Space Station 14 – Open-source remake of Space Station 13 | Hacker News Reader

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

spacestation14.io

269 pointsnonbirithm92 comments

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

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

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...

Hail Cargonia.

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

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.

This has to be the bomb.

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.

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.

Sseth leveled a warrior in WoW to 60, which probably took at least 8 days of in-game playtime. 5 months of full time work.

Not true in classic or Blizzard's modern "Classic."

It's a pretty easy speedrun, and the community's been doing it since literally 2004. Here's a really fast example from 2006:

https://www.joanasworld.com/azeroth.php

This was do-able in WoW 1.x (prior to 2.0 before TBC launch) in just 3 days, before TBC ever came out (not talking about WoW Classic).

A hunter in the guild I ran (we rolled onto a new server) did exactly that. 3 days. I felt bad for taking an entire week to hit 60, when fifteen members (incl warriors) hit 60 in the first five days.

Dr. Mandalore and Mr. Sseth

This is only a meme.

Sseth is based in EU (and makes little secret on that), Mandalore is in US.

Some in the SS13 community hold a strongly negative opinion about Sseth's video, since it appears to give the wrong impression of the game as a sandbox where you can do anything. In contrast, the most popular servers have a strict set of rules for what kind of behavior is appropriate, and randomly killing people for non-roleplaying purposes is a bannable offense. Regardless, the increase in attention to the game caused a lot of new players with no intention of following the rules to flood the servers, lowering the quality of the playerbase. (Sseth himself acknowledges in the video that the veteran players will blame him for the ensuing problems.)

As someone who did play a lot of SS13 way back (must be around 7-10 years now, whack) he gave the entirely correct impression of the game in the form that gave it its fame and infamy. Serious roleplay SS13 servers are a bit like serious roleplay sessions of Paranoia - sure you can if you squint hard enough and apply a million rules about what can and can't be done (heavily biased towards the latter) but the product becomes crippled and stiffled.

There's basically 2 extreme sides of that coin, which make up the majority of players.

Neither realize that the game would not exist without the other. The game is fun because it exists in the bittersweet spot in the middle.

The illusion of order is just an illusion. Admins kill the fun just as much as trolls.

The game IS this secret dynamic. It's even in the lore, and every single story you've ever read. Most of the fun comes from people breaking rules a bit.

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

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?

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

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.

Dang the byond engine takes me back. That was an interesting concept that I'm surprised doesn't have a modern version.

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.

FWIW, the Venn-diagram of "Twitter users" and "Space Station 13 Players" are just two, separate circles.

Yeah SS13 is more of a 4chan /tg/ thing. Twitter is the last place you'll find old hidden treasures.

Nintendo Hidden Gem: Legend of Zelda Link to the Past! Smash that like button fellow gamers!

I found ss13 from a roommate who found ss13 from twitter.

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.

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.

On an engine that makes PHP look like a paragon of good design

a compiled language with a function call overhead higher then php? it could only be byond.

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.

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

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...

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

Yep. I'll believe the curse is over when Goon/tg/etc. get some servers running on SS14/Unitystation for at least a year.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

I wouldn't say it's anything like Eve if I'm honest. More like Among Us with Dwarf Fortress levels of complexity.

And little pressure to pro-actively deal with the antagonist. In Among Us you do tasks to defeat the antag, in SS13 you do things because you want to do them, and the antag provides an element of chaos.

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.

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).

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!

> 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.

I've never even had a moderator talk to me, much less assume anything about my intentions. Different servers will have different cultures.

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.

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.

>The whole thing comes together in a beautifully elaborate machine where all sorts of crazy social situations crop up

It's probably been a ~decade or so since I've played SS13 (have gone back every now and then, but not regularly) and have fond memories of the antics that occurred.

One of my first memories as a new player was accidentally wandering into medical, getting knocked out by a couple of players, waking up tied to a chair, force-fed medicine until I died, and then waking up again having been revived, dressed in an EVA suit, stuffed inside a locker with the door welded shut, and thrown out the airlock to spend the rest of the round floating in the black void of space.

Which sounds sadistic, but was very funny at the time. New players were griefed mercilessly, so if you didn't quit you quickly became very proficient at the game (out of necessity, so you didn't spent the bulk of each round in a locker or suffering some other terrible fate).

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

Personal favorite remains 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)

Hey hey people, Sseth here.

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

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

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!

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.

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..

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.

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.

> [...] 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.

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!

Seems GOG has them:

https://www.gog.com/game/quest_for_glory

That brings back memories of Infocom’s Planetfall where you were a janitor on a space station.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planetfall

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

I’m sure you can have a dance off against space aliens in ss13

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

Are new players welcome?

Nope, but that's why you should play anyways :)

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.

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?").

You beat me to it!

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.

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.

/tg/station will have our own fork of ss14 soon enough.

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.

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)

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?

Right, as it turns out it was because Midnight Commander doesn't handle the non-standard extension Info-ZIP uses to store the file attributes.

Whether others have this issue, you don't know. And they don't know, which is not surprising given the rude tone they (or you) reacted to my report. Also, I was actually using a pretty popular app to quickly unpack the archive, so it's more like SS14's problem than MC's. Simply because they are bigger and more wide spread. (Not saying that it wouldn't be nice if they improved their ZIP file handling.)

Anyway, tar.gz is without any doubt the most obvious and safest bet if you are targeting unix systems.

> 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.

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.

Maybe, but brains talking one was from playtest. Really old one.

Also a contributor, given how my PRs are handled, i don't expect SS14 to have feature parity with SS13 anytime till 2100.

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.

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

PJB is going to be the Lennart Poettering of BYOND soon enough.

4 years is a long time.

Man's on a mission.

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.

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