Not sure this goes in this category, but I think it fits best here
Threat is obviously super important to ss13, as it is what decides what happens, but after asking around a bit it seems how its implemented has issues with it, so I am asking for clarity, or simply bringing potential shortcomings to light.
What I do know (feel free to call me dumb and correct me, please):
Threat has a random number based upon the roundstart player count
Threat costs are variable depending on some factor (not sure about this one)
Threat cannot grow in any way
Currently, threat after a certain time is simply not consumed, which leads to a somewhat strange instant antag flood past a certain time
Now here are some questions on why it is this why, or why can’t it be something else:
Is there an inherent issue with threat growing during the round?
Would, rather than putting threat cost to zero past x time, scaling threat cost (or potentially gain?) with the length of the current round.
Would having threat grow over time, at different rates, be a possible alternative to the current solution?
How difficult is the threat system to change/how much of a cascading affect come from changing it significantly.
Feel free to call me dumb should I have missed something or interpreted it wrong. It just seems that the recent change to threat has led to some strange “instant antag overtakes” because of the removed threat cost.
Antagonist types are decided based on this threat value, as well as their compatability with each other (Major antags cannot spawn with other antags, nukies/wizard and traitors can’t spawn together)
The game chooses some threat to spend at roundstart, and saves the rest for a 1:30h period.
Once the 1:30h period is over, the threat value is 0 and the game enters game-end mode, which will spawn round-ending antagonists only and ignores threat budgets.
I’m not a huge fan on the current system, but I have no time to work on it. Drama systems like dynamic is part of my dissertation, so maybe when I am done with that I might be able to find some time to work on it however it is unlikely since I’ll be moving into developing games independantly.
As for your questions specifically:
This is something I wanted to change about dynamic, however I don’t think it would change the final outputs of the system all that much; but it would make it a little bit easier to work with because right now its overcomplicated and a bit all over the place which makes it difficult to work with.
That could work, would need testing though.
I like this as an idea, but I’ll mention what I think the biggest issue is below
It shouldn’t be terribly hard to change, however dynamic isn’t created in a way that makes it easy to swap out components and refactor since its a very old system that has been in development for years.
What I really think is the biggest issue right now with dynamic is actually the inconsistency with it. Almost all complaints that come from dynamic stem from the edge rounds and typically not the average round, what I believe would be a good but extremely simple change would be to decrease the variance in the threat selection curve.
Dayum, homeboy is getting the uni certification and using us as mfing lab rats and study subjects on user behavior with regards to some kind of coding buizzz.