Gangs: Duffle bag changes

[TDHooligan]

[GAMEMODES][FEATURE]

About the PR

Adds:
Duffle bag traps:
If picked up by a civilian before any gang member, barbs inside the bag's handle will snap out and bury in their hand, becoming undroppable, and causing just enough bleed to leave a teeny blood trail. This can be fixed with a 20 second action bar to unhook the barbs from your hand..

2024-03-29.06-42-58.mp4

While unremovable by anyone but the civilian with it in their hand, gang members may also mercilessly rip the bag from a belligerent staff assistant's hand.

Duffle bag tracking:
When picked up by a civilian, or dragged outside of their room they spawned in, Duffle bags will send a radio message to the gang, informing them which room the bag is in & who knew about it (so that they can stop interrogating a player if their intel is bad).

Other nerd-hating behavior
Nerds will try to drag duffle bags to get around this, so:

• Using a new obj flag, duffle bags will notify their gang if dragged outside of the area they're spawned in.
• Using a new /atom flag, duffle bags are slow to drag.
• Lockers with a bag inside will act as if they have a mob inside and also slow down

Duffle bag QoL
Duffle bags now also use vis_contents, like gang crates. Anything taken out can't be put back in, but picking up a duffel bag will immediately re-seal it.

2024-03-29.06-40-38.mp4

Why's this needed?

Goody two-shoes keep stealing all of the gang loot and delivering it to security. Gangs are powerless to stop it, or even know it's happening. Now they have a chance to intervene.

Changelog

(u)TDHooligan
(*)Gangs are fed up of stolen drops. They've started booby trapping their bags and cut back on weight savings.

[Cherman0]

While preventing people from stealing these things is good, picking up some random thing and getting crippled and subsequently murdered seems kinda bad especially from a new player perspective who might not know how it works. Maybe non-gangs could have a long actionbar to pick it up and significantly slower movespeed while held. You can probably copy whatever the nukie knife uses to speed you up to implement the movespeed debuff.

[flappybatpal]

While preventing people from stealing these things is good, picking up some random thing and getting crippled and subsequently murdered seems kinda bad especially from a new player perspective who might not know how it works. Maybe non-gangs could have a long actionbar to pick it up and significantly slower movespeed while held. You can probably copy whatever the nukie knife uses to speed you up to implement the movespeed debuff.

Yeah I agree. This feels like quite a complicated solution. If anything I'd question if civs should be able to interact with the bags at all considering the issues that arise from it.

[TDHooligan]

this was discussed similarly in the discord thread - i don't see how the trap itself is actually complicated (you pick it up and it gets stuck). assuming that people are always going to get murdered for picking them up is also reductive, especially on RP.

i'm still open to making it impossible/harder for people to steal the duffle bags themselves, but i don't want to rush to remove options, players are already discussing crew being sidelined during gang shifts & keeping options open on how they interact helps counteract this.

Maybe non-gangs could have a long actionbar to pick it up and significantly slower movespeed while held.

Without the alarm, this is going to do next to nothing to address the issue. with the alarm, this seems similar in complexity, on top of being weirdly meta, and still needing the same workarounds i've built for dragging etc.

[Cherman0]

Its complicated in that its not at all what you'd expect from looking at it or understanding what it is. It doesnt look like something that would embed itself into your hand and summon a bunch of angry dudes to beat you up for lunch money. Whereas "heavy and cumbersome" is something a duffle bag could plausibly be.

I don't have any issue with the alarm, the hand embedding thing is weird and not useful. It doesnt actually stop you from just running off with it and in fact encourages you to get somewhere where the gangs cant catch you with it, like security.

[TDHooligan]

the hand embedding thing is weird and not useful

I think just saying 'not useful' is disingenuous. Just because you haven't thought of reasons for it to exist doesn't mean I just pulled it out of nowhere.

The embedding:

• stops you throwing it forwards to remove the slowdown it gives you
• stops you spacing/hiding the bag instantly (which would make the alarm useless, as the bag could be anywhere very quickly)
• is a sensible rationale to make you bleed, marking you as the thief & giving you a trail of blood to follow (which other contributors/devs have said is a fun idea)
• is not a death sentence

It's barbs inside a nylon handle attached to a heavy bag, I think this is thematic, not weird. it's not some space-age meta magic like 'glue that gives civilians an action timer'.

You're still also using this reductionist take of 'you will be beaten up immediately for having the bag' - RP is much more broad than this, even on classic most gangs (minus a couple notorious rampagers) are willing to talk to crew.

[Chatauscours]

I feel like it should give civilians that try to pick it up a big bright warning like "you feel like if you pick this up you'll get into big trouble with people that will kill you over this bag! Are you REALLY sure you want to pick this up?" or something of the sort, to give new players / players who have no idea how the bag works some sort of warning as to the fact that they'll get in trouble with the gangs over this.

[TDHooligan]

while i think the PDA messages serve this purpose (perhaps not reliably enough atm. i'll change up the messages to be more threatening in a sec),

i'm not entirely against the idea of adding some sort of warning, but that's also similarly meta as it'd involve overriding pickup behaviour.

[Cherman0]

I dont think an invisible hook that makes it slow to put down is any more "space-age meta magic" than an invisible weight that makes it slow to pick up or move with. What I'm mainly concerned about is this being a noob trap where experienced players know that if they touch it it will eat up their hand slot for a while and tell a bunch of antags where they are. The gamemode does have to work on classic too, and even on RP some random stealing their shit is plenty of justification to get murdered. To your point about the crew feeling sidelined during gangs, I dont want the "solution" to this problem being the expectation that the antags will not actually fight people.

If you had the gang location alert go off at the beginning of a 15 second pickup actionbar, reduce your movespeed while holding it and reduce its throw range like TTVs already do you'd have a workable solution that doesnt punish curiosity / unfamiliarity with the mechanics. If youre really concerned about people trying to make them entirely unfindable you could have a gang pinpointer that picks up its location after a long enough amount of time (also useful for if the selected person dies or is afk or in an azone or something).

Your proposed implementation does nothing to stop someone from just picking it up and immediately running away. Unless the gang has the detective bloodtrak thing they will not be able to follow such a tiny blood trail. Your average station is full of puddles of blood and bloody footsteps, 1px blood particles are going to be completely invisible. Especially in low light or with existing dirt decals and general filth on the ground.

[Mister-Moriarty]

My review is for the most part concentrated on styling and syntax; I have yet to test the code or review functionality thoroughly.