Hi! I’ve been working on a massive holoparasite rework recently - ditching Hippie-era shitcode and making things much smoother, in-depth, enjoyable, and user-friendly.
Here’s the actual PR, but this will be my official changelog, because there are literally too many changes to put in the PR changelog: Massive Holoparasite Rewrite + Rework by Absolucy · Pull Request #9387 · BeeStation/BeeStation-Hornet · GitHub
NOTE: there is a lot of stuff not mentioned here. I’m just tired ngl, don’t feel like explaining everything at the moment, but this is all the big stuff I’m pretty sure.
New Holoparasite Builder UI
I completely remade the holoparasite builder UI with this much nicer one - much less unused space, and just… looks nicer overall. I feel it’s somewhat easier to understand what’s going on with this UI, too.
There are even little QoL tooltips, telling you if you’ve entered something wrong or something:
HUD
The holoparasite HUD has seen some changes!
No more weird inconsistent mix of action buttons and verbs - everything important is a HUD button at the bottom now! And they all have tooltips, too!
(New sprites by @Pirill)
Abilities
Similar to virology, abilities now have explicit stat thresholds!
In addition, the UI will also list the interactions they have with the various holoparasite stats.
Scout
Scout holoparas now have a unique new ability when scouting: anything they hear (which the summoner can’t hear anyways) will be telepathically transmitted back to the summoner!
This has a limit though - messages will become more and more unreadable the further the speaker is from the holopara. This “falloff” distance is affected by a mix of the Potential and Range stats.
Also, there’s now a pinpointer HUD that’s active on the summoner whenever a holoparasite is scouting, pointing to the holopara.
Cloaking / Stalking
With a threshold of Potential 3 hit, the holoparasite can now optionally ‘cloak’ itself when scouting - it will become fully invisible and undetectable to everyone except itself and the summoner (however it can no longer speak or emote while cloaked).
Cloaked holoparasites can ‘stalk’ people, where they will anchor onto someone and follow their every move, without them being aware in any way… (One exception: if they stalk another holopara user, there’s a chance they may feel a strange, uneasy feeling when being stalked)
Explosive
Bombs must now be on the ground in order to be detonated (manually or otherwise). No more throwing bombs onto people’s heads.
Also, manual bomb detonations now have a flash and flame range.
The Hand
In my war against explicit Jojo references, I’ve renamed this to Spatial Rending.
Also, it has a cool visual effect whenever it pulls things now. I’ll screenshot it later.
Healing
This has 3 thresholds now!
Defense 3: Whenever healing a mob, small amounts of toxic or overdosing reagents will be purged with each hit. This respects toxinlovers, in that it won’t purge potentially helpful toxins from oozelings.
Potential 3: Reduces the duration of temporary ailments such as blindness, blurry vision, disgust, dizziness, confusion, and hallucinations with each heal.
Potential 5: Heals cellular damage with each hit, albeit at a lesser rate than normal damage.
Telepathy [New!]
A new minor lesser ability! It costs 1 point, and simply allows the holopara to send telepathic messages to anyone it has encountered recently (distance required for an ‘encounter’ is dependent on Range, while how long ‘recently’ is based on Potential)
At Potential 5, it will also allow people who are sent telepathic messages by the holoparasite to respond to them! (for up to ~3 minutes after the last message was sent).
Stargazers and people with the Telepathy mutation will be able to respond regardless of Potential (they still have the 3-minute limit, though).
Teleportation Pad
Warping something will now leave a “bluespace tear” behind, unless a threshold of Potential 4 is met. This bluespace tear will fade in over the course of a minute, and remain for another 90 seconds, where it will then disappear.
The tear can’t be interacted with, nor does it actually… do anything, it’s just an indicator that a holoparasite warped something here recently.
At Range 5, the holoparasite gains the ability to warp something to a bluespace beacon on a different Z-level!
Other Changes
Holoparas now spookily glow in the dark kinda
Holoparas will be ‘anchored’ to their summoner by default when manifesting, until they explicitly move on their own.
Your holopara being damaged while it cannot be actually seen next to you (i.e scout holoparas or max-range holoparas) will no longer instantly reveal you as the user… There is a new, unique reaction to taking damage, however!
(Note: there is a cooldown between these reactions, so they wont be spammed if your holopara is constantly being hurt during a fight)
You can no longer accidentally move out of range and end up snapping back to your summoner by accident - you just won’t be able to move if you would move out of your range.
There’s now somewhat of a ‘punishment’ for cheesing death via slimeperson shenanigans: if you die as a slimeperson and go to a new body while you have a holopara, it will deal a good chunk of brain, clone, and stamina damage to your new body, while also leaving you confused for several minutes…
Holoparasites are now immune to being polymorphed/wabbajacked… however, a holopara being hit by a polymorph bolt will force-recall it and deal a random amount of clone + toxin damage to the host.
The death of a holopara summoner is now very (ICly) traumatizing…
Holoparasites can now fully speak and understand any languages that their summoner can.
Holoparasites can now disable battle cries entirely, if they don’t want to have one.
Holoparasites can now reset themselves (give themselves up to ghosts) if they wish - and the owner can reset them for ‘free’ (without having a 5+ minute cooldown before they can reset again) if the holoparasite player has been AFK or disconnected for 5 minutes or longer (or if they just straight-up ghosted).
Holoparasites will now see their summoner’s antag HUDs
All of a single summoner’s holoparasites will now be grouped together on the roundend report.
