Security cameras recording

[gleb09]

What are your guys' opinions on if security cameras recorded what they were viewing?

Basically as the above says. I think it would be cool if the cameras around the station recorded what they saw for security officers or more likely for detectives to view after they discover a crime. You could skip around the recording and fast forward or rewind.

I think it would entice more stealthy traitors and give you that cool feeling of a detective watching the cameras to find that one clue they needed.
Obviously this shouldn't affect rampaging traitors because they don't care about stealth anyway.

To balance this I suggest:
Have the recordings be "lower resolution" or blurry to the extent that you can't make out the people's faces or IDs but you can still tell what they're wearing.
Have the recordings be stored on the mainframe somewhere so that stealthy killers who couldn't plan their murder beforehand still have a chance of erasing some evidence by hacking into it or physically removing the stored recordings.

Opinions?

[Mordent]

This kills the server.

[Wisecrack34]

If we had a magical way to make Byond good then sure maybe but until we find the genie of mundane wishes id say no 

Recording hallway chat logs including actions taken by crew, replacing names with person#1 and #2 and taking a picture of said crew member would be nifty, albeit difficult to do with little payoff and little chance of balancing well or being used at all

[Technature]

Yeah, sadly we have to keep the limitations of byond in mind when thinking things like this.

And sadly that means remembering that byond is kind of garbage.

[Firebarrage]

Images may be impossible, but what about a simplified version? Go to a computer, look up camera, see a text record like the one below.

[Timestamp] X is doing Y. They seem to be wearing Z.

E.g.
[11:05] Adrian Clarke is beating Roco Berry with a stun baton. He appears to be wearing a top hat.

On certain actions you would find all cameras within range and add a record to their list. Is this more feasable?

[Wisecrack34]

Images may be impossible, but what about a simplified version? Go to a computer, look up camera, see a text record like the one below.

[Timestamp] X is doing Y. They seem to be wearing Z.

E.g.
[11:05] Adrian Clarke is beating Roco Berry with a stun baton. He appears to be wearing a top hat.

On certain actions you would find all cameras within range and add a record to their list. Is this more feasable?

Negates need for detective work but if said detective has already been slaughtered then I guess this would work

[The Grim Sleeper]

a text record like the one below.
On certain actions you would find all cameras within range and add a record to their list. Is this more feasable?

It does sound more feasible the storing footage, but I don't know enough about Byonds programing language to be sure. But I can list the relevant obstacles for one way to do it and then somebody who does know can tell if it can be done that way.

• Whenever some texts needs to be shown to a player, the text is sent to their mob,  which invokes one of a set of *_message functions, and then the mob sends it to the controlling players text-box... I think.
  
• Security Camera's are not mob.dm, they are machinery.dm. They do not have the *_message functions required to receive and process messages. Adding these functions would be the first step in allowing camera's to record, but then these functions would then need to be invoked. This could be possible through some sort of magical Byonds function inheritance. But it is more likely that it doesn't, and then  it would require every single usage of "/mob/proc/show_message" and it's variants to add a line to also show it to cameras.
  

• Right now, there are several  *_message functions in mob.dm for this. I have no idea if any kind of organization or hierarchy exists within these to say what type of action should use specifically which *_message function, but I do know that if there is, it is not adhered too; So, on top of the problem mentioned, there is straight up truckload of dirty code to wade through to make this happen.
  

So yeah, this is a big project.

[Firebarrage]

I think the biggest pain would be getting it to work with the computer systems. 
Re: this making detective work easy: yeah it does make it easier, but fingerprinting is already easier than this is. If you like it could be the case that the camera fails on some parts of the message e.g. "Someone is attacking Y, but you can't quite make out who it is!". After all, NT is almost certainly using the cheapest cameras around. Perhaps the messages are stored as a tape in the camera rather than on a computer, forcing the detective to go get it to look at it, and letting crimers yank the tapes after crime.