should go in /en/robust-toolbox/netcode

old docs site had a page for PVS, but this was mostly a scratchpad for expounding on ideas for paulvs, which isn't super helpful as actual documentation

should include

• what PVS is and why it exists
• info on chunking & data structures within
• info on how to use pvs override / visibility masks

mostly so people know they exist and what they should be used for

• differences between sqlite/postgres
• how to add new tables for use in game code
• how to work with migrations properly to ensure shit doesnt get fucked up
• what not to do (like dont fuck up async stuff type shit)

explaining things like UIController, widgets, proper interop and separation of entity systems & UI code, all that good stuff

i didn't do this yet as it likely needs to be thought out more and fully integrated with the current server hosting tutorials

im referring to the pages under /getting-started/server-hosting-rewrite-workspace on the wikijs docs, which were written by 20kdc i believe. the watchdog page is ported, but not the others, which have lots of useful information

i did a small pass over them but need to make sure they actually compile. tbh ideally we have CI for this somehow but im not sure how that would work

off the top of my head:

• needs updating for datafield auto-naming
• needs update for source gen copying (partial datadefs)
• needs update for audiosystem stuff
• needs to use soundspecifier
• needs new images that dont use eris sprites

i will probably end up doing this, but i want it to be less 'full fledged tutorials'-minded (except for the bikehorn one which is good) and more small examples of how to do specific things, a la other things like rust by example / dm by example

a lot of content documentation can be folded into this. engine docs too, probably. full-fledged docs should be relegated to stuff that really needs its own explanations outside of just code discoverability and basic FAQ stuff

this would make it significantly easier to iterate on and add new docs since you dont have to come up with a whole narrative for stuff--you just have questions and then answer them with code snippets, links, and short explainers

how to use simulation for testing, benchmarking, how it differs from integration tests or unit tests, etc

In the ECS section we have "TODO: finish this" which reflects on some challenges of implementing an OOP style code base for SS14. We should clean this section up at minimum and hopefully add additional details later.

The legibility varies by theme, some are worse than others. Here's the default:

IMO these aren't sufficiently visible when you have a whole page of docs in front of you. They should be changed to a higher-contrast color or at the very least changed to a bold font.

PLEASE i think we can fix this i just dont know how!!!!!!!!! it doesnt happen for sidebar! i mean this is an mdbook specific issue but like help!!!!!!!! ouuuuuu browser bullshit!!!!!! STOP FLASHBANGING ME

Why I'm salty about Science

Science at the moment really doesn't feel like it has much impact on the round. There are a few items Science can unlock that impact the station - the Flatpacker, the better sechud with flash protection, the anti-singulo gun, the GORRILA gauntlets - but generally Science is just milling about with too many people in the department for the roles that need doing.

Anomalies

Anomalies generally have a kill-or-farm meta. Anomalies is a one-person job generally done by a RD untrusting of the rest of their team to do it for them, or someone who does anoms every single round. The ultimate goal of someone working on anoms is to exploit the mechanics and find a way of reliably generating oodles of points. This is completely random. If you get lucky, you invalidate artifacts entirely.

Artifacts

Artifacts are a random gacha where the player has no way of actually influencing gameplay. Once you know how to proc a trigger (or if a trigger is a bad one, and ergo the artifact must be dumped) you just need to do it, then wait 40 seconds. Oh hey, the artifact went to a new node, um, points? Oh it's gone backward, well, time to wait another 40 seconds.

Robots

Roboticist is a side-hustle at best at the moment, as it's missing BOTH of its interactions (with AI and proper borg design, and with med as robot arms etc are used to replace missing parts). Ergo it's not a real role and is simply a source of cool drip.

Manufacturing

Manufacturing at the moment is horribly inefficient and undercooked, and well-intentioned buffs like the Flatpacker have just made manufacturing and maintaining equipment more of a magic-box-that-does-the-thing and less actual gameplay. (This has lead to the nonsense situation where savvy players can just ask for their own lathes and flatpackers for Cargo, totally removing any reason to go to Science!)

Techs

Techs are unlocked by points (which are unreliable) and your available selection is unreliable. Unless science is rolling in points, being able to pick a direction of research is essentially impossible, and rounds invariably go to hell too quickly to actually ever see anything remotely deep into tech trees. Worse, the result of tech is entirely new things to manufacture, often in machines science has no access to, with resources science doesn't have.

Current gameplay impacts

Science is optional

If nobody did science in a round, and Cargo broke in and stole their manufacturing equipment, the only thing people probably would miss is the Flatpacker as it cheats having to actually make machines.

Science is boring

If you spawn as a scientist, what are you excited to do in the round? Is there any new interesting goal to work toward this round, or a constant stream of workload coming in to manage? Can you get stuff done and have a fulfilling shift even if you don't get perfect access to the resources you'd need to play optimally?

Science doesn't interact with the antag roles

-> Traitor: maybe you manage to research something you can abuse? Maybe you emag the lathe or something?
-> Nukies: at best you can unlock being able to manufacture guns? But that only really ever happens in warops, and Cargo also can get guns...
-> Zombie: you can neither fight the infection, control it or beat it.
-> Revs: Oh nice, they can make flashes at your lathe? And your department can, uh, make mops to further the revolution...?

Desired outcomes

Science should be COOL

You're a scientist pushing the bounds of intelligence and wisdom out in deep space! It should be dangerous, chaotic and fun! It should get you fun gadgets and toys that you can either screw around with yourself or make a big impact on your fellow crew!

Science should be able to have a fun round without needing a perfect station

Starting the round with one artifact that needs magboots to trigger is not fun gameplay. Waiting fifteen minutes for Cargo to deliver things is not fun gameplay.

Science should be engaging

One key aspect of Science is manufacturing goods out of basic resources, but the tools to do this are so bad that they'd be embarrasing on a casual Minecraft server. The absolute worst way to have a job that takes resources and makes products is to solve the entire thing with magic do-everything-for-you boxes, and what is worse the Flatpacker has made this WORSE whilst making things more convenient, as the old cap/bin/manip build-it-from-scratch approach at least meant you needed to engage with building something akin to how engineering needs to pay attention when making things before they get their own magic cheat-everything Fortnite gun in the RCD.

Artifacts and Anomalies both suffer from the same design problem, which is that they hide being solvable behind a random number generator to try and cheat in engaging gameplay. Anomalies can probably survive this, as they're supposed to be a high-risk-high-reward way of getting points so the player has to be on the ball and make good judgement calls, and remember how to deal with the good-to-farm-but-a-bit-spicy ones. But artifacts are utterly awful at the moment because the player essentially is on a carousel of two actions of wait -> do node -> wait -> do node until the player gets fed up and swaps artifacts or is blocked due to resources. Sometimes you need a multitool to get your points. Sometimes you wait for fifteen minutes for Cargo to get you magboots. Sometimes it's radiation and you just sell the arti. All the while you're wading through some slippery liquid the artifact emitted that refuses to evaporate.

Science should have enough stuff to do for a full shift

The biggest sin at the moment is that science even on an 80-pop server can be done by about three people - an RD fulfilling requests, someone running artifacts and someone running anomalies. You functionally do not need two or more people on either research role. You probably need more chefs/bartenders on a 80-pop server.

I don't know which to defer to. It seems like license/copyright are optional for building but should be mandatory?

Page is here

currently in one large page but could easily be split into multiple pages for easier reading

• how to add new roles without shitcode, how to add briefings and status icons for them and stuff
• how mind entities work and why they're like that
• how to add new objectives & non-traitor objectives and stuff

iirc i didnt see much engine-specific docs on server/client/shared gamestate stuff, component state handling with regards to prediction, etc that kind of stuff

this looks really ass, idk why this is the default mdbook

right now its mainly just stream of consciousness and scratchpad stuff from pjb, and it still says stuff like 'oh this isnt merged yet'. ideally its actually converted to useful documentation in a better perspective

I think they're around a year old now. The biggest thing is probably notes/bans, but ahelp, logs, and a few other things are either out of date or not documented as well as they could be.

If updating, be careful to redact any real player information, especially real PII. If you use fake/placeholder PII, it should probably be very obviously fake.

its super all over the place and disorganized, doesn't explain much about how ECS is actually used in the codebase, needs more links to other explainers, and general updating for the current state of the codebase

• probably needs explainers on archetype ECS / relationships / struct comps since we are getting that very soon with arch!

could also definitely use atomization

checklist is at least a year old at this point, it does have a warning but it needs to be updated. not sure if we have updated info for this somewhere that i just missed @Emisse

We should add a testing section to the dev wiki docs. The motivation for this is to help clarify and standardize various testing practices. This will help with stability as well as cut down on various "How do I do/test X?" kinds of development questions.

arrows have bad contrast with the bg in the default theme

basically im imagining we would update this on discretion every time we answer a simple question in discord, so in the future we can link to this doc and have a permanent discoverable explanation rather than having knowledge secreted away in discord channels

• how to work with XAML UI / integrating it with regular csharp UI creation
• not putting stuff in entitysystems/components
• different useful controls and what they do
• UI controllers #14
• bound user interfaces / euis and how to use them
• ActivatableUI docs

IIRC they haven't been updated since the great machine linking / devicenet merge? theres also def a lot of information that is out of date just from a cursory glance

space-wizards/space-station-14#13645 @juliangiebel