Remove potentially lag inducing shell casings

[FentanylPhil]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary): Remove shell casings from the server, and make weapons use case-less ammunition (with a few possible exceptions. At the very least, remove pistol, SMG and assault rifle cases.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): Could potentially significantly improve server performance and reduce lag spikes.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc): From what I understand, the roughly ~30 second long lag spikes every few minutes are due to BYOND cleaning up certain loose items on the ground. The BYOND code essentially does this all in one shot for the entire map every few minutes. (Admins or coders, feel free to correct me). As the round progresses, and there's a lot of skirmishes between the xenos and the marines, shell casings begin to make up a far more significant portion of the loose items. This makes the potential performance losses due to cleaning shell casings even more frustrating because they're most likely to be the the most severe right in the middle of the action.

I've discussed this with a few people in ghost chat while waiting for the round to end, and the general consensus seems to be that shell casings don't really add all too much to immersion, and the benefits of less lag would more than offset whatever bit of atmosphere they contribute to the whole game. However, I'm hoping to get some feedback as well, because I'm not quite sure how much of a performance increase it would actually result in (or if it would be worth the time and effort on the part of the devs to implement). I'd also like to know how the community would feel about shell casings, and if they would be missed.


Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it):
I've never worked with the BYOND engine, or developed for SS13, but from my own coding experience and what I've seen to be achievable on other servers I think the code for the weapons could be modded to make them not drop cases with relative ease. The recent (or perhaps upcoming, I can't really remember) update discussed the implementation of new bullet pathing algorithms, so something like this should be possible.

If not, it may be easy to simply reskin and add sounds to an already case-less weapon, and figure out a roundabout way of implementing reloading

[Adjective]

This entire suggestion is already being done and implemented. It has been mentioned in multiple forum posts and in-game by moderators, Rahlzel, and Absynth.

[apophis775]

Already done.