This will be our thread of updates for the month of December. Please make your comments in the matching Improvements Feedback thread.
(Edited by Johnny at 11:24 am on 12/5/2021)
banner art by Grand Failure
(Edited by Johnny at 11:24 am on 12/5/2021)
There are now 2 grocery stores. One on Gold and one on Green. (You can pretend there are numerous other ones, but none on Red.) We've changed grocery stores be dynamically stocked nightly and food and drink now specify which store they're sold at. This means that as builders design new foods, they'll be able to have the new foods automatically added to the grocery stores when they're ready. You'll also find that you may need to travel more to find the food items you want.
I expect this will drive some new, nicer food stuffs to be created over the coming months or to see items move from one store to the other, etc.
You can now ignore ambient tvs for up to an hour using 'ignore tv' and undo this with 'watch tv'. It will automatically expire after one hour.
I've tweaked faction standing slightly so you get credit for certain actions you didn't before. No more details required. Just letting folx know this got a bit of love.
NPCs asked who they are may now answer with their preferred nickname if they like you enough.
Looking at items on shelves will now show you what ingredients they're made of and what sort of recipes (plate of, bowl of, etc) you'll be able make from it.
Yes, I've posted about this before. Yes, I am posting about it again. The SIC Triangulator devices have gone through yet another rebalance. This time they've been given a lockout feature, and a warm feature.
When your triangulator is locked out, it is bricked until the SIC network expires a timeout.
When your triangulator is warm, you've been using it too much but you can keep using it. But there's a risk. Get caught while using your triangulator and it will alert the WJF, and lock out your device.
Additionally, the code that detects if you've been using it too many times in one location has been broadened significantly, and many, many locations may now be considered 'the same location'.
The difficulty for playing all instruments was previously the same. Now some instruments are more difficult than others to play.
DOME LEVEL SCALAR
Some crowds are easier to impress than others. The higher you go up in the dome, the harsher those crowds will be to please with your playing. It's a real way to throw your dick down playing the hardest instrument at a level and still whip ass.
INSTRUMENT INSPECTION
Some instruments when you inspect them will tell you if they are easy or not to play depending on your skill level.
Fires now correctly factor in armor when doing damage to players. Minor fires now do damage to players.
Drumsets have been added as the first of an introduction of a new type of instrument that can be installed or uninstalled in a room and is quite heavy.
(Edited by MirageGM at 4:59 pm on 12/9/2021)
Bartenders now want you to have a drink, they don't care if it's alcoholic. The messaging and the requirements have been updated.
CHATTER SKILL CHECKS
Chatter / Rumors now require half the stat/skill rolls they previously did. This applies to bartenders, HR folx, decker chatter, etc.
Max players before the NPC said they were too busy was set to 1. I've updated this to 2. This means that you can get a bartender to give you chatter if there is another PC in the room. This could get spammy, and if it does, please render that feedback.
The clerk code for when someone enters the WJF will now ignore HOJ employees. This code actually existed, and I remember writing it, it was just broken because it was looking at the wrong thing and may have never worked. Past Slither didn't understand things as well as I do. This should be resolved now. If you enter and get a message when you think you shouldn't, @Bug it so I can look into it.
Clerks will now not greet anyone in a WJF helmet as well, to prevent outing non-Judges pretending to be judges.
(Edited by MirageGM at 3:05 pm on 12/10/2021)
I've moved the stream of chatter that bartenders had for mix deaths from bartenders to gangers. Not every ganger has this information, but every gang, including the park, terra, and heaven has two NPCs that will give this chatter. However, you must have a bit of faction standing with the NPC's group for them to be willing to talk to you about this kinda thing. This should resolve the issue people raised with the deaths being a bit spammy, since you'll have to seek this specific information out, and the gangers seem like the people who would know it. Ask your favorite gangers what the chatter is until you find one willing to talk.
CHATTER GATES
I have adjusted the checks made for general chatter such that many more people will have access to basic chatter from bartender/gangers. It checks a variety of skills / stats to determine if you're worth talking to. Since this is for general chatter that we want widely available, I wanted to make this as accessible as possible. If you had previously been told 'you don't seem like someone worth talking to' please check again as I think you'll most likely have better luck.
This does not apply to more specialized NPCs like HR folx or deckers or scavengers that have more specialized information.
For a long time now we've been taking into account a variety of things that business owners can be doing (employing people, sic ads, skill checks for relevant skills, having events, and much more) as part of a monthly review of the automated weekly profits that businesses make from 'ambient' populations. These differ between a shop and a bar/club and a garage. This was a pretty big effort that Glitch was doing manually.
Several months back I created code for GMs to 'rate' leases based on a variety of questions that the GMs answer 'did the person have an event' and things like that. This provides us with some data on things that the MOO can't track automatically.
I also added a variety of analytics based on things Glitch was gathering manually and created a command for him to review a readout of all the things that businesses were doing, and incorporated his algorithm for increasing or decreasing the weekly profits based on all the input. This allowed him to update the leases much more effectively.
After this was battle tested, it was time to automate it. And as of a few minutes ago, this is a completely self contained system (aside from the inputs from GMs on the more intangible pieces of a lease).
The automated system runs monthly and will update the weekly profits for a business based on the results of all the data collected. These changes can be positive (an increase in profit), neutral (no change), or negative (a decrease in profits).
What this means is that characters who run businesses and are actively advertising, promoting, employing, putting UE into relevant skills & stats (trading, charisma) will see their weekly profits increase month over month, and players who are doing some of this, may see a smaller increase or they will stay neutral, and players doing fuck all, will see a decrease.
There are hard minimums and maximums, so there will come a point where profits can't go up or down any further. When a lease is first taken over it will be at the minimum weekly profits possible, so there is no place to go but up!
We'll keep an eye on this system, as we get a monthly readout of all the businesses, and what went into the calculations, as well as the changes being made.
These are not going to be earth shattering changes, but rather a slow increase or decrease based on how the business is performing in the IC world.
And since it is now automated, it's one less thing we have to do, and one less thing we potentially get too busy to remember to do. So it will be very consistent!
Cyber-eyes and other cyberware that don't belong in blood scans no longer show up in those blood scans.
No more leaky cyber-eye fluid in your blood.
I wasn't originally going to post this change note, but since the shout this morning of me clearing strep off of everyone, it's not a secret anymore.
I've rebalanced how diseases spread in the air. As diseases progress and you experience symptoms, there is now a chance for it to jump from you to someone else in the room depending on many circumstances. If it's an enclosed space, how far you are in the disease, if it's been treated, and so on.
Diseases did not previously spread automatically through the air in this way. This obviously represents a huge buff to infectious diseases, and one disease in particular had some outlier numbers I wasn't expected. It's been nerfed and cleared from the players as it wasn't intended for Strep to be THAT infectious.
The rosco was not updated when the new face naked was added so old biomods were broken causing the rosco to not be able to work with them properly. I've fixed this.
No feature changes, I've just converted it into one of our internal action systems that should result in scrounge having no more softlock conditions when using it.
If you've any time since the game's creation had a moment where you typed something during a prompt from the game, and the game flipped out and spammed your entire buffer asking you for input.
That has been fixed. Across the entire game. It will not happen again.
Fixed a combat exploit where it was possible to abuse stop attacking in order to gain multiple entries on the initiatives table.
Banished people in the back of vehicles no longer are able to just enter the city.
IMMIGRATION GATE UPDATES: CONTRABAND
Contraband in the back of multi-room vehicles, or on people in multi-room vehicles, will cause you to fail to get through the gates.
IMMIGRATION GATE UPDATES: FEES
The fees charged on ingress/egress now take into account everyone in a vehicle, not just people up front.
Updated the spaceship launch command to support checking for multiple life support systems as ships now have redundant systems.
SPACESHIP FLYING RUNNING OUT OF TICKS
Fixed a bug where we were running out of ticks during space travel.
When you are a member of a mega-corp there are perks. One of those is that you now don't need to pay to add your work SIC key. This only applies to keys that are generated automatically and displayed on the key note pads. Not the secondary ones that different groups roll and use on their own.
This does have a few caveats.
1. The key still counts against your cap
2. It counts as a key when you add another key after it. So the cost for keys after your work key will still go up.
3. It must be the -current- key your corp is using. Won't work if the key is old and already out of use.
However since adding it is always free if you need to add another key you can always remove your work key, add the new key you want to add, pay the smaller fee, and then add the work key back for free. That is totally fine.
The polly parrot had a bug where when it hit its max amount of things it would record it would not add new items since it was taking the first 50 and keeping those, and the new message was added at slot 51.
I've made the new message add at the start of the list, thereby pushing out older things and keeping newer ones.
Polly Parrots will now record new shit again.
@review-cloth is a command that lets players review clothing that has been recycled to determine if it is worth keeping. An item is reviewed a number of times and then based on the group consensus it is either saved or recycled for good.
This is often an unfun job, but it needs to be done to keep the MOO clean. We currently have 260 items waiting review.
We are now incentivizing the use of @review-cloth with a 10c SIC credit per item reviewed. Happy reviewing.
These comments were being MOOMailed to GMs but not appearing in the terminal, resulting in us thinking we were telling people things like: Juniors do not rate ProTek, either for reimbursement or requisition. Please speak to your senior agents before you request something like this again. Or I will except we were not. These comments now show up under the 'my requests' section of employment terms.
Security gear now has a serial number in the description of the item which should make it more clear which item you are dealing with in the room.
We don't track (at the bank) who sends who money, but we do track basic info like money in, money out, deposit, withdrawal-- with the amount and a timestamp. This has been made available through a 'history' command in the banks. Works for regular and business accounts.
NPCs were supposed to be holding their best weapons when they are attacked but this code was broken due to recent changes to the combat system (from May I think). It's been resolved and NPCs should be holding their best weapons (or going unarmed if that's their thing) when attacked.
NPCS WILL SHEATH NON WEAPONS
NPCs holding non weapons will now smartly put those non weapons away at the start of combat. This is a new addition.
It is now possible to fish in the ocean. There are fishing rods (three types, differing quality) on sale at certain badlands stores, along with fishing bait (two types, differing quality). Higher quality rods and bait make fishing easier. You don't actually need bait to catch a fish but it is much harder if you don't have any. There is a help file on the fishing rod itself which details how things work.
Right now, there is no functional reason to fish. You can catch a fish and then kill it. There are still some bugs to work out and wonkiness with the fish (you can hit their hands, for instance, and other stuff I've gotta tweak).
There is only one kind of fish currently.
There is no current reason to catch a fish, other than having something to do RP wise out in the badlands.
However, my plan is to make a few different kinds of fish that you can fish for in different areas, and make certain NPCs accept freshly killed fish in exchange for money.
I also plan to make it so that you can eat a raw fish, or cook it. Stay tuned for more info on that as I code it over the next few days.
Peek had only been updated on Cube Hotel doors. Apparently we have like 8 copies of this verb for different door situations. I've updated all of them and they should all work. If you get a traceback, let me know.
There are now 8 different kinds of catchable fish in the game.
NEW FISHING LOCATIONS
There are two types of rooms you can catch fish in currently. These are rooms that have water. Different fish are available in each type of location. And there are different chances of catching a specific type of fish.
FISHMONGER SHACK
There is now a shack in the badlands with a Fishmonger. This shack will be visible if you get close enough to it, as a landmark. If you think about it you'll probably be able to figure out which direction it's in.
The shack sells fish.
FISHMONGER SHACK FISH PURCHASES
Similar to how we have an NPC that buys dead rats, the Fishmonger has an NPC that will buy dead fish. The fishmonger that buys fish will pay out based on the current demand of the fish.
The Fishmonger Shack has a sign in it with the fish that are catchable, as well as their current demand. High demand means higher payout. Lower demand means lower payout.
FISH DEMAND
The demand for fish changes every day. Different fish will be more or less in demand based on the day and the random calculations of the system. The availability of different types of fish does not currently change.
It is now possible to 'build campfire' in the badlands. This will have you gather tinder and small wood and build a campfire. Once the campfire is complete you can light it with a lighter. The campfire can be doused (putting it out) and then dismantled (erased essentially).
You can put things in campfires and they will burn and be destroyed.
Campfires can be seen at a distance, using the landmark system. They are visible even if they aren't lit, but are extra visible when lit.
You can't cook over these yet, but that's where I'm going with this.
NPCs like Dashiro will no longer wander into cube rooms, out of the gate into the badlands, and other strange places.
After a set amount of time (several hours) a campfire will automatically burn out.
CAMPFIRES RECYCLE
If a campfire isn't in use, isn't lit, and there is no one in the room, and it's older than a day, a campfire will be automatically recycled. This is important as we want the dynamic rooms they exist in to be recycled as well.
(Edited by Slither at 11:15 am on 12/30/2021)
All recorded content from years past that is loaded into memory has been converted to use proper $xterm256 colors, and not our ansi hack that we will no longer have when we move to ToastStunt.
COLORED WELCOME MESSAGE
The holiday splash when you connect has been converting to $xterm256
ROOMS & THINGS
All rooms and things have been converting over to the new color codes from the old. There was tons of old stuff that was still using old codes because it never needed to be updated.
Now that we've switched to ToastStunt I've switched from our hand-hacked precise suspend code to the built in version.
What does this mean? It means while vehicles are moving, the MOO does not halt everyone's actions across the entire game for however long the vehicle needs to move.
The number of vehicles we can have moving at once has now drastically increased.
We've formally switched over to ToastStunt and have entered our two week trial period where we will be putting it to the test.
By virtue of being on ToastStunt and have 64 bit integers-- KOTM is no longer capped at 250million. It's capped at 2.5 billion in earnings.
The Mudrammer client seems to make out of band connections to the MOO which for some reason are progressing further in ToastStunt than they were previously, causing a traceback. I believe I've caught the issue and it should be fine now.
I previously fixed roscos to support the new face naked but only fixed one, not realizing we had more than one. I have fixed the rest.
When you start fishing somewhere it will be assigned a modifier that determines how numerous the fish are in the area. This modifier will make it easier to catch fish. You can't 'see' it currently, but it means that if you fish around and aren't getting much, trying a new location may benefit you.