Sensible Lab Turrets

Dorian · 2015-12-12T16:47:51.000Z

I was thinking about lab turrets. While all other turrets in the game (road barricades, military bunkers, etc.) are placed relatively sensibly, the ones in labs are just plain dumb/silly. I can just imagine how being hired at one of those labs would have played out:

“Hi Bob, great to have you aboard! As you’ve been told, our facility is state of the art, and we offer free room and board to all employees. You’ll be staying here, in Cell 3 Barracks 2, which is the third door on the left. Just one thing. Don’t take the first door on the right.”

“Why?”

“You’ll be blown to bits by a gigantic automated machine gun. HAHAHA!”

“Haha… but seriously… why?”

“No, I am serious. Don’t go into that room.”

“Oh my god. What do you keep in there?”

“Nothing. It’s just to weed out the forgetful people.”

Hopefully this will help to illustrate the need of this suggestion. Turret rooms in labs are fine, but they should contain SOMETHING other than just a randomly placed turret in an enclosed room. I mean, why the hell did they put that there? My suggestions for contents would be these:

Chance of bookshelves containing lab diaries/formulas/etc. - instead of them just being strewn randomly about the lab.
Chance of bionics.
Chance of mutagen/serums/etc.

If turret rooms contained these, I could totally see the rooms going into automated security mode in an emergency lockdown situation.

pisskop · 2015-12-12T17:34:50.000Z

Youre misunderstanding the premise of them. Theyre palced in high security areas, and areas that can potentially see mutants/theft/contamination/etc.

They werent hostile to all people. They theoretically were turned hostile by whatever runs the labs, be it a crazed ai who floods rooms (RE), a military bunker somewhere, or a control panel. Code black yo.

Before the outbreak and disintegration of society they would presumably be monitoring people for proper access, and would probably, like all the other robots, serve in less lethal capacity. Chicken walkers and riot control bots may have been for riot control, and there were riots before zoms appeared, sure, but security bots had a stun mode.

Youre assuming they were always lethal. But I do agree their placement needs refinement.

kevin.granade · 2015-12-12T18:04:22.000Z

The entire lab layout needs an overhaul, it’way too random right now. In other words, i agree

Dorian · 2015-12-12T21:05:46.000Z

[quote=“pisskop, post:2, topic:11070”]Youre misunderstanding the premise of them. Theyre palced in high security areas, and areas that can potentially see mutants/theft/contamination/etc.

They werent hostile to all people. They theoretically were turned hostile by whatever runs the labs, be it a crazed ai who floods rooms (RE), a military bunker somewhere, or a control panel. Code black yo.

Before the outbreak and disintegration of society they would presumably be monitoring people for proper access, and would probably, like all the other robots, serve in less lethal capacity. Chicken walkers and riot control bots may have been for riot control, and there were riots before zoms appeared, sure, but security bots had a stun mode.

Youre assuming they were always lethal. But I do agree their placement needs refinement.[/quote]

I don’t think I misunderstood anything. My entire post was about the placement - not the purpose. I agree there should be turrets in the labs. The stuff you said about the reason they are there is fairly obvious. The problem is that they shouldn’t be in empty rooms that you can otherwise safely ignore. Either the rooms should have something in them worth investigating (and thus giving whoever built the place a reason for throwing death-turrets in there), they should be out in the hallway or something like that.

G.E.C · 2015-12-13T02:30:10.000Z

Kevin Granade:

The entire lab layout needs an overhaul, it’way too random right now. In other words, i agree

Yes please! Right now labs feel more like a dungeon than a proper research facility, it never made any sense to walk out of the dinning area into a room where people are being dissected and go to sleep in your room that’s next to the containment of a screaming otherworldly creature.

sparr · 2015-12-13T03:09:48.000Z

[quote=“G.E.C, post:5, topic:11070”]Right now labs feel more like a dungeon than a proper research facility, it never made any sense to walk out of the dinning area into a room where people are being dissected and go to sleep in your room that’s next to the containment of a screaming otherworldly creature.[/quote]This post was written by someone who never played XCom

G.E.C · 2015-12-13T03:49:59.000Z

sparr:

This post was written by someone who never played XCom

You got me, alright! I could never get past the first couple of missions! Stop judging me!.. classic XCom was hard…

evilexecutive · 2015-12-13T05:31:44.000Z

G.E.C:

[quote=“sparr, post:6, topic:11070”]This post was written by someone who never played XCom

You got me, alright! I could never get past the first couple of missions! Stop judging me!.. classic XCom was hard…[/quote]

Try Xenonauts. It’s Classic XCOM in a modern form, with greater emphasis on Long-term strategy. And hey, it’ll make you scared shitless of night fighting for the same reasons classic XCOM did.

Shopkeeper · 2015-12-13T06:16:42.000Z

What ever happened to the guy who was working on a dynamic generation overhaul for labs? I know there was a thread made up for it and he showed some really promising stuff compared to how labs are currently handled. But I can’t seem to find it.

WIndburns · 2015-12-13T07:03:15.000Z

Here: http://smf.cataclysmdda.com/index.php?topic=10469.0

Shopkeeper:

What ever happened to the guy who was working on a dynamic generation overhaul for labs? I know there was a thread made up for it and he showed some really promising stuff compared to how labs are currently handled. But I can’t seem to find it.

pisskop · 2015-12-13T17:05:55.000Z

evilexecutive:

[quote=“G.E.C, post:7, topic:11070”][quote=“sparr, post:6, topic:11070”]This post was written by someone who never played XCom

You got me, alright! I could never get past the first couple of missions! Stop judging me!.. classic XCom was hard…[/quote]

Try Xenonauts. It’s Classic XCOM in a modern form, with greater emphasis on Long-term strategy. And hey, it’ll make you scared shitless of night fighting for the same reasons classic XCOM did.[/quote]
oc, Xenonauts is a game where you can miss 3 times in a row at 91% accuracy 5 tiless away

And night fighting is aweful for your health. smoke bombs. Smoke grenades are best grenades

BeerBeer · 2015-12-13T22:14:45.000Z

You have to consider lab starting scenarios then, too.

You can’t then just fill the corridors with turrets, or at least provide means for low level characters to disable/destroy/disrupt/distract turrets.
Make sure the lab start player doesn’t spawn next to a turret…
Perhaps design a special case (easier/different) lab for lab starters, while the others normal labs would be considerably deadlier.

Aren’t labs pretty much a jigsaw puzzle, or a patchwork quilt? You just have to design compatible individual rooms which the game then pieces together. Isn’t that how it works?

Labs indeed are pretty random. I’d say they’re often too big, too. I think there are plenty of individual room layouts but it’s how the labs are pieced together, that’s the real issue. You start adding turrets in other rooms, you might get impossibly difficult gameplay. Note that turrets explode, too, potentially destroying stuff. I think there’s a reason why they were only placed in empty rooms. Probably just as a test, and it hasn’t been developed further since.

Dorian · 2015-12-15T04:18:17.000Z

At least for the present, I am more in favor of just putting interesting stuff in the turret rooms. That at least goes part of the way towards explaining why the damn things are there, it gives the player something to do, and it doesn’t create problems for lab characters such as those you mentioned. It should also be fairly easy to implement.

ZoneWizard · 2015-12-16T01:14:52.000Z

I know votes don’t matter, but I wouldn’t mind more thought poured into the labs design work. Random sure…but make some reason for why an empty room is guarded as the OP asks. Or just put rare crap in a guarded area. Solid reason if not too interested in the work. Anything at this point to balance labs would be a good thing even if I disagree with it lol

sparr · 2015-12-18T22:57:06.000Z

github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA

New build_lab, other underground overmap code cleanup

by sparr on 12:12PM - 18 Dec 15

7 commits changed 2 files with 70 additions and 118 deletions.

Here’s my PR to change the lab overmap generator. It will produce lab layouts with more choke points, rather than large square-ish blocks of lab maps. If this lands, someone could modify the lab mapgen to put turrets [mostly] at the choke points instead of in random rooms.

Dorian · 2015-12-23T04:40:34.000Z

Fantastic.

iceball3 · 2016-01-15T20:07:54.000Z

[quote=“sparr, post:15, topic:11070”]https://github.com/CleverRaven/Cataclysm-DDA/pull/14475

Here’s my PR to change the lab overmap generator. It will produce lab layouts with more choke points, rather than large square-ish blocks of lab maps. If this lands, someone could modify the lab mapgen to put turrets [mostly] at the choke points instead of in random rooms.[/quote]Oooh, and it got merged, good stuff! Were the turret changes implemented yet, as well? I’m using a somewhat recent nightly build, from the 9th, and i haven’t gone into labs yet, but i can’t find anything regarding the turret placement on the github.

sparr · 2016-01-16T00:43:38.000Z

Nothing changed about the mapgen for lab OMTs yet, just the overmap gen that controls lab shape. There’s some discussion in other threads about lab map tiles, and that’s probably going somewhere soon.