Weight based AreaInsert and Dumpable delay, a janitor qol tweak #24899
Conversation
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I'm not so sure about this. Dumping - yes it makes sense for weight to determine the delay since a lighter bag is easier to dump than a heavier one. Regardless of quantity of contents. I'm with you on this one. But for area insert, it is in fact more arduous to hand pick 30 singular bullet casings or pins or whatever other tiny objects one by one, rather than a handful of bigger and heavier ones. IRL, sweeping with a broom is often employed when dealing with a bunch of small items, in order to gather then in one spot to make grabbing them in bulk easier (via dustpan for example). In any case - be it via sweeping and bulk collecting or handpicking - it takes more time to pick up more items. Area insert should stay quantity-based IMO. |
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I don't think anyone is going to complain that their immersion was broken just because a trash bag picked up bullets a little bit quicker. |
I am, now. Janitors have severely limited numbers on stations for a reason - we can't have them clean too fast. If they did: a) sabotage that relies on dirt becomes too weak (counter to antag fun), b) they wouldn't have enough to do and get bored (counter to janitor fun), and c) consequences of general dirtiness are reduced (counter to general player fun - having to find a different path through maints because a corridor is flooded with lube is emergent gameplay). Station succumbing to dirt meets all the criteria of core SS14 design Cleaning takes time so that an army of janitors isn't always keeping the station pristine (or: they can keep it pristine but it takes a lot of effort on their part). I'm pretty sure this is the reason janitor numbers are purposefully kept low. They must have a hard time keeping up by design. Whether area insert needs speeding up or not is a point of discussion. What I am pointing out here is that this isn't "just a QoL". It affects everyone's game. Not by much, but it does. tl;dr: buff the janitors too much with "QoL tweaks" like this, and all stations may need to go minus 1 on janitor numbers. And then station becomes dirty too quick and you end up needing more janitor buffs for them to keep up. I don't like the direction of fewer faster janitors. I think the opposite direction is preferable: give janitors more to do and keep them busy for longer, so more janitors per station are needed. Higher population of lesser impact janitors helps cushion situations like one of the janitors going SSD and leaving the station crippled. 1/4 janitors going SSD hurts more than 1/8, even if each of those 7 are twice as slow as one of the 31. Footnotes
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I actually find the really long doafter bar very satisfying lol It's kinda a way to be like "Wow look how long the bar is taking, I'm doing a good job gettin allota trash!" And that stupidly loud sound of dumping it all out brings me dopamine -Jani Enjoyer |
Janitor powergaming God forbid the crew stop making a mess of themselves, we give janitors cleaning grenades, or flood the station with cleanbots. QoL is just QoL (especially out of their own volition and contributing), nerf janitors directly then rather than making their job clunky, buggy or unintuitive. |
I put the "QoL tweak" in quotes because this isn't a QoL tweak. Neither is it janky, a bug, or unintuitive. A good example of QoL is the trash bags having an area insert in the first place. Thanks to that, the player can pick up 30 items using a single click and a delay rather than having to click 60-121 times, walk, strain their eyes, fight with UI, etc. etc. The "life" that "quality of life" stands for is the life of the player. QoL means an improvement for the player - making it easier/less of a chore to make the game do what they want it to do. Going from 1 click + 12 seconds wait to 1 click + 5 seconds wait is not a QoL change. It takes the player in charge the same amount of effort. This is a balance change. Alas, I think we are going slightly off topic here. I don't think doafter needs to be shorter - though I don't oppose shortening it. The thing I am against is area insert delay being-weight based rather than quantity-based. Make it 5 seconds if you must, but it should scale with the number of items, not (just?) their weight. The reason I started talking about janitor balance was a response to OP trying to justify the change by saying "janitors won't mind because they get a hidden buff from it". That's the wrong approach, hence the lengthy response why it's not this simple and faster-working janitors might not be what we want. |
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Thank you for your input, but I don't think this issue is worth the fuss you're making. I'm going to leave this for a maintainer to decide. |
About the PR
The delay for dumping and area inserting items into containers now scales with total item weight.
Why / Balance
Currently, a trash bag full of small items takes ~6 seconds to area insert. A bag full of tiny items takes a whopping 12 and is twice as long when dumping. (24 seconds!) This PR flattens these times and retunes the average to be roughly 5s for all weights in both situations.
Overall, this is a QoL tweak for Janitor players when picking up large piles of ejected cartridges, typically found after firefights.
Technical details
StorageComponentandDumpableComponentnow sum up the weights of all the items instead of simply counting them. The TimePerItem was turned into a constant and was reduced slightly to retune the average.DumpableComponentreads the same constant to set it's default value. Prototypes with explicitly set TimePerItem fields are unaffected.Media
Changelog
🆑 Krunk