Renews Maintenance Drones

[JJRcop]

About The Pull Request

It's the second try! (First: #48456)

Drones are little robots inspired by Keepers from the Mass Effect games. With laws to maintain both the station, and their distance from the matters of others, they were a great ghost role that let you fix up the station when you were otherwise out of the round. They were in the game for quite a while, but were abused. The abusive players completely ignored the laws and did whatever they wanted. Being tiny ventcrawlers, this became a huge issue for admins.

I attempted to bring them back, this time with some gameplay restrictions to enforce their laws a bit better. It seemed to go well, but I required headmin approval, and this all happened near a headmin election, so the project died.

Recently, some people have wanted to bring drones back. So, they gave me a ring, and I started a discussion with the admin team to see what other changes they would want in addition to the previous ones.

Here are those changes:

• They can't interact at all when close to another being, living or dead
• Their binary chat has been removed to separate them from AI and borgs
• They can only hold a whitelist of items necessary to do their job
• They can only interact with machines necessary to do their job
• The drone satchel is gone, and drones now have built in basic tools
• They also can't interact in some blacklisted high risk areas
• Finally, you must play 40 hours total as a Silicon role in order to play as a drone

Additionally, the drone dispenser is not mapped, and the drones must be researched to be constructed.

Why It's Good For The Game

Drones are a fun way to pass the time, and this time they have a lot less freedom. You can still perform the basic function of maintaining the station, but not without difficulty and tedium. This will allow other station roles to perform much better than the drones, while still letting them chug along at their slower pace.

Changelog

🆑 JJRcop
add: Maintenance Drones are once again constructable in Robotics.
del: The Drone Dispenser has not made a return.
config: New settings DRONE_REQUIRED_ROLE, and DRONE_ROLE_PLAYTIME, which determine the playtime exp required for playing drones.
/:cl:

[IndieanaJones]

I'm noticing that drones don't seem to have any sort of internal metal storage. Realistically, how much can they actually fix with the toolset provided here?

[MrDoomBringer]

Should make drones be forced to use the system in #58029, ie they can only repair existing constructs

[JJRcop]

I'm noticing that drones don't seem to have any sort of internal metal storage. Realistically, how much can they actually fix with the toolset provided here?

Drones no longer have internal storage, but they still have hands. They can carry metal wherever they need it, but since they have no storage, they have to hold onto it, or drop it on the ground. This conveniently restricts what thet can hoard, as they can't hoard on themselves.

[JJRcop]

40 hours as silicon seems a little irrelevant.
A gate lik e100 hours total is much more useful, both in terms of players knowing game etiquette and this being usable by people other than silicon mains (🤮)

These numbers will not be changed. It is in a config file, so you are free to discuss with headmins after this is merged.

[MrDoomBringer]

These numbers will not be changed 😠

Had a quick conversation with JJ about this, for anyone wondering on any reasoning there's a discord policy discussion here
The silicon hour requirement being linked with law-following players makes sense

[JJRcop]

I do not plan to make many gameplay/functional changes aside from trivial ones, because this version of drones has headmin approval. Deviating from it is grounds to void the approval.

[JJRcop]

40 hours as silicon is ludicrous considering no other ghost roles require time, including becoming a borg brain.

This is my last reply to this type of comment: This is not changing. Please do not comment about this.

[JJRcop]

What are the next steps for this patch?

[optimumtact]

why are you doing this

[JJRcop]

Players can right click mobs to get the pull verb, which dodged the components I set up to block clicking.

[JJRcop]

I welcome suggestions to do this better, maybe making the pull verb go down the code path of ctrl click instead

[JJRcop]

Further discussed in discord: issue was about indenting a define, not for having a pull signal
Answer: following precedent
Conclusion: precedent sucks

Happy to fix the whole file for you

[LemonInTheDark]

One minor nitpick, but the code looks serviceable to me. I still would like to hear more opinions about the design from maintainers, specifically @LemonInTheDark

For the record I was initially concerned about drones because I was worried they'd outpace atmos techs and engineers, but in a not totally roundstart form like this I've got no problems with em

[theta006]

40 hours is a lot just to play as a bad engi borg

[optimumtact]

so go play engi borg then.

These are explicitly for dead players to fuck about in until teh round ends when they no longer want to rejoin the round meta

[davethwave]

Now to include a suicide with a drone shell inhand to boot your soul into the drone the cool way.

[notfrying1pans]

so go play engi borg then.

except that the average person who would want to play engie borg probably doesnt have over 40 hours as a borg

[Mothblocks]

if you think the 40 hour minimum is too high take it up with head admins over on the policy discussion board