Changing weeds up a bit

[SPACEpotato1]

Summary (a quick, 2-3 sentence summary): So this is my first suggestion, sorry if it's trash. But basically, the idea is. When a marine destroys a weed sack (Those things that grow weeds, I forgot the actual name), the weed around it will slowly die. This may seem to mess up the balance, but just read on a bit.

Benefits (How this will benefit the server and game as a whole): It's a few tweaks that will (Or will try to) get rid of some issues with weeds and marines.

Details (Description of how you think this would work, the benefits, etc): So the idea is. When a marine destroys a node, the weed around it will die in around 1 or 2 minutes (Maybe 5 if it's easily abused, but I have a solution!). The way to prevent balance from going derp is to increase the HP nodes have. So you may think "Wtf is that going to do?", well, hear me out. What if, instead of just "destroying" the node, a marine could smack it a few times (Same amount it takes to destroy a node currently), and it will stop providing a buff to the xenos? (It'll still slow marines, but it won't speed up and heal xenos). So, when a marine damages a node, and moves on, because what's the point, right? Well a drone (Or any caste that can plant weeds), will get a new, fancy option called "Repair node", which will reverse the damage done to it. (If that's too hard to code, you can just have the "Plant weed" button, repair the weed or something). This will iron out whatever issues marines have with weeds, and it will change the way xenomorphs and marines play strategy wise. This could also make certain suggestions more plausible (I.E, the grass weed stuff that 2 people made a suggestion about)

Implementation (Optional, if you have an idea how to implement it): I ain't no coder. Just bug the coders I guess?

[username123]

Hmmm, neutral leaning to -1 because it is a lot of work for the dev team for too little benefit, would be better to spend that time to develop new things rather that something that is not really unbalanced.

[Boltersam]

Or. make it more simple. make weeds need to be within X tiles of a node to be able to survive and not wither up and die, this way more nodes actually helps a bit, and it has the "repair" concept built-in.

+1.

[username123]

Or. make it more simple. make weeds need to be within X tiles of a node to be able to survive and not wither up and die, this way more nodes actually helps a bit, and it has the "repair" concept built-in.

+1.

That will cause a lot of lag because all the weeds will need to analyze if there is a node near in a ZxZ range (where z is a variable) creating more lag than the motion tracker made.

[Boltersam]

That will cause a lot of lag because all the weeds will need to analyze if there is a node near in a ZxZ range (where z is a variable) creating more lag than the motion tracker made.

I see. Would it reduce the lag from it if Nodes scanned for weeds instead, and then reset their decay timers? It could work be resetting weed decay timers every five seconds (or would that cause a shitton of lag? not a coder.)

[username123]

I see. Would it reduce the lag from it if Nodes scanned for weeds instead, and then reset their decay timers? It could work be resetting weed decay timers every five seconds (or would that cause a shitton of lag? not a coder.)

That still produce a lot of lag, to put an example:



Here the weeds (blue squares) needs to analyze in a 3x3 range if there is a node inside of that range, if there is, they don't die, if there is not, they die, which means that each weeds analyze 9 tiles, 8 weeds analyze which is in total 72 tiles (y=9x where y= ammount of tiles analized and x= ammount of weeds). If we make the node analyze the weeds, it will be 1 node analyzing in a 3x3 range which means that is 9 tiles per node (y=9x where y= the ammount of tiles analized and x= ammount of nodes).

That would reduce the lag a lot,but it will still produce the same amount of lag per node that the motion tracker did, but much more, because we had 4 motion trackers before in the old map but weeds can be spammed by aliens indefinetly. Let's say that the motion tracker analyzed in a 10x10 range to beep, thats 100 tiles per motion tracker, 4 trackers, 400 constant tiles that they analyze. With weeds, let's say that we make the node analize in a 6x6, thats 36 tiles per node, and an alien can place 10 nodes with no problem in less than a minute, thats a lot of lag.

[SPACEpotato1]

Alright, so it's trash when actually applied to the game...

But it's great on paper, right?

As for the lag. Well I don't really know. Your profile picture urges me to find a flaw.
But I am going to post more suggestions, trash or not.
And they will suggest
And they will..........[Editors note: Leave a cool, dramatic line here]

[KingKire]

Okay i was thinking on this, and i have a small idea: Create a variable called Weed Life, and have it be applied to all weed tiles. It starts out at 1. When this variable is reduced to 0, the weeds will have a random chance to die off. This variable is reduced by 1 every time a weed node dies within a 4 tile circle radius. If a weed is planted within 4 tiles of a weed, you add 1 to the variable.

The thought process on this is that:
Weed Node(A) is planted. Every weed created by the Weed Node(A) has "1" weed life. The weeds spread out to the 4 tile radius. They are all happy little 1 life weeds. A drone plants a new Weed Node(B) 4 tiles west of the 1st node(A)
The Weed Node(B) does a single check and adds 1 weed life to all weed tiles within 4 radius. It then creates its weeds which have 1 weed life

Issue: how can we check to see if weeds tiles planted by Node (B) get +1 weed life from being near Node (A)? hmmm. There's gotta be a way to not have the weeds or the nodes constantly checking for new weeds all the time since that would create pointless lag and defeat this suggestion.

Maybe have weeds that are newly spawned a check cycle to see if there's any nodes nearby? That way there's only 4 checks:
- A check from a freshly made node to add+1 to any weeds nearby,.
- A check from a newly created weed to see if it has any nodes nearby and add +1.
- A check when the node is destroyed, to -1 from all nearby weeds.
- A random death check from weeds that is only triggered when its at 0 health .

I think this solves the issue of having the weeds constantly check to see if theres a node nearby, as the checks only occur when a node or weed is spawned/despawned.



All the weeds to the west of Weed Node (A) gain +1 life, while the ones outside the radius stay at 1.
Weed Node (A) is killed off. All the weeds within its radius lose 1 life. The weed tiles next to Weed Node B are now at 1 life, while all the other weeds outside Node B's radius are at 0 life, and start to randomly be deleted every other tick cycle.
We are now left with Weed Node (B)s weeds after a while.

So stands the mighty Weed node, last of its kind. Till a drone walks by and plants a friend and the cycle is restored.


Thoughts?

[SPACEpotato1]

-Potato-

Holy shit. That seems like it would work. Also wow, my suggestion JUST got revived.

[Snypehunter007]

Neutral

Would be interested to hear further feedback before weighing in.

[Caryl]

Why not assign the normal weeds that grow in that particular sac its sac's value. And then if the sac is destroyed, they all get destroyed over time.

[Anticept]

--Lots of things went here-- see viewtopic.php?f=59&t=6297&p=123241#p92014 for what was quoted

This is actually how many things in SS13 are optimized to the best of byond's ability. In programming, it's bad practice to base things on looping iteration when using a deterministic system such as weeds. Using triggers like this, instead of iteration, is how you keep resource use low.

[Wubs4Scrubs]

bumperino