Reworks the morph. Makes it a more stealth ambush oriented antag

[farie82]

What Does This PR Do

Makes the morph more stealth and ambush focused. Like a mimic in DnD or such.

1. Morphs now remember forms they learned. They can switch between them on the go (after a short do_after)
2. While morphed morphs are slower. This form is not meant for traveling
3. Morphs are a bit faster while in normal form. Still slower than humans.
4. While morphed morphs can prepare an ambush. This will make their first attack extra powerful and will weaken the target. When somebody touches the morph with their hands they will ambush them as well dealing even more damage. Walking away or attacking things/getting attacked will stop the ambush. Preparing for another 15 seconds will make their disguise perfect. Removing the there is something wrong message when examining. An alert will be shown to notify the user that he's in this mode.
5. Morphs can remember up to 5 forms. After that they will forget the oldest form.
6. Morphs gather food points when eating mobs and lose it when eating items (can't eat items if they have no food points). Bigger mobs mean more points. Humans also have a bonus. They start with a bit so they can use some abilities
7. Morphs can "reproduce" once they ate enough mobs. 5 humans right now or equivalent. A new morph will spawn from the signed up ghost pool. Morphs can only start reproducing on a floor tile. While a ghost is being picked they can't vent crawl.
8. Being eaten by a morph now will turn your suit sensors off if possible. Prisoner jumpsuits are an example of where this is not possible
9. Morphs eating light sources will try to extinguish them to avoid becoming a light source themselves
10. Morphs can no longer turn into certain things. Like effects or things that are way to big
11. Morphs have objectives! EAT AND REPRODUCE!
12. Morphs can open vents/scrubbers at the cost of stored food. Takes a bit to do for the user and then it slowly burns away 4 second total.
13. Eating items as a morph now takes 3 seconds instead of 21
14. Morphs can pass closed airlocks using an ability. This takes 6 seconds and won't work on bolted airlocks.
15. Morphs are now unpushable and unpullable in their true form.
16. New dead sprite for the morph. The old one was... weird
17. The Gluttony ruin now has a matter eater injector instead of the morph injector. It would be problematic to have miners become morphs now since they can reproduce and what not.
18. Turning into an object with the color var set to anything now properly resets your color once you become your true form again as morph

I've also changed the NPC behaviour to correctly use the new mimic spell and ambush ability. They do cheat though

All action button sprites except the pass airlock one were provided by @smokincheez
Dead morph and the pass airlock action button sprites was provided by @Pewtershmitz

Fixes a bug where wirecutters did not return a value when the attack succeeded. Dunno how much this impacted though

Fixes: #13800 since it removes the glut ruin morph injector. Thus no more cheese. Other cases can be dealt with using admins

Why It's Good For The Game

A morph is currently a bit... boring? It can turn into things but then it has no real ambush ability. If you undo your form you will be to slow to catch them and you do to little damage to actually hurt them enough to slow them down usually.
This PR aims to make morphs a dangerous foe for the crew. And something the crew should be paranoid about when finding a random taser in maintenance.

Images of changes

Morph morphing and ambush

When somebody tries to use the mimic while in ambush mode

Open vent ability

Reproduce ability (you spawn on the same tile)

Morph passing through airlocks

Changelog

🆑 Farie82 smokincheez Pewtershmitz
add: Added the Mimic spell. Works for morphs. Potential to work for other mobs (doesn't work yet). When used on other objects you will start to remember their form. When used on yourself you will get the option to morph into a remembered form
add: Morphs can now prepare an ambush when morphed. Dealing a ton of damage and will weaken the target.
add: Morphs now gather food points when they eat. This can be spent on eating non mobs and reproducing
add: Morphs can reproduce by eating enough mobs (5 humans will do)
add: Morphs can open welded vents/scrubbers at the cost of stored food
add: Morphs have formal objectives now. EAT AND REPRODUCE
add: Morphs can now pass through closed airlocks which are not bolted using an ability
tweak: Eating items as a morph costs food. 5 per item you eat. Not enough food points means no eating items
tweak: Being eaten by a morph turns your suit sensors off if possible
tweak: Morphs will try to extinguish light giving objects when eating them. Avoiding them to become a light source themselves
tweak: Morphs now use the Mimic spell.
tweak: Morphs are a bit faster when not morphed and slower when morphed.
tweak: Morphs do a bit less damage in normal form
tweak: Morphs can no longer transform into effects or objects to big.
tweak: Eating items as a morph now takes 3 seconds instead of 2
tweak: Morphs are unpushable and unpullable in their true form
tweak: Gluttany's ruin now has a matter eater injector instead of a morph injector
imageadd: Action background for morphs by smokincheez
imageadd: Icon for the mimic spell and the morph ambush, vent open and reproduce ability by smokincheez
imageadd: Alert icon for the morph ambush ability
imageadd: New dead morph sprite by Pewtershmitz
imageadd: Icon for the morph pass through airlock action button sprite by Pewtershmitz
fix: Turning into an object with the color var set to anything now properly resets your color once you become your true form again as morph
/:cl:

[Drobe50]

Does this also affect the morphs created by mining loot?

[Peakwastaken]

Morphs also desperately need more concise objectives.

I've seen a midround morph, disguised as an e-dagger, working as a sec offcer's partner, staying hidden until the officer was in danger and then revealing themselves to attack/drag them away... when ahelped, the answer was pretty much that morphs don't have objectives and as such are free to do whatever. This was an extremely frustrating experience and I really, really, think some clearer objectives for them is needed.

[farie82]

Does this also affect the morphs created by mining loot?

Yes any type of morph. Mining morphs are... a pain in the ass for me. I am not sure if they are seen as antags or not

Morphs also desperately need more concise objectives.

I've seen a midround morph, disguised as an e-dagger, working as a sec offcer's partner, staying hidden until the officer was in danger and then revealing themselves to attack/drag them away... when ahelped, the answer was pretty much that morphs don't have objectives and as such are free to do whatever. This was an extremely frustrating experience and I really, really, think some clearer objectives for them is needed.

Aye I hate those morphs as well. I'll think about adding some goals to make them unable to be "friendly" (disgusting).
I hope that the ability to reproduce and their abilities relying on eating mobs also helps with that

[farie82]

New update:
Morphs can open vents now by spending collected food. Gif coming soon.
Morphs have actual objectives now. All be it simple.
Morphs no longer can become effects and big things like the DNA vault or the dead clockwork god on lavaland. (might still not have covered all the edge cases though)
They start with a bit of stored food now

Sprites will be added soon. Made again by smokincheez!

[procdrone]

Greetings mimic.

Good change.

[Spacemanspark]

Very well made. Looking forward to this.

[farie82]

TM was done. Quite some issues were found and I got a lot of suggestions. Here a summary:

• Examine was broken... making the morphs appear normal while disguised. Fixed
• Morphs could split in vents. Fixed now by making them unable to do that + they can't vent crawl while the ghost player gets picked.
• I've nerfed their base speed and morphed speed a bit
• Their healing is now based on the food gained from the being eaten. It is a 1 on 1 conversion. So 30 healing from a human. Was 50 for all
• Fixed a bug where morphs could hide under vents when they disguised themselves as hidden maint drones or other hidden beings. They will now always be positioned on the Mob layer
• When using the ambush ability you now won't get the food left message
• Fixed a rogue pixel on the dead morph sprite (maybe another sprite will be made. Maybe not)
• Morphs can now pass through closed airlocks using an ability. Bolted airlocks will prevent the morph from passing it. No more having to break down maint doors when you spawn
• Fixed a bug where the ambush do_after didn't stop when unmorphing
• Fixed a runtime when you morphed twice without unmoprhing
• Fixed a runtime when remembering more than the limit of the forms
• Morphs can now not be pulled/pushed when they are in their true form. Morphs are slower now so getting away is painful already. Cheesing them getting away by pushing/pulling them is not possible now when they are unmorphed.
• When sitting still for another 15 seconds after preparing your ambush you will get a perfect disguise. This means that the "hey this looks weird" message when examining you does not get shown.

TODOs:
Add a sprite for the pass through doors ability.
Maybe add another sprite for the dead morph

Maybe stuff:
Add thermals to the morph. I can see why that would be nice but I don't want to give them to much buffs.
Remove the health HUD from them. This would make them even harder to detect. Maybe...
Make morphs spawn near vents more. Now they got the go through doors ability I don't think this is needed. Some of their spawns are already near a vent anyway.

[SteelSlayer]

The way this is set up makes abilities which cost food give confusing feedback in chat:

user.use_food(hunger_cost) should probably go further down in the chain of spell procs or something.

[farie82]

Aye I saw that as well while testing. Issue with fixing this is that I have to refactor the spell code even more :(
The costs are currently deducted before a cast. So if the user cancels the cast midway they will get a refund then the message will make more sense. Currently the after_cast proc is also always called no matter what cast returns so putting it there will lead to even worse messages. You have 30 left. You have 20 left (since it gets reversed before the after_cast gets called.

I think I'm gonna leave this one in till that refactor

[SteelSlayer]

Ah alright, I don't blame you, spell code is confusing/annoying to work with. Refactor is out of scope.

[SteelSlayer]

Component based? 👀

[farie82]

Not the components as in DM but more like described here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component-based_software_engineering
The targeting on it's own can be a datum or so which you can just put on your spell at will. Which will reduce the OO madness where you can't make a morph AOE spell and a morph click based spell
Soon:tm:

[SteelSlayer]

Oh ok I was thinking datum components, and I got excited for a minute 😄 Still, sounds like a good idea.

[SteelSlayer]

I don't think I've ever seen a new mind created like this when used for ghost roles. The observer should already have a mind (hopefully). Is there a reason you did this?

[farie82]

If you transfer the mind from the observer to the morph then they will keep their old objectives and memories. Even their martial arts and the like...
I don't want a hijack morph with carp :P

[SteelSlayer]

That's true I suppose.. which means it already happens with human based ghost roles, abductors, SITs and so on. 😳 At least, I think so.

Edit: Nevermind, they're given new minds.

[AllStickyGithub]

mining morphs are... a pain in the ass for me. I am not sure if they are seen as antags or not
If we are going to make a powerful antag out of morphs I am not sure we can justify leaving a free antag item on lavaland. The lavaland morph was never intended as an antagonist though. It was more like something miners could use to goof around with and miners have been punished by admins for abusing it. The real problem I see is the reproduction. If a miner morphs starts to reproduce what rules should the offspring follow?

I loved the TM though and if the gluttony ruin has to go for this it will still be worth it.

[TheYeetster1]

Was playing a round, Gluttony's Ruin Morph disguised as the bar sign, which is 2 tiles wide. I think you asked to be notified if you missed anything that they shouldn't be able to be disguised as? @farie82

[farie82]

Was playing a round, Gluttony's Ruin Morph disguised as the bar sign, which is 2 tiles wide. I think you asked to be notified if you missed anything that they shouldn't be able to be disguised as? @farie82

Yep! Thanks for the comment. I'll add it to the blacklist. I'm sure I won't get all the items but getting most "common" ones on the station would be good

[Necaladun]

Looks way more fun to me

[Spacemanspark]

@farie82 A morph was also able to disguise itself as sparks recently. Not sure if that's fixed in this PR but worth mentioning.

[farie82]

@farie82 A morph was also able to disguise itself as sparks recently. Not sure if that's fixed in this PR but worth mentioning.

Yeah that is fixed here. Ive made it impossible to become an effect

[farie82]

Small update, the gluttony ruin now has a matter eater implanter instead of the morph injector. Having miners become the new type of morph will be problematic to say the least

[dearmochi]

This sound still makes me physically cringe whenever I hear it

[farie82]

CRUNCH

[S34NW]

Is this in a ready state (minus the conflict?)

[farie82]

Is this in a ready state (minus the conflict?)

Yep yep. All finished