Empirez Demolition Frogs
It's... the most beautiful thing I've ever seen...
What have I given birth to...
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One is not supposed to speak about MAYHEM. (It is not in my basement chained up being fed scraps.)
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-Easy concept with different levels of difficulty.
You live on a spacestation, bad people show up sometimes. You can pick a job tailored to your level of skill, but many servers have differing communities so in practice, you might find yourself crowbarred to death, or yelled at because you didn't roleplay getting shot. Alternatively you can spend the entire round growing corn, or being a clown and making bad puns. Or be a traitor (assigned in game, not by choice) and kill everyone. -Round based gameplay. Every round is different, especially depending on the server. I'm sure each server forum has some kind of best moments thread about crazy, funny, or interesting things they've seen in game. I think TV tropes describes SS13 pretty well. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/ SpaceStation13?from=Main.SpaceStation13 | |
And don't forget the retarded moderators. Yesterday, about 2 minutes into the game I was randomly beaten to death by two people ( who weren't Syndicates ) and thrown out into space. I admin helped as they were beating me, no response. So the next round, I concoct one of my atomic bombs and wipe out Medbay. Almost instantly the admin PMs me "WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?"
I reply "Oh, you saw that, but you didn't see me being beat to death for no reason nor my adminhelp message last round? Suck it." So that makes 2 servers I'm now banned from. That's how hardcore I am. | |
Yes. Hardcore. :x
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I'll crosspost what I said when someone asked about this in the SS13 board.
As a player you have a ton of freedom and options and 100% of the game is cooperating or competing with other people. Since it's completely player driven no two rounds are ever the same. It's nothing but a bunch of people pretending to be spacemen, and some of those spacemen are trying to kill you and you don't know which ones. With the public codebases and different branches there's a wide range of experiences, anywhere from a few friends trying to run a deserted space station to crowded insane deathtraps where just staying alive until the escape shuttle comes is a challenge. There's places that take roleplay seriously and there's places that don't care and everything in between. Also it's actively developed every day by a bunch of different people going in different directions so there's always new things to try. Magicsofa wrote: One limitation that comes to mind is colored dynamic lighting. Space Station 13 has colored dynamic lighting. At least on the LLJK servers. It doesn't use icon blending. The Magic Man wrote: Also you have to remember, SS13 is basically community made and driven now. The person who initially made it hasn't worked on the game in years. We still talk to Exadv all the time. He was helping us work on some atmos issues very recently. Albro1 wrote: I'd like to hear what limits they are talking about. BYOND only runs on one core and is not very efficient. It is 32 bit. It uses a lot of deprecated Windows APIs. It has no diagnostic tools. It does not make very good use of modern hardware. SS13 is large and complicated and has serious performance issues. The DM environment's profiler, error logs and debugging API are extremely limited compared to other programming languages. With BYOND easy problems are difficult and difficult problems can be impossible. We could solve the performance issues today by gutting the game but the complexity is the fun. We'll keep making tiny improvements and trying to find a way to make our Frankenstein's monster get along with a system that just won't tell us what we're doing wrong. Doohl wrote: No, I am not, because I was not trying to say BYOND is at fault. BYOND wasn't designed to handle the amount of CPU SS13 uses. Most of the CPU usage, however, comes from wasteful practices in the code. Yes, the problem is the game's code. Of course it's the game's code. BYOND is just a platform, it doesn't do anything but what you tell it. BYOND makes it diffcult or impossible to fix the issues in SS13's code. | |
I'd just like to clarify that I'm not attacking BYOND here. The system was designed to make it easy to make multiplayer games and it accomplishes that. It was not designed to deal with games pushing the limits of what it can do and DM was never intended to compete with major programming languages.
Just wanted to answer some things. | |
"BYOND makes it diffcult or impossible to fix the issues in SS13's code."
That's pretty wrong. SS13's codes are bad, ss13 could be rewritten and have no performance issues. | |
No, it really couldn't. It was written over a decade by many intelligent people, you couldn't reproduce that effort and also do a better job on any kind of reasonable timeframe. You'd end up writing yourself into the same or some different corner when an issue popped up and you had no tools available to diagnose it.
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EmpirezTeam wrote:
So that makes 2 servers I'm now banned from. That's how hardcore I am. I tried it for the first time, but I got stuck inside of an escape pod with no way out. | |
Jittai wrote:
Except I'm doing exactly that, except for the last part. Heard that one before. Many, many, many times. | |
I think the point he was trying to make is, due to the way BYOND works, it is just inherently less efficient that using another programming language.
I don't know the technical details, but BYOND uses bytecode as opposed to machine code. BYOND has to read the bytecode, translate it into instructions for a machine, then tell the machine what to do. Machine code is just a set of instructions for the machine. BYOND adds extra steps to the entire process, so it is inherently less efficient. If you took two exact same functions, ran one in BYOND and one in another language, I'm willing to bet BYOND runs it slower every single time. This is just one of the downsides to using an easy to use language like BYOND, Gamemaker, RPG Maker and even things like Java. | |
Oh man you're so cool.