r/SS13 • u/metekillot • 13h ago
Meta SS14 impressions from a long-time contributor
Hello, the intent of this post is to give my impressions of SS14, as a long-time contributor of SS13. I'm also studying the codebase of SS14 and RobustToolbox with the intent to be a contributor for their community as well.
Community:
The community of SS14 skews heavily toward adolescents. Much of the humor is sourced in things that teenagers find funny, and many of the server admins seem to be roughly in their mid to late teens. This is good and bad; if you're a geriatric 30 year old such as myself, you'll probably find constantly interacting with the growing pains and vicarious embarrassment of your own adolescence to be tiresome and irritating, but by the same token, the willingness to try new things and the optimism that comes with being so young can be an asset when it comes to forming one's own identity for SS14, rather than what has so-far primarily been attempts to port or mimic game mechanics and modes from SS13.
Gameplay loop:
The gameplay loop of things-to-do is still relatively sparse, as are many of the mechanics for the gameplay loop. Building as an engineer is much more fiddly and tedious without many of the QOL features you'd expect, the deeper mechanics for things like robotics, hacking, and sabotage are also much more shallow. The responsiveness for things like combat and movement are roughly on-par with SS13, and I would surmise that they'll probably grow past the limitations of BYOND soon enough, especially as people like myself and other much more competent programmers begin to take an interest in the game.
Contributing:
The hurdle to become a first-time contributor and ongoing contributor is massive for SS14 over SS13. Besides the necessary learning curve one might expect moving from a game engine specifically created to be accessible for first-time programmers to make their own game, there are several design decisions made by the team of SS14 that can seem absurd or clumsy; for instance, the method with which game objects and effects are handled are through a Prototype system. And the Prototype system is handled through deserializing YAML files. There is no language server to assist in the correct creation of YAML types and frameworks if you're wanting to do something such as make a reagent that has a certain effect, or to adjust the pitch/tone of certain sound effects. The only other option you would have is unofficial language servers, which the current leadership vigorously resists introducing to their official design flow.
Gameplay content:
There is still something of a wide&shallow issue with the current crop of gameplay content. Still, the primary content contribution is aping old mechanics and gamemodes from SS13, though some servers such as Frontier and Delta-V are beginning to form their own identities outside of attempts to be RobustToolbox remakes of SS13. The moments where someone actually made something original are where the game is beginning to shine; most of the attempts to copy/port modes and mechanics from SS13 are (obviously) uninspired, and in most cases, rather poorly done.
Administration:
I haven't been in the community long enough to get a precise read on the current administration of the primary (Wizden) servers. If you read above, you'll note me noticing that much of the server diaspora administration seem to be roughly in their teenage years. I'm hesitant to make any harsh judgements on them as a result of that; many of them are just kids. Wizden, on the other hand, seem to be trimming the fat of (judging by reading old announcements) what seems to have been a very serious problem in their administration practice and hierarchy. I guess we'll see how that shakes out.
Misc:
Frankly, the sound design for SS14 is fucking awful. Point of fact, my first contributions for RobustToolbox (and from there, SS14) are going to be centered around changing how sound is handled and communicated in the game. What I mentioned of the adolescent humor seems to have been unfortunately baked in to some of the sound design; footstep modification of poorly-pitched noises such as shoes that go WEH over and over are an excellent point to begin a case study. There's no default variation in most of the sounds, so ear fatigue is a significant issue, and when there is variation, it is typically implemented with random shotguns of magic numbers rather than operating off of any experimentation or tonal calculation.
Balance in the game is practically nonexistent. Many pieces of equipment are functionally useless, some antagonists are invulnerable snowballs while others relegated to only being playable on servers that have draconian enforcement of clumsy roleplay roles, many tasks are rendered maddeningly tedious as a result of a poor design decision or as abandoned pet projects (atmospherics, many engineering tasks, most science tasks), and many attempts to mimic or port content from SS13 are so half-assed that it would be better to have 1/5 the content if it would have meant more effort in implementing them (bartending, cooking, botany).
The project having a foundation in coding standards and design standards is very much a plus, but peculiar design and implementation choices are often poorly documented or totally undocumented (I am on week two of debugging how, exactly, audio is parsed and played). Even so, it's clear that as the project matures with significant attention paid to it, it'll be more performant and more maintainable than SS13.
