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Poll: Turning the Power Off


grayman

Turning the Power Off  

30 members have voted

  1. 1. What happens when power is restored?

    • Turn on only the lights that were on when power was cut.
      25
    • Turn on ALL lights, even the ones that were out when the power was cut.
      2
    • Some other result (to increase interest, randomness, interesting gameplay, etc.).
      3


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I'm curious about what folks would rather see when the power gets cut off in a mission.

 

Here's the simple situation: When the power is cut off, all the lights go out. When the power is restored, all the lights come back on.

 

Now, let's make it slightly more complicated ...

 

IRL, if you wander around the place and turn off half the lights, then turn off the power, all the lights are off.

 

And here's the poll question: When the power is restored, do you expect that

 

1 - only the lights that were on when the power went out should come back on. (Real life.)

 

OR

 

2 - all the lights come back on, even the ones that were switched off by you. This could be explained away by saying the power system resets itself to the "safety comes first" paradigm of "more ON lights are good".

 

OR

 

3 - some other result of turning the power off then restoring it.

 

 

Please vote, discuss in the thread, and suggest some category 3 situations.

 

Thx.

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I'd think that when only the lights which were turned on get back on makes the most sense. I don't know what you want to do with it, but, that's what i would imagine is the best solution. Will also make it look more "pro". :)

 

On top, in RL, there are many different circuits, so, it'd make sense to divide different districts to different power grids. Or generators, like in Dark Mod.

Edited by chakkman
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I voted "only lights that were on before the outage" since it's the most realistic \ immersive

but I don't think there's a right answer here.

 

If the mission is more fun because you are surprised by new\more lighting then you don't need to

follow any rules about this. Depending on how much of a pain the restored lighting is, it might

be advisable to alert players about "lights auto-reset" functions in a readable.

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Light up the "old" lights only BUT increased (patrolling guards) interest, of course.

Edited by lowenz
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As NBohr said, maintaining the state of the lightswitch is more realistic, BUT having the generator power behave like a master switch will definitely create more of a challenge. Besides, it would probably mean a lot more scripting for you to remember all those light switch states.

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Voted maintaining the state of the lightswitch. But if there are AI in the area they would turn things on and off to check if lights work, making it more random. This would also need to be vocalised in one way or another.

 

Also you can introduce further rules for wireless electricity (how things work when they "lose signal") and distinguish between "antenna" switches/ machines and those with thick cable stretching across whole building.

 

640px-4-way_switches_position_4.svg.png

S2wtMNl.gif

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I guess most players would expect the light state to be stored, as can be seen in the poll already. However, I voted "some other..." as I think it heavely depends on the situation/area. Mainly it should depend whether it is acceptable that lights get turned out via switches, like in houses or mansions where only those rooms are lit where people currently are. If the player is in an area where the lights should be all on (raising the question why there should be any light switches then), reseting them to beeing on makes sense.

 

Another aspect to consider might be whaat makes more sense gameplay-wise, what also depends on the actual mission, I guess.

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I guess it depends on what you want for the gameplay. I'd say start with realism and go from there as its something most players will understand? Solution 1.

 

If you go with solution 2, you would want to be very strategic about where you place switichable lights in the case the player turns off a closet light to hide bodies or something like that.

 

As for a 3rd solution (once again depending on gameplay intent). I think its always good to let the player see or be close to seeing what the effect of their actions are. So you could have groups of lights attached to power boxes that are close by or in the same room, or even in different sectors like the Cathedral in T1.

 

Funny- I've tried to tackle this exact same problem and failed to figure out a good solution, so I'd love to see this implemented with a robust script.

Edited by kingsal
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IMO it would be much more interesting, both gameplay- and design-wise if, after turning the main power off, the whole place was lit with some kind of emergency lights. So the whole location would basically switch to a different lighting setup, requiring new gameplay approach.

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You can add torches that have the "shouldBeOn" spawnarg that toggles with the outage. That way, guards will light these torches as soon as the electrical lights are out. If it is linked to the electrical lights, they will no longer care as soon as the lights are turned on again. In general, it may make sense to turn on torches on guard paths as it is quite probable that the guards would turn them on, when the electrical lights fail (shich I would suppose happens not very seldom).

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I voted for the majority option as well (turn back only those lights which were already on), because this seems to be closest to how I imagine steampunk electrics should work, with the sort of simple mechanical switches that would have been used in the late nineteenth century.

 

Turning everything on seems more characteristic of digital control circuitry that we have today, where the lights are permanently supplied with electricity and the switch is just an input device that requests the light to turn on or off. I have no doubt that an electrical engineer in 1890 could have designed a system to work like this, perhaps using mechanical control devices like electromagnetic relays, but I assume it wouldn't have been very common.

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I voted to turn on only the lights that were on, however the thought occurred to me that there may be a surge when the generator is reconnected or restarted which could cause some of the 'on' lights to blow

 

I've never seen a mass production facility in this universe so I imagine all the electrical items are hand made & have slightly different tolerances

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