Speed up or skip pointless airlock cycles

[pseudo nymph]

💡 Motivation
Waiting for airlock doors to open and close is generally a lot of repetitive time wasted.

💡 Proposal
Only maintain a minimum of one door open at a time.

💡 Nitty-gritty

Ship -> Station

• When your ship docks to a station, it automatically opens the ship-side airlock door.
• You enter the airlock (this starts making a quiet "opening alert" noise and flashes dim lights outside the lock, in the station), and the ship-side door closes very quickly behind you.
• The station-side door opens slowly and loudly as normal. If you notice enemies outside, you can interrupt and reverse the process (start closing the door and cycle back to your ship) midway through by hitting the airlock console button again.
• The station-side door stays open.

Balance: The above changes give a little more warning for players who aren't deliberately camping that another player will be arriving soon, but it also means that ambushers need to give the new arrival a false sense of security in order to lure them out of the safety of the airlock before attacking. This reduces some unfair aspects of the randomness of ship arrivals and positions of players already inside the station.

QoL: We no longer spend precious (and very boring / noninteractive) seconds at the start of every single raid waiting for both airlock doors to open and close.

Station -> Ship

• The station-side door is open. A cycle can be triggered from either the station or airlock console. This starts a long "cycle starting" countdown, then the station-side door closes.
• Once closed, the air cycle completes very quickly and the ship-side airlock opens almost instantly (1-2 seconds for this whole process).

Balance: We preserve the danger and anxiety of extraction ("do I hide or clear the area first?")

QoL: Once safe from other players, we don't waste any of the extractor's time inside the ship.

How to speed up airlock cycles without compromising danger & tension

[charred pumice]

I like this idea, but I think the issue here is technical. The airlock is a hidden loading screen, so I'm not sure if what your proposing could even be implemented because of that. Though I agree, the process is slow, but it may have to be that way for the servers to properly load the area.

[flint wharf]

The main thing I can agree with is that you need to be able to cancel and reverse the airlock process without leaving the airlock and doing a full cycle. When people are camping your exit it's really just a completely unfun mechanic that the only way to cycle the airlock is to fully leave it, stand outside while it cycles, press the button, go back in, and then press the button again.

Having the airlock auto-open on dock is also good and will help solo players, as they're at a speed disadvantage (can't have someone waiting downstairs to press the button).

[opaque moat]

i would say no to a cancel button but maybe after 10 seconds let them close the dpor without exiting

[pseudo nymph]

Servers in games like this generally don't have to do any big "loading" (harddrive -> RAM) except at the start of the instance/raid. The server likely already has the station interior in RAM before the first player even enters that station/ship, and servers don't need to load any graphics/audio, only things like map & hitbox meshes. Given the client's minimum RAM spec is 12GB, I'd bet good money that the interior is already in RAM for players, too.

Besides that, opening the ship-side door saves a huge amount of time and helps buff solos vs groups regardless of how loading works. At the very least, we can make loading the bottleneck, rather than any arbitrary added wait time for airlock cycling which may take longer than loading.

Edited to a simpler system where the station-side door stays open when a ship is docked. Because there's cover available inside the airlock, this also introduces ambiguity for other players who rush to kill the extractor: are they already hiding inside the airlock, or elsewhere? These opportunists now have a way to steal a ship without even necessarily killing the captain: they can run inside the airlock and fight off the captain outside until the door closes. This also intuitively shows players which docks are occupied by ships without them having to run up to the console and check.

[pseudo nymph]

bump

Speed up or skip pointless airlock cycles

[snow fiber]

The airlock is a teleporter that's why it's designed like this because they don't want people fighting each other while teleporting back and forth from the station "Cell" and from the space "Cell" instead they should just remove the station cell and merge it with the space Cell and work on making the audio not penetrate cast iron walls....

[pseudo nymph]

The airlock still functions as an airlock in my proposed scheme: that is, both doors are never open (at all) simultaneously. So in terms of performance and how the level/cells work under the hood, everything should be exactly the same. My system just leaves one of the doors open when the airlock's not in use, i.e. we presume which direction passengers on the ship are most likely to be travelling through the airlock (ship -> station upon docking, and then no usage until that same party goes from station -> ship).

[snow fiber]

Multiple ships can dock at one airlock...

[pseudo nymph]

I agree about the audio leaking through the doors - would be an easy quick fix to mute until they've at least cracked

[pseudo nymph]

oh shit, of course. yeah this system doesn't work until it's one ship per airlock. I assume that's temporary because it's so insane / unfair / unintuitive

[snow fiber]

I don't think they have anything in terms of audio dampening areas yet

Like I mentioned it's really a teleporter

I do agree with the whole not waiting 3 minutes stuck in room

[pseudo nymph]

now I understand; I thought you were talking about optimisation rather than practicality

[compact girder]

this is a bad idea because the monument and space pvp/ship are two different servers therefore it could screw up server

[snow fiber]

Yeah if you opened both airlock doors and walked through them you'd just fall off the map

[pseudo nymph]

huh?

[snow fiber]

False they are different cells in the same server

[compact girder]

mb would still make servers run slower

[pseudo nymph]

no it wouldn't; please don't speculate if you don't understand programming

[snow fiber]

Servers running speed is the sum total of every script and process it has thousands of inputs

The dev team is like 1 dev per 40k players (last time I checked pop)