13 ms·

Space Station 14 – Open-source remake of Space Station 13

269 points by nonbirithm 5y ago

rackjack 5y ago
BTW Byond, the platform that hosts Space Station 13, looks like malware but (probably) isn't.
234ijpoiadj9 5y ago
Completely ruined by assholes calling shuttle whenever they feel like, and the admin doing absolutely nothing to discourage it.
WalterGR 5y ago
For others who had never heard of it, here’s Space Station 13 on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_13 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_13
beaconstudios 5y ago
isn't space station 13 infamously cursed when it comes to remakes? There have been numerous attempts over the years (mainly because SS13 is built in a terrible unmaintained closed-source engine with a custom language) but all have failed because SS13 is so mechanically dense.
- gaogao 5y ago
  On an engine that makes PHP look like a paragon of good design
  - MrStonedOne 5y ago
    a compiled language with a function call overhead higher then php? it could only be byond.
- AngryData 5y ago
  Yes, it has been so far, but this project has progressed much farther and steadily than most every other attempt. The sheer amount of features is astounding though, and highly varied among the different servers and codebases.
- ajvs 5y ago
  Curse seems to be over thanks to the progress in SS14 as well as Unitystation[1] which is slightly further along. Whilst not as featureful as /tg/ they have enough content to support several antagonists and most departments. [1] https://github.com/unitystation/unitystation https://github.com/unitystation/unitystation
- nonbirithm 5y ago
  Evidently so. I'm not quite up to speed, but ever since SS13 was first created there have been maybe a dozen attempts to move it off of BYOND: SS14, SS3D, RE:SS3D, UnityStation, Griefly, Bluespess... I do remember stumbling across this issue[1] by one of the lead developers of SS14 calling out one of the devs of another project. I think it illustrates that the stories of people trying to remake SS13 alone are numerous and fraught with tension at times. But it speaks volumes about how passionate many individuals are about this specific game. There is also this very interesting writeup[2] by another SS14 dev about four years ago about how the project got started. Also interesting about SS14 in particular is that they use a completely custom engine called RobustToolbox, written in C#. This was after trying to use SFML, scrapping everything, and eventually spending a year "waiting for Godot", in someone else's words. One of the devs apparently spent two years mostly learning OpenGL just to finish the engine. [1] https://github.com/Bluespess/tgstation-remake/issues/76 https://github.com/Bluespess/tgstation-remake/issues/76 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ss14/comments/5k3tkl/comment/dbo633i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ss14/comments/5k3tkl/comment/dbo633...
- Ygg2 5y ago
  As much as any attempt to rewrite is cursed. Funny enough RobustToolbox also is being used to port existing codebases to C# [0]. This way old codebases can keep using DMI, and use CEF instead of Internet Explorer. [0] https://github.com/wixoaGit/OpenDream https://github.com/wixoaGit/OpenDream
- rackjack 5y ago
  Yep. I'll believe the curse is over when Goon/tg/etc. get some servers running on SS14/Unitystation for at least a year.
- MrStonedOne 5y ago
  byond does alot of things differently then most programming languages. They are always hailed as a failing, but its not. ss13 wouldn't exist if byond was a competent programming language. Half the features wouldn't get coded if class members had visibility/security levels (public/private), or had to be well written interface defined frameworks, or if types were enforced or required to be specified. Lacking all of the fluff of modern programming languages allowed it to appeal to a wider base of contributors, a fair amount who got their start in programming by contributing to ss13. Non-visualized programming languages also have issues that make game dev hard, that byond can sidestep. byond uses a single-thread:multiple-stacks framework that treats soft blocks (sleep, network/file io, client involved commands) specially and allows you to detach your call stack at an arbitrary point when a softblock happens allowing for easier programming of performant code. So if i have code for airlocks to start the close animation, sleep for the duration of the close animation, then mark the airlock as dense and the tile its on as an airblocker, I can easily make code to handle closing all doors in a list of doors without making each wait thru the animation of the close block the caller, while still allowing for the blocking of the caller when thats what i want. The curse is real, but its not insurmountable.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    The execution flow you describe is similar to JS' event loop and (I think, I'm not very experienced at C#) C#'s async/await functionality. It's a godsend in JS for exactly the reasons you describe. I haven't written any Dream code so I can't / wasn't speaking to the language design itself, and I got started in php and actually mostly like it for its design and accessibility so I wouldn't be the guy to shit on the language. I'm just aware that the platform is kinda crashy and non performant.
    - MrStonedOne 5y ago
      > The execution flow you describe is similar to JS' event loop yes, in mechanic, the biggest benefit is you can get it via a control statement so its as easy as typing a keyword and an additional indentation block, ie, you can do it mid function and the function level vars just get copied over, or you can mark the entire function as non-blocking and the stack detaches at the first sleep, but at the non-blocking function, even if the sleep is 10 calls deep from that function. All without the caller of the non-blocking function needing to do anything (the biggest difference from c#'s async/await). You can even define this on a base function and all 50 million overrides can be trusted to not block the caller.
smoldesu 5y ago
SS13 will always have a special place in my juvenile heart, and while I probably wouldn't play it today, I'm glad it's being remade. Supposedly the game performs very poorly under Wine, so having a good native version seems imperative for keeping cross-platform play alive. If you've never played SS13, by the way, you are the ideal candidate to pick it up and play a few rounds. It's mechanics are highly complex and intertwined: some players are wrapped up in a social sim, while others engage in sabotage. Many players are charged with keeping the peace, others are told to sow discomfort among crew members. The whole thing comes together in a beautifully elaborate machine where all sorts of crazy social situations crop up. Everyone is out for themselves, and that relentlessly petty style of gameplay is what got me hooked when I had nothing more than a Pentium and DSL.
- andrecarini 5y ago
  > If you've never played SS13, by the way, you are the ideal candidate to pick it up and play a few rounds. I'd recommend otherwise. The community is extremely toxic and moderators assume everyone have bad intentions. Feels like working with your boss breathing down your neck.
  - Talanes 5y ago
    I've never even had a moderator talk to me, much less assume anything about my intentions. Different servers will have different cultures.
    - andrecarini 5y ago
      YMMV. When have you last played, for how long and in which server? I've had terrible experiences overall on some of the popular ones.
      - Talanes 5y ago
        I pretty exclusively play on /tg./ I was most active years ago, sometime around whenever the launch of mini was. Now I just hop on a few times a year when I can sit and burn an entire night and not worry about how little sleep I'll get.
ajvs 5y ago
No SS13 discussion is complete without linking to SsethTzeentach's infamous absurd-sounding review[1] or MandaloreGaming's slightly less infamous but more informational review[2]. [1] https://youtu.be/URJ_qSXruW0 https://youtu.be/URJ_qSXruW0 [2] https://youtu.be/nLAHBexJxrE https://youtu.be/nLAHBexJxrE
- 1_player 5y ago
  And Black Pants Legion [1] for some very fun playthroughs of the game. Hail Cargonia! 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHweuFtIS-M&list=PLR5zhFCFVb9Vek2Qk7CrOE3RuctpcteDF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHweuFtIS-M&list=PLR5zhFCFVb...
  - chaps 5y ago
    Hail Cargonia.
- gambiting 5y ago
  I literally opened the comments to post these two links, but clearly there are other people here who enjoy these two exact channels already :D
- Ralfp 5y ago
  My opinion on SsethTzeentach changed when guy did two and half hours long presentation (and Q&A) on current state of and ongoing developments in oncology. It was a joke, but apparently this is his real field of expertise and YouTube edgelord persona is what he does to wind down after work. Here's recording of stream in question, potentially offensive and NSFW jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsRVQWfqjms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsRVQWfqjms
  - dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
    I always knew he was putting on half a persona for the videos but seeing him talk about advanced serious topics in that voice is genuinely surreal.
- 5y ago
kwolff 5y ago
It's cool and all, SS13 is a very fun game, but at this point the game itself is simply too big and the community is too small for it to get a proper remake. Anyone who frequently plays it will be disappointed by SS14 in the lack of features that the TG-Station fork of SS13 provides. TG-Station has been in development for a very long time. Replicating that work would require a sizable team of dedicated developers, and it'd still take years. This will unfortunately peter out like every other SS13 remake. Old players and devs won't move, and if some of them do they have too many options to pick from. The prospect of many new players is unlikely, with the exception of the occasional highlight of the game by a popular youtube creator. Don't get me wrong, the game is great, and I'd love a proper port that doesn't rely on Internet Explorer, but it's extremely unlikely to happen.
- tmpmoony 5y ago
  Hey, one of SS14's game admins/contributors here. We've been hearing this for 4 years and it hasn't happened yet, so I don't see what exactly you're getting at when we're moving through development faster than ever and adding new stuff constantly. Also, we're not a remake of /tg/station and I have not a clue where you get that impression, we like functionality and spritework from many codebases, and have put our own spin on many things as well.
- MrStonedOne 5y ago
  /tg/station will have our own fork of ss14 soon enough.
- Ygg2 5y ago
  Disclaimer: Contributor to SS14. Added cigs and refactored some stuff. Gonna heavy disagree with it. The thing is porting big games takes time. And SS13 isn't even like a single game. It's several dueling codebases. Not to mention SS14 is more ambitious than that: make your own engine, plus add pixel movement, grid rotation, etc. And SS14 is at a playable alpha. And I mean actual alpha, not Blizzard polish alpha. Like people discovered you can grab and throw the station - alpha. And there is a man with a suitcase full of talking brains , because brains have a communication component. We have enough people for playtests weekly. > Old players and devs won't move That's pretty strange to claim, when we had influx of coders from other codebases. Granted not all will like the new code base, but some do.
MrStonedOne 5y ago
As the guy running all the servers for /tg/station 13 I am feeling feelings of confusion, fear, and anger at this new and confusing lack of tiles
- LogonType10 5y ago
  Are new players welcome?
  - smoldesu 5y ago
    Nope, but that's why you should play anyways :)
  - rackjack 5y ago
    SS13 is, IMO, an inherently newbie-unfriendly game. However, there are servers and new players guides online, for Goon (one group of servers) and tg (another group of servers), and probably others that I'm not familiar with.
  - MrStonedOne 5y ago
    We receive high double digit new players every single day on /tg/station's servers. Most don't make it past a week due to the high learning curve but we would not be sustainable without the consistent influx of fresh minds to be amazed by the depth of the game, as the biggest source of drop off for people who make it past the first week is people who've learned all the advanced mechanics and had their emergent gameplay moments ("wait, you can do that?").
ajvs 5y ago
For those who don't know, SS13 is an open-source multiplayer round-based roleplaying game that has been built on the closed-source BYOND engine since 2005. Imagine Among Us, DarkRP (on Garry's Mod) or NoPixel (on GTA V) but with much more content for both antagonists and normal workers. Or Dwarf Fortress/RimWorld but everybody controls a different person (with usual crew count being 50-150 people). It has a great number of forks, with more than a dozen focused on the space station gameplay loop and various others that adapt the game to themes such as marines vs xenomorphs missions, an open-world modern day city setting, ancient civilization world, etc. Other than that if you want to find out more I'd suggest watching the two most popular game reviews about it I added in another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29109264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29109264
- aspaceman 5y ago
  It also has a very long (and silly) dev history. I don't know it very well, but wasn't the source code stolen at some point? Then several forks that did and did not include that code? Or is that just source from the SomethingAwful fork?
  - fragileone 5y ago
    It was rumoured to be stolen for a long time, but the original developer of SS13 (Exadv1) said in an interview that no theft took place, and he'd voluntarily given the code to fellow programmers[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP5t1b1TKQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP5t1b1TKQg
    - skeaker 5y ago
      This is true, but there still has been drama with the ownership of the source code in the past. The Goon fork that has always been one of the biggest forks but is also closed source has leaked on a few separate occasions, for example.
- path411 5y ago
  Dang the byond engine takes me back. That was an interesting concept that I'm surprised doesn't have a modern version.
TeaDude 5y ago
I've played a bit of this before around a year ago and was suitably impressed (even if you couldn't play a round yet and most items were just non-functional sprites you could pick up) Looks like they've added a lot more in the meantime!
- tmpmoony 5y ago
  Game's fully playable now, though heavily reliant on roleplay. We usually tend between 10-30 players all day in the US at the minute.
malkia 5y ago
Haven't played Space Station, but somehow got the nice memories of playing Space Quest - https://www.google.com/search?q=space+quest+game https://www.google.com/search?q=space+quest+game - where the main character Roger Wilco, is a janitor on a spaceship.
- GordonS 5y ago
  Man, I used to love all those "Quest" games! Some of my favourites were Space Quest, The Colonels Bequest, and one I forget the name of, which was set in medieval England (it might have been called "Heroes Quest?). I also liked the Leisure Suit Larry series, which weren't "Quest" games, but AFAICT used the same engine.
  - the_af 5y ago
    > [...] and one I forget the name of, which was set in medieval England (it might have been called "Heroes Quest?) That'd be Sierra's Hero's Quest: So You Want To Be A Hero, later renamed to Quest for Glory because "Hero Quest" is a trademark of Games Workshop. The sequels included other settings, for example the Arabian Nights.
    - GordonS 5y ago
      Yes, I think that's it! If I recall correctly, some of the game was set in the Middle East too, though I might be confusing it with another game in the series. I really need to try and download these golden oldies from somewhere and have a nostalgia-fest!
      - Moru 5y ago
        Seems GOG has them: https://www.gog.com/game/quest_for_glory https://www.gog.com/game/quest_for_glory
- digikata 5y ago
  That brings back memories of Infocom’s Planetfall where you were a janitor on a space station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall
swarnie 5y ago
Hey hey people, Sseth here.
gonehome 5y ago
I love that I can be pretty 'wired in' to HN, tech twitter, etc. and still find cool stuff like this that's been around for years and I've never heard of before. It looks like a pretty cool game, I'm surprised I've never heard of SS13 given all of I've seen about Dwarf Fortress.
- smoldesu 5y ago
  FWIW, the Venn-diagram of "Twitter users" and "Space Station 13 Players" are just two, separate circles.
  - beaconstudios 5y ago
    Yeah SS13 is more of a 4chan /tg/ thing. Twitter is the last place you'll find old hidden treasures.
    - giantrobot 5y ago
      Nintendo Hidden Gem: Legend of Zelda Link to the Past! Smash that like button fellow gamers!
    - MrStonedOne 5y ago
      I found ss13 from a roommate who found ss13 from twitter.
    - BbzzbB 5y ago
      Twitter is reputation/persona-centric rather than topic/subforum-centric, it is what you make it to be. I don't really venture outside of fin-Twitter, but I'd bet there are fantastic accounts focused on sharing old hidden treasures. While not quite this sort of old treasure, take for example twitter.com/TechEmails, I've learned of a bunch of 15-25 year old stories and anecdotes through some of his posts that I wouldn't have otherwise heard of.
Arrath 5y ago
I've played SS13 off on and for a number of years, and it can have some truly sublime moments. The SomethingAwful forums have some spectacular tales of shenanigans and bugs and the two combining together to become more than the sum of their parts.
83457 5y ago
Misread and thought this was somehow Space Channel 5 related :(
- ginko 5y ago
  I’m sure you can have a dance off against space aliens in ss13
prohobo 5y ago
Thank god! I was worried this project was cursed, and I really want SS13 to live on. It's one of the last bastions of true multiplayer gaming, and it's such a deep and funny experience to play. Honestly I want SS13 to be around when I'm elderly, and the Byond engine is just holding it back.
balthasar 5y ago
You beat me to it!
aqme28 5y ago
I used to mod the goonstation wayyyy back in the day, before it got kind of (IMO) overburdened with content. Some of my favorite moments in gaming were with this game. It's really incredible that after all this time, no one has managed to make such an in-depth space station sim with compelling gameplay.
radicalcentrist 5y ago
Hahaha, the issues are hilarious! A few examples: * You can put yourself into disposals while dead * Bullets rotate with the station * Pulling doesn't know what newton's 3rd law is * You can select wires hidden under walls and zap yourself with them Where are all the mundane build problems and crashes? Their issue page is full of the type of zany interactions gone wrong I love to debug. https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues
- tmpmoony 5y ago
  Personal favorite remains https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues/4767 https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues/476... An issue where a player trapped me inside a locker while I was looking around as admin ghost (Something that absolutely does not belong in lockers)
taveras 5y ago
I spent a large bit of my youth on SS13 and BYOND. I owe my development career to the latter. Thanks Dantom and Lummox JR!
OneTimePetes 5y ago
Allow me to pitch a little idea of mine: A dysfunctional spacestation/spaceship, with three factions fighting for control ala system shock, but the gameplay mechanics of minecraft & a shooter. For the alien hive carbon sludge is food, for the humans its reactor coolant. For the cy-borg network cabling is healing material, for the humans its the technology that keeps the air-ventilation alive a little longer. All parties dismantle - rebuild the wreck to further their goals and collide, while the catastrophes they inflict on one another create large scale drama..
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

269 points by nonbirithm 5y ago

BTW Byond, the platform that hosts Space Station 13, looks like malware but (probably) isn't.

Completely ruined by assholes calling shuttle whenever they feel like, and the admin doing absolutely nothing to discourage it.

WalterGR 5y ago

For others who had never heard of it, here’s Space Station 13 on Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_13 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_13

beaconstudios 5y ago

isn't space station 13 infamously cursed when it comes to remakes? There have been numerous attempts over the years (mainly because SS13 is built in a terrible unmaintained closed-source engine with a custom language) but all have failed because SS13 is so mechanically dense.

gaogao 5y ago
On an engine that makes PHP look like a paragon of good design
- MrStonedOne 5y ago
  a compiled language with a function call overhead higher then php? it could only be byond.
AngryData 5y ago
Yes, it has been so far, but this project has progressed much farther and steadily than most every other attempt. The sheer amount of features is astounding though, and highly varied among the different servers and codebases.
ajvs 5y ago
Curse seems to be over thanks to the progress in SS14 as well as Unitystation[1] which is slightly further along. Whilst not as featureful as /tg/ they have enough content to support several antagonists and most departments. [1] https://github.com/unitystation/unitystation https://github.com/unitystation/unitystation
nonbirithm 5y ago
Evidently so. I'm not quite up to speed, but ever since SS13 was first created there have been maybe a dozen attempts to move it off of BYOND: SS14, SS3D, RE:SS3D, UnityStation, Griefly, Bluespess... I do remember stumbling across this issue[1] by one of the lead developers of SS14 calling out one of the devs of another project. I think it illustrates that the stories of people trying to remake SS13 alone are numerous and fraught with tension at times. But it speaks volumes about how passionate many individuals are about this specific game. There is also this very interesting writeup[2] by another SS14 dev about four years ago about how the project got started. Also interesting about SS14 in particular is that they use a completely custom engine called RobustToolbox, written in C#. This was after trying to use SFML, scrapping everything, and eventually spending a year "waiting for Godot", in someone else's words. One of the devs apparently spent two years mostly learning OpenGL just to finish the engine. [1] https://github.com/Bluespess/tgstation-remake/issues/76 https://github.com/Bluespess/tgstation-remake/issues/76 [2] https://www.reddit.com/r/ss14/comments/5k3tkl/comment/dbo633i/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ss14/comments/5k3tkl/comment/dbo633...
Ygg2 5y ago
As much as any attempt to rewrite is cursed. Funny enough RobustToolbox also is being used to port existing codebases to C# [0]. This way old codebases can keep using DMI, and use CEF instead of Internet Explorer. [0] https://github.com/wixoaGit/OpenDream https://github.com/wixoaGit/OpenDream
rackjack 5y ago
Yep. I'll believe the curse is over when Goon/tg/etc. get some servers running on SS14/Unitystation for at least a year.
MrStonedOne 5y ago
byond does alot of things differently then most programming languages. They are always hailed as a failing, but its not. ss13 wouldn't exist if byond was a competent programming language. Half the features wouldn't get coded if class members had visibility/security levels (public/private), or had to be well written interface defined frameworks, or if types were enforced or required to be specified. Lacking all of the fluff of modern programming languages allowed it to appeal to a wider base of contributors, a fair amount who got their start in programming by contributing to ss13. Non-visualized programming languages also have issues that make game dev hard, that byond can sidestep. byond uses a single-thread:multiple-stacks framework that treats soft blocks (sleep, network/file io, client involved commands) specially and allows you to detach your call stack at an arbitrary point when a softblock happens allowing for easier programming of performant code. So if i have code for airlocks to start the close animation, sleep for the duration of the close animation, then mark the airlock as dense and the tile its on as an airblocker, I can easily make code to handle closing all doors in a list of doors without making each wait thru the animation of the close block the caller, while still allowing for the blocking of the caller when thats what i want. The curse is real, but its not insurmountable.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  The execution flow you describe is similar to JS' event loop and (I think, I'm not very experienced at C#) C#'s async/await functionality. It's a godsend in JS for exactly the reasons you describe. I haven't written any Dream code so I can't / wasn't speaking to the language design itself, and I got started in php and actually mostly like it for its design and accessibility so I wouldn't be the guy to shit on the language. I'm just aware that the platform is kinda crashy and non performant.
  - MrStonedOne 5y ago
    > The execution flow you describe is similar to JS' event loop yes, in mechanic, the biggest benefit is you can get it via a control statement so its as easy as typing a keyword and an additional indentation block, ie, you can do it mid function and the function level vars just get copied over, or you can mark the entire function as non-blocking and the stack detaches at the first sleep, but at the non-blocking function, even if the sleep is 10 calls deep from that function. All without the caller of the non-blocking function needing to do anything (the biggest difference from c#'s async/await). You can even define this on a base function and all 50 million overrides can be trusted to not block the caller.

smoldesu 5y ago

SS13 will always have a special place in my juvenile heart, and while I probably wouldn't play it today, I'm glad it's being remade. Supposedly the game performs very poorly under Wine, so having a good native version seems imperative for keeping cross-platform play alive. If you've never played SS13, by the way, you are the ideal candidate to pick it up and play a few rounds. It's mechanics are highly complex and intertwined: some players are wrapped up in a social sim, while others engage in sabotage. Many players are charged with keeping the peace, others are told to sow discomfort among crew members. The whole thing comes together in a beautifully elaborate machine where all sorts of crazy social situations crop up. Everyone is out for themselves, and that relentlessly petty style of gameplay is what got me hooked when I had nothing more than a Pentium and DSL.

andrecarini 5y ago
> If you've never played SS13, by the way, you are the ideal candidate to pick it up and play a few rounds. I'd recommend otherwise. The community is extremely toxic and moderators assume everyone have bad intentions. Feels like working with your boss breathing down your neck.
- Talanes 5y ago
  I've never even had a moderator talk to me, much less assume anything about my intentions. Different servers will have different cultures.
  - andrecarini 5y ago
    YMMV. When have you last played, for how long and in which server? I've had terrible experiences overall on some of the popular ones.
    - Talanes 5y ago
      I pretty exclusively play on /tg./ I was most active years ago, sometime around whenever the launch of mini was. Now I just hop on a few times a year when I can sit and burn an entire night and not worry about how little sleep I'll get.

ajvs 5y ago

No SS13 discussion is complete without linking to SsethTzeentach's infamous absurd-sounding review[1] or MandaloreGaming's slightly less infamous but more informational review[2]. [1] https://youtu.be/URJ_qSXruW0 https://youtu.be/URJ_qSXruW0 [2] https://youtu.be/nLAHBexJxrE https://youtu.be/nLAHBexJxrE

1_player 5y ago
And Black Pants Legion [1] for some very fun playthroughs of the game. Hail Cargonia! 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHweuFtIS-M&list=PLR5zhFCFVb9Vek2Qk7CrOE3RuctpcteDF https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHweuFtIS-M&list=PLR5zhFCFVb...
- chaps 5y ago
  Hail Cargonia.
gambiting 5y ago
I literally opened the comments to post these two links, but clearly there are other people here who enjoy these two exact channels already :D
Ralfp 5y ago
My opinion on SsethTzeentach changed when guy did two and half hours long presentation (and Q&A) on current state of and ongoing developments in oncology. It was a joke, but apparently this is his real field of expertise and YouTube edgelord persona is what he does to wind down after work. Here's recording of stream in question, potentially offensive and NSFW jokes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsRVQWfqjms https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsRVQWfqjms
- dj_mc_merlin 5y ago
  I always knew he was putting on half a persona for the videos but seeing him talk about advanced serious topics in that voice is genuinely surreal.
5y ago

kwolff 5y ago

It's cool and all, SS13 is a very fun game, but at this point the game itself is simply too big and the community is too small for it to get a proper remake. Anyone who frequently plays it will be disappointed by SS14 in the lack of features that the TG-Station fork of SS13 provides. TG-Station has been in development for a very long time. Replicating that work would require a sizable team of dedicated developers, and it'd still take years. This will unfortunately peter out like every other SS13 remake. Old players and devs won't move, and if some of them do they have too many options to pick from. The prospect of many new players is unlikely, with the exception of the occasional highlight of the game by a popular youtube creator. Don't get me wrong, the game is great, and I'd love a proper port that doesn't rely on Internet Explorer, but it's extremely unlikely to happen.

tmpmoony 5y ago
Hey, one of SS14's game admins/contributors here. We've been hearing this for 4 years and it hasn't happened yet, so I don't see what exactly you're getting at when we're moving through development faster than ever and adding new stuff constantly. Also, we're not a remake of /tg/station and I have not a clue where you get that impression, we like functionality and spritework from many codebases, and have put our own spin on many things as well.
MrStonedOne 5y ago
/tg/station will have our own fork of ss14 soon enough.
Ygg2 5y ago
Disclaimer: Contributor to SS14. Added cigs and refactored some stuff. Gonna heavy disagree with it. The thing is porting big games takes time. And SS13 isn't even like a single game. It's several dueling codebases. Not to mention SS14 is more ambitious than that: make your own engine, plus add pixel movement, grid rotation, etc. And SS14 is at a playable alpha. And I mean actual alpha, not Blizzard polish alpha. Like people discovered you can grab and throw the station - alpha. And there is a man with a suitcase full of talking brains , because brains have a communication component. We have enough people for playtests weekly. > Old players and devs won't move That's pretty strange to claim, when we had influx of coders from other codebases. Granted not all will like the new code base, but some do.

MrStonedOne 5y ago

As the guy running all the servers for /tg/station 13 I am feeling feelings of confusion, fear, and anger at this new and confusing lack of tiles

LogonType10 5y ago
Are new players welcome?
- smoldesu 5y ago
  Nope, but that's why you should play anyways :)
- rackjack 5y ago
  SS13 is, IMO, an inherently newbie-unfriendly game. However, there are servers and new players guides online, for Goon (one group of servers) and tg (another group of servers), and probably others that I'm not familiar with.
- MrStonedOne 5y ago
  We receive high double digit new players every single day on /tg/station's servers. Most don't make it past a week due to the high learning curve but we would not be sustainable without the consistent influx of fresh minds to be amazed by the depth of the game, as the biggest source of drop off for people who make it past the first week is people who've learned all the advanced mechanics and had their emergent gameplay moments ("wait, you can do that?").

ajvs 5y ago

For those who don't know, SS13 is an open-source multiplayer round-based roleplaying game that has been built on the closed-source BYOND engine since 2005. Imagine Among Us, DarkRP (on Garry's Mod) or NoPixel (on GTA V) but with much more content for both antagonists and normal workers. Or Dwarf Fortress/RimWorld but everybody controls a different person (with usual crew count being 50-150 people). It has a great number of forks, with more than a dozen focused on the space station gameplay loop and various others that adapt the game to themes such as marines vs xenomorphs missions, an open-world modern day city setting, ancient civilization world, etc. Other than that if you want to find out more I'd suggest watching the two most popular game reviews about it I added in another comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29109264 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29109264

aspaceman 5y ago
It also has a very long (and silly) dev history. I don't know it very well, but wasn't the source code stolen at some point? Then several forks that did and did not include that code? Or is that just source from the SomethingAwful fork?
- fragileone 5y ago
  It was rumoured to be stolen for a long time, but the original developer of SS13 (Exadv1) said in an interview that no theft took place, and he'd voluntarily given the code to fellow programmers[1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP5t1b1TKQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hP5t1b1TKQg
  - skeaker 5y ago
    This is true, but there still has been drama with the ownership of the source code in the past. The Goon fork that has always been one of the biggest forks but is also closed source has leaked on a few separate occasions, for example.
path411 5y ago
Dang the byond engine takes me back. That was an interesting concept that I'm surprised doesn't have a modern version.

TeaDude 5y ago

I've played a bit of this before around a year ago and was suitably impressed (even if you couldn't play a round yet and most items were just non-functional sprites you could pick up) Looks like they've added a lot more in the meantime!

tmpmoony 5y ago
Game's fully playable now, though heavily reliant on roleplay. We usually tend between 10-30 players all day in the US at the minute.

malkia 5y ago

Haven't played Space Station, but somehow got the nice memories of playing Space Quest - https://www.google.com/search?q=space+quest+game https://www.google.com/search?q=space+quest+game - where the main character Roger Wilco, is a janitor on a spaceship.

GordonS 5y ago
Man, I used to love all those "Quest" games! Some of my favourites were Space Quest, The Colonels Bequest, and one I forget the name of, which was set in medieval England (it might have been called "Heroes Quest?). I also liked the Leisure Suit Larry series, which weren't "Quest" games, but AFAICT used the same engine.
- the_af 5y ago
  > [...] and one I forget the name of, which was set in medieval England (it might have been called "Heroes Quest?) That'd be Sierra's Hero's Quest: So You Want To Be A Hero, later renamed to Quest for Glory because "Hero Quest" is a trademark of Games Workshop. The sequels included other settings, for example the Arabian Nights.
  - GordonS 5y ago
    Yes, I think that's it! If I recall correctly, some of the game was set in the Middle East too, though I might be confusing it with another game in the series. I really need to try and download these golden oldies from somewhere and have a nostalgia-fest!
    - Moru 5y ago
      Seems GOG has them: https://www.gog.com/game/quest_for_glory https://www.gog.com/game/quest_for_glory
digikata 5y ago
That brings back memories of Infocom’s Planetfall where you were a janitor on a space station. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall

swarnie 5y ago

Hey hey people, Sseth here.

gonehome 5y ago

I love that I can be pretty 'wired in' to HN, tech twitter, etc. and still find cool stuff like this that's been around for years and I've never heard of before. It looks like a pretty cool game, I'm surprised I've never heard of SS13 given all of I've seen about Dwarf Fortress.

smoldesu 5y ago
FWIW, the Venn-diagram of "Twitter users" and "Space Station 13 Players" are just two, separate circles.
- beaconstudios 5y ago
  Yeah SS13 is more of a 4chan /tg/ thing. Twitter is the last place you'll find old hidden treasures.
  - giantrobot 5y ago
    Nintendo Hidden Gem: Legend of Zelda Link to the Past! Smash that like button fellow gamers!
  - MrStonedOne 5y ago
    I found ss13 from a roommate who found ss13 from twitter.
  - BbzzbB 5y ago
    Twitter is reputation/persona-centric rather than topic/subforum-centric, it is what you make it to be. I don't really venture outside of fin-Twitter, but I'd bet there are fantastic accounts focused on sharing old hidden treasures. While not quite this sort of old treasure, take for example twitter.com/TechEmails, I've learned of a bunch of 15-25 year old stories and anecdotes through some of his posts that I wouldn't have otherwise heard of.

Arrath 5y ago

I've played SS13 off on and for a number of years, and it can have some truly sublime moments. The SomethingAwful forums have some spectacular tales of shenanigans and bugs and the two combining together to become more than the sum of their parts.

83457 5y ago

Misread and thought this was somehow Space Channel 5 related :(

ginko 5y ago
I’m sure you can have a dance off against space aliens in ss13

prohobo 5y ago

Thank god! I was worried this project was cursed, and I really want SS13 to live on. It's one of the last bastions of true multiplayer gaming, and it's such a deep and funny experience to play. Honestly I want SS13 to be around when I'm elderly, and the Byond engine is just holding it back.

balthasar 5y ago

You beat me to it!

aqme28 5y ago

I used to mod the goonstation wayyyy back in the day, before it got kind of (IMO) overburdened with content. Some of my favorite moments in gaming were with this game. It's really incredible that after all this time, no one has managed to make such an in-depth space station sim with compelling gameplay.

radicalcentrist 5y ago

Hahaha, the issues are hilarious! A few examples: * You can put yourself into disposals while dead * Bullets rotate with the station * Pulling doesn't know what newton's 3rd law is * You can select wires hidden under walls and zap yourself with them Where are all the mundane build problems and crashes? Their issue page is full of the type of zany interactions gone wrong I love to debug. https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues

tmpmoony 5y ago
Personal favorite remains https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues/4767 https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14/issues/476... An issue where a player trapped me inside a locker while I was looking around as admin ghost (Something that absolutely does not belong in lockers)

taveras 5y ago

I spent a large bit of my youth on SS13 and BYOND. I owe my development career to the latter. Thanks Dantom and Lummox JR!

OneTimePetes 5y ago

Allow me to pitch a little idea of mine: A dysfunctional spacestation/spaceship, with three factions fighting for control ala system shock, but the gameplay mechanics of minecraft & a shooter. For the alien hive carbon sludge is food, for the humans its reactor coolant. For the cy-borg network cabling is healing material, for the humans its the technology that keeps the air-ventilation alive a little longer. All parties dismantle - rebuild the wreck to further their goals and collide, while the catastrophes they inflict on one another create large scale drama..

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