Security Cameras Recording Stuff

[mozi]

okay dumb brainfart here but I thought it could be a cool addition to the investigator's arsenal. encourages a bit more planning on the part of baddies, or at least the ability to think on one's feet and quickly cover their tracks when shit goes wrong. sorta bridge the gap between "changeling spits and abducts a guy in the middle of the hallway and no one cares" and "AI reports everything it notices no matter how irrelevant".

what if working security cameras recorded what they saw, and there was a database or computer that the detective/security could use to check these records? thus if you discover a pile of dead bodies stuffed in a room, or a mile long streak of blood in a maintenance corridor, or a door hacked open, instead of saying "welp they used gloves there is not a single clue to go on here" you could try checking the records to see who what happened there. if they cut the camera before using the area for any nefarious purposes then you're shit out of luck but that kind of forward thinking is cool right? also even if they get caught on camera maybe they could break into the security officer or database room and steal/delete/blow up the records. I like playing hitman blood money

here's the practical aspect: obviously byond isn't going to make actual video records. currently the game does log most everything that goes on, especially speech and combat, timestamps and (I think) coordinates. I was thinking it could be upped to include tags for every IC functional camera that should have seen the speech/combat/stuffing into a disposal chute. (how to do this without incurring horrible amounts of lag is a riddle I leave to smart people)

detective/whoever accesses the security records, specifies a camera "Aft Maintenance 3" or "Camera #32" and a starting time point into the round "0 minutes" "15m" and they get a log of everything the camera saw. in a busy place like the bar or medbay there'd probably so much shit going on that it'd be impossible to sort out what the hell happened but if you see "hmm the victim and 1 other person were the only people to enter the catering podbay before victim wound up toolboxed to death" you have a lead

my hope is this system would encourage more devious treason, or traitors doing funny shit to hide evidence of their crimes, and give the detective something to do other than drink & shoot people to death

feedback & scorn welcome :belarus:

[Readster]

I like this. There are so many cameras and so much logged that people couldn't just look through the recordings to find criminals without having a lead to go off of, while also being a valuable asset to the detective and HoS.
I think the terminals with access to the database should be exclusive to the HoS' office and the detectives office, and that they should obviously be linked to the mainframe so a clever criminal could either remove the thinktape from the sec database, or destroy the mainframe.
I support this idea entirely, though it's probably very complicated to put together.

[BlackPhoenix]

This gets my walrus of approval.

[UrsulaMejor]

"where were you from 7 to 9 this morning?"

"my office, detective, petting my heisenbee"

"really now, mister geon. Because these camera records..."

*detective hard boiled slaps down a pile of printed papers*

"...place you in the kitchen at 7:53; the last time anyone saw the chef."

"you falsified those records. You don't have anything on me or you'd have arrested me by now. This interrogation is over"

*door suddenly shuts, detective hard boiled stands up and cuffs director geon into his chair*

"oh no, mister geon. This investigation is far from over."

*detective hard boiled slaps director geon across the face!*

"now let me ask again, mister geon. Where were you from 7 to 9 this morning!?"


YES PLEASE

[Marquesas]

Absolutely. Yes.
Make the storage unit one or more databanks, so we finally have a use for ThinkTapes.
Also, consider the capacity of ThinkTapes and make it so that you have to exchange/empty tapes roughly every 20 minutes or it fills up and can't record anymore.

[Master Of Unlocking]

not security camera related but what about giving doors a log of IDs with timestamps that have opened them? you'd have to hack the door or break into a database somewhere to access that log but it would be one more way to trackdown what happened in a room

[mozi]

i gave the practical aspect a bit of thought when I was very productively procrastinating on important stuff

instead of having the logs figure out which camera can "see" a given action every time it happens (which would result in a bunch of calculations every time everyone did something which would be awful), I'd just have the logs make sure to record the XYZ of everything. I don't think that would add any server load cause the server already records vars of the person in question like their name and ckey.

then when the user selects a certain camera to check, the game calculates the range of XYZ coordinates in its view and pulls up all actions in the log whose stored XYZ are in that range. so the calculation would only happen whenever the detective looked something up instead of whenever something was recorded.

even cooler is that this way, when the camera process runs the calculation of what a given camera's visible "range" is, the game could also omit blind spots from camera recording coverage, in other words not letting the camera see through walls. so you could be committing a nefarious deed around the corner from a camera, the AI will still be able to spot you (boo), but at least the camera won't have any record of you lighting up that doobie. maybe over time veteran players will figure out all the blind spots in the coverage and adjust their crimes accordingly

the thinktapes that comprise the IC "recording" object doesn't need to store any data except timestamps stating "yes I started recording at 0 minutes" "I was removed and stopped recording at 10:30" "the HoS recovered me and put me back in the database at 30:40" etc., when the user pulls up recording data from a given period in time the game checks "is that time in the span covered by the loaded tape's recording?"

and I guess you'd need the camera objects to record timestamps too of when they were deactivated/reactivated so the game knows to omit any logs of stuff the camera shouldn't have seen cause someone cut the wire.

hmm it sounded a lot simpler in my head. if a pro-tier coder would weigh in that'd be rad

[mozi]

not security camera related but what about giving doors a log of IDs with timestamps that have opened them? you'd have to hack the door or break into a database somewhere to access that log but it would be one more way to trackdown what happened in a room

also i like this a lot, especially with the supercool hacking thing marq was working on you could spoof certain ID combos on doors to frame other folks for shit

[Marquesas]

the thinktapes that comprise the IC "recording" object doesn't need to store any data except timestamps stating "yes I started recording at 0 minutes" "I was removed and stopped recording at 10:30" "the HoS recovered me and put me back in the database at 30:40" etc., when the user pulls up recording data from a given period in time the game checks "is that time in the span covered by the loaded tape's recording?"

Physically this could be represented by a file with random obfuscated contents. Assume the cameras flush their contents into the file every minute, append CAPACITY/20 worth of data to it. You could manually tamper with the logs by appending things, thereby corrupting everything in the tape after that - this could be done by checking every obfuscated segment against the sequence generated for that minute (if it doesn't match any minute at all then it's invalid data, plus the minutes must be in strictly ascending order).

[Cogwerks]

This seems like it would be very expensive to implement, but I'll take a look at how audio recorders work.

[Morphing_Dwarf]

Ok, so I have an idea about how we could do this.

Screwdriver a camera open to remove the memory tape inside of it which contains footage, then take it to a special computer in the detective's or HoS's and put it in then slap on a pair of VR goggles or watch it on the computer to see what happened. It would make it so after you murder someone, you would just take the disk, and not have to worry about the cops... Unless you left some prints on the camera. That would be so cool.

Just imagine. You arrive on the scene of a major crime and find that the disk is missing. After some quick inspection, you find it in a nearby disposals chute. It showed the whole crime! That would make detective work a lot more rewarding. People would actually come check out the crime scenes for once!

[mozi]

This seems like it would be very expensive to implement, but I'll take a look at how audio recorders work.

it wouldn't actually record stuff, just draw stuff from the same master log admins look through

[Anticheese]

What if instead of continuously recording all your movements, the camera playback function shows what you were doing every ten seconds or so? That way you can get a bit of ambiguity ("Yeah, I had an extinguisher in my hand - I filled it with styptic powder and was dragging that guy to medbay! Honest!"), and it isn't dead easy to get a perfectly accurate timeline of someone's behaviour by tracking all of their historical movements.

[mozi]

the system as described wouldn't log movements or descriptions of people, just the stuff you see in the chatbox. so speaking, attacking, grabbing, disarming, resisting, stuffing into a locker.. stuff like that. the game currently logs some movements (like if you push someone into a fire) but its obviously not practical to log every step people take

a potential middle ground is to have logs make a note every time someone enters an area (areas defined as stuff like "chapel" or "aft maintenance corridor" or "wizard's den") and record the timestamp and coordinates, I think this wouldn't be processor expensive cause there's a built-in proc that already fires any time you enter a defined "area." it'd be kinda clumsy and maybe confusing to anyone reading the log data so mehh

having doors log user data from IDs used to open them would be a good way to supplement the info though. if a person in disguise wordlessly beat up someone in a room the security camera log would just be stuff like "Unknown punches Victim!" over and over again, pretty useless by itself, but from the log you'd know the time of the attack and could work from there

the super cool sly criminals will of course insist that their victim be the one to open the door to let them into the secluded murderzone so there is no record of their ID being used....

[Marquesas]

performance analysis

The problem here is not the recording but the listing itself.

Let's say you use the current text based admin logs;
- you extract the minutes and XYZ from the text - this is O(1) in this scope, but extracting an (assumingly well-formatted) value from the string is O(len), not to mention you have to do three string to integer casts
- now, you do a range check for each camera - the range check itself can be done manhattan style in O(1), so this is O(camera count)
- for each camera that passes this test, you have to check if the camera was active at the time, depending on storage this is O(1) or O(minutes elapsed); on any hits, abort, we saw this action.

Doesn't sound too bad, right? There are a few expensive operations in there, list management, string manipulation, etc. For each log entry.

We have two relatively infeasible options - either you do this, use the admin logs, and have a possibly massive server lockup each time someone click the FILTER button on the computer, or otherwise write a logging for this system which stores the data in a way that is easier to access - ie. it's well indexed. The latter will place additional load on action processing, but a well indexed dataset is fast to access. This is not as trivial as you might think.