vampire fixed, misc gripes itt

[Crumplehat]

Only borgs don't actually go after vampires like they do with lings. I don't think i've ever in my whole game experience, witnessed a borg kill a vampire. Ever.

That's because for some odd reason vampires are considered human I think? Or is that just zombies? Vampires are basically undead wizards.

[Crumplehat]

Also, cloaking is bugged in general; you see it in Chameleon too. Used to be that cloaking was an on/off thing. The MOMENT you stepped out of shadows or moved at all in Chameleon's case, you were revealed. But now there's a sort of lag behind it. Even if you move into the light as a vampire, you still might not uncloak right away. And what's even lamer is that you the cloaker can't even tell when you're cloaked or not because that damn light sprite keeps appearing even when you're in full view sometimes, not that you can tell if it's there or not when it's not. Back when cloaking was just a straight up distortion field it was a lot more noticeable to thermals and AIs and shit but at least you knew if it was on or not.

I think this all owes a lot both to that sprite change and the way light code works now. Damned if I know how but it's the most likely reason. Either the cloak needs to be adjusted to it (have certain thresholds of light activate the cloak, and actually turn off the cloaking sprite when it's not active), or maybe just make it only work when you stand still in the dark?

There's gotta be some way to make it work.

[Lavastage]

Only borgs don't actually go after vampires like they do with lings. I don't think i've ever in my whole game experience, witnessed a borg kill a vampire. Ever.

That's because for some odd reason vampires are considered human I think? Or is that just zombies? Vampires are basically undead wizards.

No, they are non human. It's just that borgs don't go after them because it is actually harder to find a vampire rather than a changeling. let me re iterate.
It is harder to find a vampire rather than a changeling.
I think something is a bit off here. How can a horrible shape shifting monster designed to impersonate others easier to catch rather than vlad? Plus if a vampire who is all out rampaging is caught by a borg, a quick glare and mist form and the borg is there no longer!

so yeah, I agree with Sundance's Idea.

[Kovirii]

blood code would need some changes to really fix vampire

as it stands now if you find a braindead guy and a medkit/medbot you can get more blood than you would ever possibly need

I heard that blood is going to be overhauled in the future.

[mozi]

Flash-lights: The cloak of darkness is easily shattered by flash-lights. Coupled with you PDA flash light and the ability to stack brightness, you can get enough light coming off your person to see a vampire coming a mile away.

this is def not true, it's bugged so you can stand right next to a cloaked vamp who is stunned, holding a flashlight or having a flashlight on the ground, and you know exactly where he is but can't interact with him because cloak of darkness is bugged shit

we complained about regular traitor cloak being shit long enough that it got retooled but CoD is even worse

[atomic1fire]

Cool idea that doesn't just involve making more garlic (although it does involve that)

Allicin is a chemical found in garlic that has medical uses, in addition to making garlic smell and junk.

Why not make it something medbay carries for cough treatment, food poisoning, and probably other stuff it can be used for.

A doctor can give it to someone for food poisoning instead of just making them sleep, but now the station has a readily availible substiance for vampires.

Make Allicin sorta effective against vampires (but less effective then holy water, which sets them on fire) as a way for doctors to sorta find vampires and maybe stun/hurt them a bit.

Because of the fact that giving doctors a super effective chemical to fight vampires with is kinda dumb, and in real life allicin breaks down quickly, give it a super high burn through rate when injected, so you either need a lot to kill a vampire, or use it for detecting the vampire far faster then holy water, because you can readily grow garlic everywhere.


Chef could slip some in food and anyone who starts acting like the garlic has made them sick or something can be sprayed at with holy water.

That's my probably dumb vampire suggestion.

[APARTHEID]

Make Allicin sorta effective against vampires (but less effective then holy water, which sets them on fire) as a way for doctors to sorta find vampires and maybe stun/hurt them a bit.

As I found out, splashing 10 units of holy water isn't enough to set a vampire on fire; it has to be the full 30.

[Kovirii]

Make Allicin sorta effective against vampires (but less effective then holy water, which sets them on fire) as a way for doctors to sorta find vampires and maybe stun/hurt them a bit.

Because of the fact that giving doctors a super effective chemical to fight vampires with is kinda dumb, and in real life allicin breaks down quickly, give it a super high burn through rate when injected, so you either need a lot to kill a vampire, or use it for detecting the vampire far faster then holy water, because you can readily grow garlic everywhere.

Why doesn't Silver sulfadiazine, or just plain silver have any effect on vampires?

[atomic1fire]

Also on that note, since charcoal is basically burnt wood, perhaps antitoxin syringes/antitoxin pills could be nasty too.

It would be funny if medbay was turned into a vampires favorite place for blood but also their worst nightmare if caught.

In general if there's drugs that could be used to screw with vampires, there should be.

If a vampire can sit and keep bulk healing someone with drugs then drink their blood more, doctors should use certain drugs to make a vampire run away.

e.g Burn patches become silver bullets, charcoal syringes become stakes, etc.

[Kovirii]

Also on that note, since charcoal is basically burnt wood, perhaps antitoxin syringes/antitoxin pills could be nasty too.

It would be funny if medbay was turned into a vampires favorite place for blood but also their worst nightmare if caught.

In general if there's drugs that could be used to screw with vampires, there should be.

If a vampire can sit and keep bulk healing someone with drugs then drink their blood more, doctors should use certain drugs to make a vampire run away.

e.g Burn patches become silver bullets, charcoal syringes become stakes, etc.

Since when are burnt stakes a vampire thing?
I'd support wooden stakes if someone wants to sprite those.

Medbay already has toxin, calomel, cryoxodone, atropine, embalming fluid, and haloperidol. There's also nicotine. I'm not sure how many more we need, but Allicin having some special effect would be cool, or you know, just causing tox damage.
I don't know about Silver sulfadiazine and burn patches, but Silver should at least have some effect, probably condition dependent.
If a vampire consumes someone's blood, do the reagents in it have any effect on them?

Now doping some bullets with silver would be interesting.

[Daeren]

I've said this a bunch, but I'm probably the most openly cantankerous admin about vampires. Fuck 'em. To put it this way, when I screw around with or hand out Omnitraitor - the admin-only antagonist that gives you the powers of all antagonist types at once - 95% of what you end up actually using comes from the Vampire tab, with the occasional bit of Spit Acid, Abomination, and Wrestlemania. It's just that much better than everything else.

Vampires, IMO, went from crazy weak to crazy overpowered from a combination of changes. First off was when the blood stuff was changed to let you get 200 units of blood per person, instead of 100 if you were lucky. Suddenly, you only need to eat two and a half living people to come completely online, which really isn't that hard. Think of it, killing two people and roughing up a third is something you can do with your bare hands and some cunning, and vampires start with Glare, Hypnotize, and a permanent stun/drain if left alone. You can be at 600 blood and ripping crowds to pieces better than a wizard in five minutes if you're fast, and with absolutely no effort if you go to the diner to do it.

That brings me to point #2, Glare. Hoooly shit, Glare's one of the biggest single problems with vampires. It was added back when vampires didn't really have many options in their early game and when feeding was a lot more difficult. Their only option was effectively to find a braindead human or monkey to chew on until they got their actually useful powers - that, or find someone willing to be hooked up and used as a battery to fuel an antagonist rampage, which was unfortunately far more common than it should have been. So, Glare got added as a low cooldown, single-target flash with some big red bold text. Fair enough, right? Except it went through eye protection (and I'm almost certain it still does) and dazed everybody nearby in a wide area, scrambling their movement. Now, not only do you have a single target disable, it fucks with attacker movement long enough for you to sprint off with your ill-gotten assistant. Even at full power, Glare is a great way to follow up Chiropteran Screech or a swarm of bats.

Point #3 is basically everything already said about Cloak of Darkness, with Mist Form and Rejuvenate's upgraded form added on top of that. Oh hey! You have thermals/lucked out with your flashlights and found the vampire! Nope, fuck you, Rejuvenate -> Glare, then either Bats/Scream -> steal your shit and kill you, or Mist Form away. You can't outplay a vampire with enough blood, your only hope is that they fuck up somehow or they mismanage cooldowns. That's dumb and boring and unfun.

Vampires as-stands are ridiculous changeling-wizard hybrids that need to be viciously kneecapped and possibly reworked entirely.

Let botany grow garlic to use against the vampire?

Garlic is already full of holy water. Nobody ever bothers, because holy water is incredibly easy to make, botanists never do their jobs, and vampires will just butcher anybody force-feeding them garlic if they don't extract the holy water, and at that point why not just go to the bar and make more in less time?

And what's even lamer is that you the cloaker can't even tell when you're cloaked or not because that damn light sprite keeps appearing even when you're in full view sometimes, not that you can tell if it's there or not when it's not. Back when cloaking was just a straight up distortion field it was a lot more noticeable to thermals and AIs and shit but at least you knew if it was on or not.

For real, I have no idea why the cloaking sprite got changed to that stupid swoosh-every-couple-seconds thing. Even if you've got thermals, you have to be watching closely at the right time to see if someone's actually invisible. Shit's dumb, and Chameleon has a MUCH more visible effect for it. Make all the cloaking effects look like that.

[Crumplehat]

It was changed... I don't know when, but I think it was when vampires were still new, maybe? I can't remember, but the reason at the time was that the cloak effect was always on and obvious as hell if you had thermals or were a robot. And the thing was robots/AI's would narc the everloving shit out of you at the drop of a hat. This effectively made the thing totally worthless if you had any cybernetic PCs running around at all. Which was an okay idea at the time but it ended up being a monster, because not only was it hard for a cloaked person to tell if they were still cloaked (especially vampires when the lighting code was changed and it was hard to tell if you were "in the shadows" or not, and oftentimes the effect didn't disappear even when the cloaker became visible, outing them to people who could see them), but on the other side of the fence, even with thermals you couldn't be sure you were looking at a cloaker unless you caught sight of that swoosh.

So basically it's been fucked for ages now in several ways, but nobody's gotten around to fixing it.

[mozi]

iirc dr. kay was the last to tweak it and he hasn't touched anything in awhile and most coders don't like undoing or drastically changing stuff other folks have worked on

[Sundance]

iirc dr. kay was the last to tweak it and he hasn't touched anything in awhile and most coders don't like undoing or drastically changing stuff other folks have worked on

I completely understand and I don't mean to be impudent or offhand about it but..
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2453&hilit=vampire
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1974&hilit=vampire
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1665&hilit=vampire
viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1609&hilit=vampire#p16661

..are threads (not including this one) solely for the purpose of nerfing vampire dating back to july 2013. Don't you think that's just.. a bit ridiculous?

With respect to Dr. Kay's work, there are 3 options we can do:
Option 1: Remove vampire from the round rotation
This doesn't change any code, it just puts it on the back-burner iirc. This was the purpose of this thread, because it doesn't require any coding and thus pretty much anybody could do it given the power.

Option 2: Copy and paste. Start from the ground up
What I mean by this is take the vampire we have right now, and put it on the back-burner, but this copy some of the code over to a new fresh vampire. This way the vampire we have now is preserved, and we have something to work with.

[Sundance]

2 options whoops. Proof-reading at it's finest.