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colonelbarker · 9 months ago

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Nebula dlebvog, August and September '24

G'day folks! This devblog covers both August and September due to Loaf missing the previous date due to Life Events, so it's a chunky one. It's also the first devblog posted solely on the new account, so Loaf is having to adjust to writing in the third person. Loaf feels like a Zhan-Khazan. Loaf does not understand this 'key board'.

Nebula SS13 is an open source project based on the Baystation 12 version of Space Station 13. SS13 is a top-down multiplayer simulation game where you play the crew of a ship, station, colony, etc. depending on your fork and map, with the Nebula and Bay forks having a focus on roleplaying and simulation interactions.

Contributor shout-outs and thank-yous

This section is new, and is just somewhere to call people out in public.

Shout out to Zirc for contributing the new lockpick icons! We were just using sticks before, but now we are using bent sticks with a nice roll to hold them!

Shout out to Doe for producing approximately nine billion new icons on very short turnarounds like some kind of pixel art machine. Shears and a fleece icon in maybe half an hour, amazing work!

Shout out to Penny for keeping track of changes to make writing this devblog less of a nightmare, as well as the usual huge amount of work put into the codebase!

Shout out to Noelle for pouring time into fixing Loaf's bad math and getting the new reagent heating mechanics to actually function!

Shout out to Liz for delving into horrible reagent code to fix quantizing and rounding issues that have been plaguing the codebase for months!

Shout out to NataKillar for steadily building out the reagent simulation towards a halcyon dream of something close to actual physics and matter phase changes!

Finally a big thank you to any contributors that were overlooked for this list - as well as to the players from ScavStation, Pyrelight and Polaris who have been reporting issues.

News

Another new section - just somewhere to put project news unrelated to changes and development.

Polaris, a venerable Bay fork, is currently looking at the feasibility of a Nebula rebase. This is taking the form of a new branch on their repo, and Atermonera and Cerebulon have been collaborating with Loaf and Penny to determine what needs to be ported or updated to replicate Polaris' featureset on Nebula. Woodrat has also been updating and improving the Exodus map in the process, as it is more suitable to a Polaris test than the Tradeship map, but needs some work to be brought up to scratch.

Notable changes

There have been a lot of changes made to our reagent simulation, both big and small.

Most significantly, NataKillar has separated the concept of solid and liquid reagents within the same container. This has been partially modelled for years, but only now is it actually handled in a way that allows for something like sediment at the bottom of a liquid, or ice cubes in a drink. With refinement, this system should let us finally make `water ice` and `solid water` the same material, instead of needing a special kind of ice that melts at 30C for iced drinks to work.

Loaf and Noelle have collaborated on adding a reagent heater to allow for distillation of ethanol on the medieval map. This was really finnicky and required a lot of work from Noelle in particular before the thresholds and draught were working, and came alongside handling for reagents within a container to boil off into vapour if hot enough. This last bit has been causing problems with soup and other liquid cooking, so probably needs some more time in the oven before it goes to stable, but progress is being made.

Some less wide-ranging changes include Liz fixing some very annoying rounding issues with reagent transfer, and the addition of the ability to drink from and wash your hands in reagent containers like wells, fountains and flooded turfs. Special handling was needed to stop drakes dunking their entire head in the fountain to wash it, as their only 'hand' slot is their mouth, which may be in character on reflection.

There have also been a lot of changes and improvements made to food code to support cooking on the medieval map.

Penny has added baking trays, which perform recipes like cooking bread when inserted into a kiln, similar to the way cooking pots on fire sources handle boiling and simmering recipes. Electric equivalents of ovens and stovetops still need to be added, but in the meantime the recipes can still be made in the microwave like regular old SS13.

Penny also spent some time ironing out the last taste and soup bugs, hopefully. This made room for her to add more by making food a closed container and not a /chems subtype in order to remove about three hundred !istype(food, /obj/item/chems/food) checks in reagent transfer code.

Loaf finally got around to reworking condiment containers to be less horrendous internally, which has the added bonus of salt shakers and mayo jars not morphing into a generic container when empty.

Loaf also put some time into expanding on dairy-based foods, initially just cheese, but then an implementation of butter taking Polaris' version as inspiration. Milk, cream, cheese and butter now track their origin and various appearance values like name and colour in their data, allowing for goat's milk to make feta cheese instead of everything making generic yellow cheese. There is still no way to actually produce cream from milk, but progress is being made.

Penny put some time into improving bulk storage and implementing a produce bin to hold arbitrary amounts of grown food, alongside porting and adapting a new compost bin sprite.

A ton of new props, items and mobs have been added to bulk out the medieval map and provide new ways to obtain resources.

Loaf split scrolls, staves, canes, sticks and brooms out of wizard code and generalized them, as well as adding behavior for brooms to be used to sweep with. This came alongside a more general refactor of stamps and paperwork, and made spellbooks into a subtype of actual books, allowing them to be put into a new dynamic bookcase object.

Loaf also struggled to keep up with a firehose of new icons produced by Doe, including a town bell, decorative gargoyles, wall fountains, stand-alone pillars and pedestals, several kinds of new clothing and armor, rideable horses, and a butter churn. Doe also produced some amazing multitile carts and wagons, but as yet it's not clear how they could be implemented nicely. Something for the future!

Loaf and Doe also collaborated to add a critically important, long overlooked new set of mobs: sparklewolves, sparklefoxes, sparkledeer and sparklerabbits. This required some systematisation of the way animal overlays are handled to allow for boring things like improved animal customisation and for wyrdlings on the Pyrelight downstream to customise their animal form, but the main benefit is that the ability to have woodland animal raves.

Animals have also been given a mouth inventory slot that can hold small items, which has yet to be rigorously tested but introduces the worrying possibility of mice being able to arm grenades.

There are also several other changes of note.

Penny made wall shutters possibly the most expensive on-click code in the game, all for the convenience of being able to open shutters with a table or stove/oven in the way.

Zirc created a new icon for lockpicks in a roll, which dovetailed nicely with a set of general changes to locks and lockpicking made for the medieval map. Jobs can now spawn with a set of keys if their job requires them, and lockpicking is a bit less all-or-nothing - failing to pick a lock will damage your picks instead of permanently jamming the lock.

Loaf implemented a new sprite accessory metadata system to support several features popular on Polaris and its downstreams, specifically tails and ears with multiple colour choices, and the ability to have a second hair colour applied with a gradient.

Noelle made an absurdly small change for a very large admin QOL gain: VV refreshes do not clear your current search parameters.

Current priorities

r5 staging is now months overdue, mostly due to shiny new feature stuff distracting both Penny and Loaf. A feature freeze until staging is merged to stable is a possibility...

Loaf has three big PRs open and pending completion: the beewrite (rewriting beehives into a broader insect nest/swarm system), a wizard refactor (a major rework of the ability system to allow modpacking things like spells), and the floor rewrite (why god why please send help). The floor rewrite in particular is needed for fun things like snow gathering on turfs, but layering issues have blocked it from completion so far.

Loaf has also put some work into a PVEVP wave defense mode, but has stalled on mob AI issues. The mob AI rewrites are ongoing but a lot of old bot code (cleanbots and securitrons, and such) needs conversion before the pathfinding system can be properly generalized to support things like async/cached A*, flocking, movement constraints, etc. Someday...

Bugs of note

On Pyrelight, wyrdlings are humans who have a mask that can change them into an animal form. Due to a cockup with reference clearing, this meant that every time someone looked at a wyrdling in character creation, it created a new woodland animal lurking in the void outside of reality. Trying to use the Follow verb as an observer would reveal nine hundred foxes vibing in nullspace.

Walking into water with a reagent container like a bucket or jar will mix the contents of the container with the water on the turf, which is fine. However, things like lanterns and pepper spray canisters consider themselves open containers it seems, which means you end up covered in flammable oil or pepper spray in the process.

The new handwashing code initially just used the name of the atom you were clicking, so using a turf resulted in messages like "You wash your hands in the mud.".

With the addition of the mouth inventory slot for animals, animals have been given the ability to invoke some previously human-only interaction code. Unfortunately this has replaced their natural weapons like teeth, so wolves attacking rabbits stomp them to death instead.

Horses are rideable, but directing a mount requires a grab, and grabs are considered a hostile action. This means that as soon as you get up on the horse's back, it flips out and starts trying to flee from you, which becomes sprinting wildly in random directions.

Parting words

The end of these always feels very abrupt, but this one in particular is enormous and feels like it needs a conclusion, so here's some boilerplate:

If you're at all interested in contributing to the project or just following on, feel free to join us on the Nebula SS13 Discord or have a squiz at the Nebula SS13 Github.

Please send any errors, omissions or requests for additions to @mistakenot4892 (mistakenot/Loaf on the Nebula Discord).

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