Holodeck

[IProduceWidgets]

Proposal for the iconic and very thematic holodeck.

[deltanedas]

funny name considering the content

[ArtisticRoomba]

Princess also approved this on discord. Maint team discussed this and it's obviously something we want. Not really any concerns from a balance/mapping standpoint, the balance can be done on a case-by-case basis (the unsafe rooms from TGstation seem fine).

This should have been merged 2 years ago.

[ArtisticRoomba]

The document needs to be cleaned up to be more formal but that's such a minor blocker it can be done later by anyone really.

[IProduceWidgets]

Neato.

As a loose thought, I've been thinking about the noneuclidean joke at the end for a long while. I know RMC uses disguised teleporters for its stairwells to fake zlevels. I didn't realize that at some point they got vision over the boundary to work. Given that it's a MIT fork we can probably use a similar concept to make a holodeck bigger on the inside, and handwave away a lot of the moving of entities this proposal originally required.

The only real tradeoff is losing well behaving area effects. Things like explosions outside the holodeck wouldn't automatically cause damage to things inside the holodeck for instance. Similar for other things like area of effect spells or radiation.

There's probably some nuanced thing we could do there like pass damage from the wall entities to whatever entities are displaced inside, but thinking of edgecases for things like wizard spell targetting is hard.

On the bright side I think mob logic already supports portal navigation so that's already sorted.

Another thought --
Probably the best way to go is having a nodegroup which the walls (and maybe floors?) Utilize to understand if the room is sufficiently enclosed. Though some sort of flood fill logic could work too. I'm just unaware of other areas we use that except some atmos things.

[ArtisticRoomba]

I can write a BFS fill API for Atmospherics if you'd like.