[HN Gopher] Space Station 14 - Open-source remake of Space Stati...
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Space Station 14 - Open-source remake of Space Station 13
Author : nonbirithm
Score : 211 points
Date : 2021-11-04 15:48 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spacestation14.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (spacestation14.io)
| ajvs wrote:
| 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 [2] https://youtu.be/nLAHBexJxrE
| gambiting wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| dj_mc_merlin wrote:
| 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.
| 5faulker wrote:
| This has to be the bomb.
| 1_player wrote:
| 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=PLR5zhFCFVb...
| chaps wrote:
| Hail Cargonia.
| ameminator wrote:
| Rumor has it that SsethTzeentach and Mandalore are the same
| person, but we will never know for sure. The audience can only
| listen to the voice and make their own conclusions.
| Ralfp wrote:
| This is only a meme.
|
| Sseth is based in EU (and makes little secret on that),
| Mandalore is in US.
| gambiting wrote:
| Voice aside, I think it's unlikely purely because Mandalore
| is an absolute upload machine, he makes very high quality
| content and uploads regularly. Sseth less so lately, but the
| games he plays require _insane_ investment of time and
| effort. Like, yeah, there was 4 month gap between the Amazing
| Cultivation Simulator video and the one before it, but having
| watched it it 's obvious why(in fact I'm impressed it _only_
| took him 4 months). Mandalore usually plays games to
| completion, but doesn 't get so incredibly deep onto them as
| Sseth does.
| rackjack wrote:
| Dr. Mandalore and Mr. Sseth
| beaconstudios wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| On an engine that makes PHP look like a paragon of good design
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| a compiled language with a function call overhead higher then
| php? it could only be byond.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| 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
| AngryData wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| rackjack wrote:
| Yep. I'll believe the curse is over when Goon/tg/etc. get some
| servers running on SS14/Unitystation for at least a year.
| nonbirithm wrote:
| 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
|
| [2]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/ss14/comments/5k3tkl/comment/dbo633...
| smoldesu wrote:
| 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.
| GhettoComputers wrote:
| This sounds a lot like a free EVE online. Looks fun, that era
| of space games was great, I remember I didn't have consistent
| internet and played EV Nova a lot.
| Aromasin wrote:
| I wouldn't say it's anything like Eve if I'm honest. More
| like Among Us with Dwarf Fortress levels of complexity.
| tmpmoony wrote:
| Poorly is unfortunately an understatement. BYOND itself works
| fine, but BYOND uses Internet Explorer (great) for game UIs,
| and many newer SS13 codebases use something called TGUI. TGUI
| requires IE11, and Wine does not support that, so as a
| consequence most codebases are simply unplayable.
| PJB3005 wrote:
| Even without the need for IE11, BYOND is nigh unusable on
| Wine. It runs extremely poorly due to extreme and poor usage
| of Win32 UI stuff.
|
| There appears to be some form of resource leak in BYOND which
| causes its Ui system to gradually slow down the longer you're
| playing. This is severely amplified by presumably Wine being
| less optimized than Windows in these areas. It means that
| after just ~15 minutes of playing the client will starts
| stuttering severely on Wine. Then you need to restart the
| client which can take 2-3 minutes depending on how broken
| BYOND's ad loading wants to be. (This also happens on Windows
| but the effect is MUCH slower so you can go hours without
| noticing).
| smoldesu wrote:
| I remember getting it to work reasonably well with some
| heavy-handed tinkering, but it was definitely never at a
| fully playable state on Linux. The remake utterly flies
| though, so I have hopes that they'll continue development!
| andrecarini wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| I've never even had a moderator talk to me, much less assume
| anything about my intentions. Different servers will have
| different cultures.
| kwolff wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| PJB3005 wrote:
| We've[0] been at it for 4 years. As Moony already said,
| development has been faster than ever recently. We've gotten
| decently consistent player counts now over the past month, and
| just a few days ago a Twitch streamer Bikeman streamed SS14 to
| 1,500 viewers (peak)[1].
|
| We may only have 15% of the content of an SS13 codebase but I
| like to think that we have enough merits like a less laggy
| engine to make up for that.
|
| I can say confidently that we have _definitely_ broken the
| curse and short of a suspicious series of bus accidents across
| the EU, US and AU, nothing can stop us now.
|
| [0]: (current "iteration", SS14's code dates back to 2011 at
| LEAST). [1]:
| https://twitter.com/BikeMan/status/1455385097671254018
| throwaway2331 wrote:
| PJB is going to be the Lennart Poettering of BYOND soon
| enough.
|
| 4 years is a long time.
|
| Man's on a mission.
| munk-a wrote:
| The first real programming project I worked on that wasn't just
| a greenfield toy was maintaining a MUD. In the MUD community
| you tend to have 2-3 devs per MUD which is usually about 5% of
| the DAU. The code is insanely old and crusty but people
| maintain it because they want to keep it alive. You ain't seen
| crusty until you've seen Diku.
|
| Things happen because people care - a lot of people care
| passionately about SS13 and, while it may take quite some time
| (and while SS14 may not be it) I'm pretty sure there will be a
| SS13 remake eventually.
| skeaker wrote:
| The development cycle for SS13 works entirely off of random
| contributors throwing up PRs simply because they want to.
| Hundreds of contributors, thousands of PRs, and tens of
| thousands of comments and feedback on those PRs is what keeps
| the game constantly moving and updating on a multiple-times-
| per-day basis. Normally I would agree with you that this kind
| of development could never be matched, but SS14 seems to be
| taking the same approach of being very accepting to any
| developer who wishes to contribute even slightly. I think that
| that's the sort of approach that will make it work out in the
| long run.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| /tg/station will have our own fork of ss14 soon enough.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| 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.
| a_t48 wrote:
| > 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.
|
| This feels like a classic SS13 bug, business as usual,
| really.
| tmpmoony wrote:
| I think they got the station throwing a bit wrong, I
| actually had to modify the game slightly to remove a sanity
| check in hands code to pull it off. Was very funny though.
| Ygg2 wrote:
| Maybe, but brains talking one was from playtest. Really
| old one.
| atleta wrote:
| Please consider using tar.gz for the Linux download as ZIP
| does not store the file permissions and thus the game won't
| start. The SS14.Launcher should probably be an executable,
| which itself is a shell script trying to start
| bin/SS14.Launcher . The shell script can be started without
| it being marked as an executable but it will fail when it
| tries to execute bin/SS14.Launcher. I also had to set the
| execute bit on bin/loader/SS14.Launcher as otherwise the game
| would throw an exception after trying to connect to a server.
|
| System.ComponentModel.Win32Exception (13): Permission denied
| at System.Diagnostics.Process.ForkAndExecProcess(String
| filename, String[] argv, String[] envp, String cwd, Boolean
| redirectStdin, Boolean redirectStdout, Boolean
| redirectStderr, Boolean setCredentials, UInt32 userId, UInt32
| groupId, UInt32[] groups, Int32& stdinFd, Int32& stdoutFd,
| Int32& stderrFd, Boolean usesTerminal, Boolean throwOnNoExec)
| tmpmoony wrote:
| This is a problem with your choice of unzip (Midnight
| Commander according to the issue) tool, nobody else seems
| to have this issue. Maybe report an issue to them instead?
| wetpaws wrote:
| Also a contributor, given how my PRs are handled, i don't
| expect SS14 to have feature parity with SS13 anytime till
| 2100.
| malkia wrote:
| Haven't played Space Station, but somehow got the nice memories
| of playing Space Quest -
| https://www.google.com/search?q=space+quest+game - where the main
| character Roger Wilco, is a janitor on a spaceship.
| GordonS wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > _[...] 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Seems GOG has them:
|
| https://www.gog.com/game/quest_for_glory
| digikata wrote:
| That brings back memories of Infocom's Planetfall where you
| were a janitor on a space station.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall
| Arrath wrote:
| 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.
| ajvs wrote:
| 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
| aspaceman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| skeaker wrote:
| 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.
| WalterGR wrote:
| For others who had never heard of it, here's Space Station 13 on
| Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Station_13
| rackjack wrote:
| BTW Byond, the platform that hosts Space Station 13, looks like
| malware but (probably) isn't.
| balthasar wrote:
| You beat me to it!
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Are new players welcome?
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| 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?").
| smoldesu wrote:
| Nope, but that's why you should play anyways :)
| rackjack wrote:
| 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.
| 83457 wrote:
| Misread and thought this was somehow Space Channel 5 related :(
| ginko wrote:
| I'm sure you can have a dance off against space aliens in ss13
| fossuser wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| FWIW, the Venn-diagram of "Twitter users" and "Space Station 13
| Players" are just two, separate circles.
| beaconstudios wrote:
| Yeah SS13 is more of a 4chan /tg/ thing. Twitter is the last
| place you'll find old hidden treasures.
| giantrobot wrote:
| Nintendo Hidden Gem: Legend of Zelda Link to the Past!
| Smash that like button fellow gamers!
| BbzzbB wrote:
| 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.
| MrStonedOne wrote:
| I found ss13 from a roommate who found ss13 from twitter.
| TeaDude wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| swarnie wrote:
| Hey hey people, Sseth here.
| prohobo wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2021-11-04 23:00 UTC)