Future cloning.

[Klayboxx]

Idk you don't usually take out a feature that works fine in order to put a less fun one in instead

[Jerkops]

Idk you don't usually take out a feature that works fine in order to put a less fun one in instead

I think it working fine is what people believe the problem to be. It's too easy to be cloned, so life is cheap.

Still, if you're going to make it harder to clone people, maybe it should also be more powerful on the top-end. For instance, a good geneticist should be able to clone someone using just some blood or gibs.

[UrsulaMejor]

While I agree that all of these suggestions sound equally unfun, I see updating the cloning system as the kind of thing we did with the singularity.

The singularity was:
1) idiotically simple
2) able be set up by literally anyone
3) completely the same no matter how smart/skilled the person setting it up was
4) boring

The TEG is:
1) incredibly complex and cool to look at, but simple in execution
2) able to be set up by anyone with the patience to learn
3) different every single time, and rewards the development of a skill with better results
4) fun to work with

So, currently, Cloning/Genetics is:
1) idiotically simple
2) able to be done by literally anyone
3) completely the same no matter how smart/skilled the person doing it is.
4) boring

So when we make suggestions for a new cloner, i think we should focus primarily on improving those four points, as opposed to simply creating artificial difficulty.

[Klayboxx]

Idk you don't usually take out a feature that works fine in order to put a less fun one in instead

I think it working fine is what people believe the problem to be. It's too easy to be cloned, so life is cheap.

Still, if you're going to make it harder to clone people, maybe it should also be more powerful on the top-end. For instance, a good geneticist should be able to clone someone using just some blood or gibs.

That's how I've always felt about this game though. Life IS and should be cheap in this game. Add it stands, the game is balanced so as long as you aren't gibbed, you can be discovered and brought back to life. There are only a few ways for a traitor to gib someone into uncloneable mess. They can either disposal them, grind them into meat, or they can get their special items that allow them gib them.

The counter to this is its super easy to bring an ungibbed corpse to life. So if you don't hide a body well enough you will be found out. With this change it seems like geneticists won't really want to fuck with all of this extra bullshit and just moan when they get stuck with the job. The point is to make it fun, not annoying, drawn out, or boring.

[Cogwerks]

I just think it kinda makes forensics pointless if cloning is too easy. The default thing everyone does is just say 'alright, clone that guy, ask who killed him.' If the body is uncloneable, it ends up in the trash and nobody really thinks about them again.

[Clarks]

That's how I've always felt about this game though. Life IS and should be cheap in this game. Add it stands, the game is balanced so as long as you aren't gibbed, you can be discovered and brought back to life.

The counter to this is its super easy to bring an ungibbed corpse to life. So if you don't hide a body well enough you will be found out.

Yes, having to dispose of the body to be completely certain they won't come back is good.
And I don't mind the odd deader returning to hunt me when I'm a traitor.

Often though the cloner works full time. Placing some limits on how quickly you can clone people, would force geneticists to decide who to save and who to let go.
And a cloning process that requires control and tweaks would need a geneticist to stick around for a good outcome, or risk a mangled/unsuccessful clone.

I just think it kinda makes forensics pointless if cloning is too easy. The default thing everyone does is just say 'alright, clone that guy, ask who killed him.' If the body is uncloneable, it ends up in the trash and nobody really thinks about them again.

Thing is... forensic is mostly pointless. You can find bullets, but chances are you already know what gun was shot.
You can take a look at the damage types, and make a wild guess whether someone was killed by poison or a fire. But once someone dies, reagents are deleted from the body, they don't leave any trace which you can use for clues (maybe they should!). High toxicity could be poison, radiation or discount dan, and you have no way to know which.

[Xenonia]

Use the biomatter and the forensics ideas. Bam, Genetics is super duper

[Weavel]

That's what I was going for with the post-death-healing idea, Cogs. Allows for some actual genuine forensics; rather than just having a door to the utterly unused Morgue, the Detective can join in with some new toys and find bullets, laser damage, a clonked-in skull, or whatever. Not only that, all the code for post-death healing already exists! All that'd be needed to include would be a remodeling of the room, and a "This body is too damaged." message on the cloner, really.

[atomic1fire]

Not to mention, with forensics becoming a part of genetics, that solves the "No point to crime solving" problem.

Instead of reviving a person and having them tell everyone who the traitor is, you can tell what weapon the traitor might have, what they've been using to poison people, and use those as clues to finding out who did it.
Otherwise detective's forensics tools are generally pointless without a skilled player.

Use genetics to test other new forensic ideas as well, e.g clothing fibers from other uniforms, e.g yellow fibers, red fibers, grey fibers, etc.

Match the clothing to the traitor, and you have a concrete case.

[Nautilus]

I noticed that cloning had a functionality which was completely useless in practice - placing in a DNA disk into the cloning computer and using that to modify the genes of the clone. Problem is that the moment the clone is released, it automatically gains a random disease and needs a fresh strain of SE anyway, making an SE disk useless. Remove the random disease, but make the SE dependent on whether the clone was premature, or if the corpse was uninsured.

The cloning machine has a bunch of shortcuts and interesting things you can do to make the process faster, such as toggling the power and ejecting a clone quickly and then just shoving alkysine down its throat. What if doing methods such as that give a real deformity? Make it so if you do something like that, the clone is a meatcube and requires an immediate SE Injection before its bodily structure catastrophically fails.

It could tie in to the whole insurance system which determines the quality of the clone you'd have. Without insurance, you'd be revived with a completely different name and body type (and sometimes species - why not?) and it would be up to the geneticist in charge to repair these genetic faults. Maybe the player wants to DNR and takes the choice as a ghost so he can spectate the round, or maybe a traitor has taken pains to sabotage the insurance files, setting them to DNR and gibbing any attempted clone in the pod much like an EMP would.

What I'm saying is that the original cloning system isn't terrible but it can definitely be improved in a few ways here and there that aren't absolutely terrible. Putting in a feature that gives the cloner slightly more depth every now and then would definitely keep that aspect of genetics fresh.

(bring back revival via turning corpses from humans to monkeys and then back to humans imo)

[Klayboxx]

If you people want forensics to be a thing, make it a rule that people who are cloned don't remember the details of their death.

Oh wait, thats super lame.

It hasn't kept the game from being good before! Forensics as a gimmick isn't important enough to goof up a core part of the gameplay imo. Adding all these weird requirements and having a weird thing you have to do pretty much every round if you want to keep your same name post-death makes it a huge chore every round that you have to go through.

I dunno, I DON'T LIKE CHANGE ((

[Jerkops]

I dunno, I DON'T LIKE CHANGE ((

That does seem like the core argument against it, but it seems like after the robotics and engine overhauls, genetics really is the next big thing that needs attention.

I really like the idea of using the cryo tanks as a way to preserve the "life" in a corpse instead of just being a slow and stupid way to heal someone. You could really kill two birds with one stone by incorporating the useless cryo system into genetics somehow.

My contribution to the genetics idea would be, as I said earlier, to make genetics powerful enough to clone a dead person using only a blood sample or a chunk of flesh, but make it a somewhat attention-intensive and lengthy process so that it's not feasible to do it if you have a pile of bodies waiting outside the door.

If we care about realism at all (and I'm not saying we do, or even that we should, but it might be fun anyway) you could feasibly clone a person from a single strand of hair or a drop of blood, if all you need is readable DNA. I've never coded in BYOND or played with the SS13 source so I don't know exactly how it works, but from what I've gathered, DNA is a variable that is only stored in corpses before they decompose. I don't know if or how it's possible to store DNA in blood or body parts, but maybe there's some clever shortcut, or the genetics revamp in the works is already addressing that.

But if you could store DNA in blood, or body parts, and you took that sample to genetics, you'd need to purify the DNA to ensure that there's no contamination from foreign organisms in it. This could be impossible if the sample is old or mixed up with other stuff.

You'd also have to "grow" a body. The DNA of genetics test subjects or patients never really mattered before, since injecting someone with DNA or mutating them in the modifier magically changed every bit of DNA in their body. Throwing a bunch of biomatter into a vat and eventually pulling out a fresh braindead human would be the analogue to building a borg suit in robotics. This is where you could use cryo tubes - they preserve and gradually repair the bodies to be used in cloning. Maybe you could make it so they can be programmed to fix a body to have more "human-like" DNA so that it's more receptive to the modification step.

The tough part would be getting all of the DNA in the body to match the DNA of your purified sample - the person you want to clone. I guess that's where the modifier would come into play, and where genetics would get difficult. Instead of just stabbing someone with an injector, you'd have to fiddle with numbers, with the difficulty of the process being a factor of how much sample you begin with, and the amount of similar DNA in the body you're using. If you took a blood sample from a fresh corpse, then stuffed the corpse and some additional meat (for repairs) into the cloning vat, purified the blood sample, then put both the sample and the body into the modifier, it wouldn't be that hard to clone the person successfully. But if you purified some blood you scraped off the floor and then used it to modify a body made entirely of synthflesh and monkey meat, it would be a very difficult process with a lot of weird mutations and possible meat-cubing.

Those are some of my ideas, looking forward to the genetics changes whatever they are.

[Kaet]

To fix people popping out of the cloner shouting the name of whoever killed them, maybe have a 1 to 5 minute period where they will suffer from cloning sickness and will be unable to talk?

That way you could have someone interrogate him with yes/no questions to have the clone nod or shake his head to figure out who did it(if anyone cares). Custom emotes might have some people bypass this though so maybe disable that too while they cant talk?

[Weavel]

That sounds like a very unfun way to deal with something, and they'd just immediately start *custom emotes to say what happened. It's not about limiting players, it SHOULD be about giving more fun alternatives.

[Captain_Bravo]

Or just hand them a pen and have them write it down.

How about we do this: Cloned bodies are super easy to make. Like, easy-bake oven style. Just click a button on a machine, body pops out. However, it's just a generic body. If you want to be able to clone someone, you need their DNA. Geneticist takes the body to the DNA modifier, and if they have the right strand of DNA they can alter the body to become that person. If the DNA is right, then when they put the body in the Vita-Booth and flip the switch, the surge of electricity sucks the ghost into the new body, and the person steps out, fully cloned.

However, if there's no body to scan but you know someone is dead and have a sample, there's a trick for that too! You can stick that in the DNA Viewer, and figure out the important bits on the UI/UE strands. A little time and finesse in the DNA modifier, and you can try to brute-force a genome close enough for their ghost to reintegrate with the body. Better hope you didn't fuck up, though, or you might just revive the changeling that was just gibbed. Or the ghost of Shitty Bill.

I mean, I understand the thing about forensics, but I think there's other ways you can work to improve that job. Trying to gimp cloning (which can ruin the round for a shitton of people) to improve forensics (Which only has one person playing the job) kind of seems like a raw deal. This change would make cloning a more in-depth process, require a bit of skill with the job to do, and provide an outlet for those with a lot of skill and time to try and revive lost causes. Plus it adds in the all-important element of "If you fuck up, a naked man with a toolbox will bash your head in."