find. And empty rooms? What do they even mean? There's no instant way to tell the difference between a room you CAN see with no one in it and a room you THINK you can see but can't actually that's packed with changelings.

I'm in favor of AI LoS, but it should be universal. All cameras should have LoS shared from all other active cameras if we're gonna do it that way. LLA (I think?) has the AI camera moving like a ghost, with visibility only where cameras can see, and it's -so much fucking better- than this shit we use today, even pre-change. Probably the only thing they do better than goonstation. The camera fiddlyness just doesn't behave the way humans would expect it to, and I'm sure it's turned scads of newbies off AIhood.