Make Ai able to leave from game by cryo unit./ AI AFK interface

[Zamujasa]

Definitely a solid point, but nothing stopping robotics making up a new AI regardless.

i am pretty sure robotics is prevented from just making more ai cores by the fact that the thing that lets you make additional ai cores is locked behind the mdir unlocking it, and even then i think it's limited in how many it lets you make.



this whole thread is fun for me, because "having some way of saying you are AFK" was one of my pet projects; you might be familiar with one of my other features, the "Zz" overhead indicator

i frequently need to get up and step away from my computer for health reasons (usually every 30-60m), and having to hide in a locker every time (and hope nobody found me / understood what it meant), or log out + suffer a 30 second delay* in addition to not actually getting to see anything that happens while you're up


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that said, my dream setup for this

- every player gets a "set afk" button. it puts a little "(AFK)" over your head and pops up a dialog box you have to close. it doesn't actually do anything mechanics wise -- nobody with it is granted the protection actually being offline/SSD gives you -- but it's useful to say "i had to step away for a bit, i'll be back". "but what if people abuse it" deal with it.

- the ai also has access to this feature. for the ai maybe this puts a special image on the ai status screens, i'm not sure. it's difficult to communicate the ai status because it generally doesn't have any physical representation other than its core, and its core is typically behind command doors and turrets. this is partially why the overhead "remote" overlay exists for the ai and its shell, to communicate some of that. (alas, i never added one for the SICC...)

- the ai should be able to use cryo, or alternatively another command, to "observe", the same way players can with the cryotron. this creates a command announcement and reverts the core to a SICC; players can either open it up and replace that with a player, or just let it go and have someone new join. presumably you'd want to reset their status/color/name when the original one leaves.

if you really want to go full chaos mode, make the ai announcement ping active ghosts to see if anyone wants to be the ai instead. do another command announcement that the ai has been changed. hell, maybe even go a step further and offer SICCs to ghosts -- aka tg's positronic brains.



("but what if people abuse ooc knowledge" then you get to enforce the rules! #lifehack)