[Suggestion] Have Cloning Scans Tell Us If Someone's Dead

[Wickedtemp]

This scenario has happened several times in the past week:

Crew Member: "Hey, I found this person's gear in the hall. Do they have a scan?"
Medical: "Why yes, they do, I'll handle it."

And guess what. The person wasn't dead. They just stripped their gear off and went radio-silent. They were likely in a scene.

Of course, medical has no way of actually knowing. The only reason someone didn't get ejected from their roleplaying scene and forced into a body of a clone was because I ahelped and asked if the person in question was alive or not, and I was told that they were. Had I just went along with the cloning, their scene would have likely been ruined, or at the absolute least, interrupted and delayed.

We had this before the port... Can Medical PLEASE get SOMETHING in the cloning monitor that just says "Hey, this person's dead.", so this sort of thing doesn't happen anymore?

[Lobo-Branco]

That sounds like it would be useful and not waste Medical's time.

Are you suggesting some kind of OOC tool for that? Or do you mean some kind of death alarm implant thing for everyone?

Whatever makes the life of the medical stuff less frustrating would be welcome I guess.

[Arbon]

I thought if the person was still alive (As in, that same person rather than the same player as a new character) then you just got an error message telling you that you can't clone them? If that has changed then this is a serious idea that I would fully support, even if it does have this intended side effect of acting as a secondary vitals scan telling you when players are dead. But if not? If it still functions the same way as when I worked in medical, then that functionality already exists just in a limited form.

If trying to clone someone who's alive doesn't get an error message, then I feel it might be easier to just change that back so it does.

[Wickedtemp]

I thought if the person was still alive (As in, that same person rather than the same player as a new character) then you just got an error message telling you that you can't clone them? If that has changed then this is a serious idea that I would fully support, even if it does have this intended side effect of acting as a secondary vitals scan telling you when players are dead. But if not? If it still functions the same way as when I worked in medical, then that functionality already exists just in a limited form.

If trying to clone someone who's alive doesn't get an error message, then I feel it might be easier to just change that back so it does.

Unless it was changed a few months ago, you should be able to clone someone who's still alive. The player will be ghosted, their character will drop SSD, and they'll be put into the clone. Now, maybe it was changed and we do actually get an error screen. I wouldn't know, because I never risk it to find out.

We USED to have a full vitals-readout for every cloning scan, it was like having an internal set of sensors that're always on, so Medical could flip through them all to check on everyone's health to see who needs a clone and who's going to need one. It also used to automatically delete the cloning scans of crew that went to cryo. But, to avoid confusion, Medical could just look at the crew manifest to see if there's anyone in the scan records that isn't on the manifest anymore, to see if they're out of the round before they clone.

I'm sure that, by now, someone has been cloned when they were alive, and whatever it was they were doing either got shut down completely, or delayed for a good while. It was ABOUT to happen last night, the only reason it didn't was because I asked an Admin to check if the person was still alive. If there wasn't an Admin online at that time, I probably would have said "Well, might as well not risk it." and went ahead with the cloning.

[arokha]

You can't clone someone who is still alive unless they cryo and rejoin, as the scan isn't considered as matching the newly spawned character. This is why scans are deleted when you clone someone, since their new body wouldn't match the original scan anyway, and would lead to shenanigans. You could also clone someone who died or otherwise lost their body somehow and then an admin used 'Spawn Character' to give them a new one, but that's pretty rare.

S'been that way for as long as I've been playing, though at one point I did make it so cryo does delete your scan too, that was never re-done when we moved to Polaris since it was a pretty rare occurrence anyway.

Edit: In reading the code, it seems like you probably can't clone people in live bodies at all, even ones who cryo and rejoin, because of

Code: Select all

   if(clonemind.current && clonemind.current.stat != DEAD)   //mind is associated with a non-dead body
      return 0