I got that to work easily with a secondary power network for lighting. Simply connect a switch to a light with it, and the switch(and any others connected) toggles the state of the light circuit. The circuit would then set the individual lights.
By simply implementing lights for lighting rather than magically giving light to lit areas, you have accomplished the first step towards such a system, if you ever wanted to extend it that way. The key point of using a physical network is simply that players can only properly interact with physical objects and text interfaces. Asking them what network to connect a light to is just unfair, as they could set up a light room showing what parts of the station are in use, or they would get frustrated trying to match the light to the switch, and match switches to each other, and then the greifer comes along who makes a second switch for every light set in a remote base...
Not that such remote switches are impossible with cabling, but at least someone with a t-ray scanner could trace the cables back to their base(In fact, such a setup would suddeny be barely greif, as it is much closer to actual RP. First, it is easy to find them by tracing cables, and second, they must create them in the first place.)
Much later, maybe add a wireless LAN system for sending inter-machinery messages, and then you can reveal the conveyor, pod door, and mass driver IDs to the players(assign it a random but consistant 4-digit hex string, randomized at the start of the round, and replacing each mapper-ID set with a unique code), especially as it would allow remote prison doors and other neat features, and explains how the AI could operate them. That gives the potential later update that anything the AI does must go through such WLAN interfaces, and thus exposes all of those functions to crafty players. Add modular components such as timers and logic gates, and you have a primitive wireless wiremod so that you actually *CAN* create an automated airlock cycle that drains the air before letting you out, to conserve valuable resources, and all from in-game with no mapper input!
Further, adding a general wire interface to all objects, and a system for giving the object a list of functions for the wires, so that it can create just enough of them and re-order them on a per-type basis, and each proc can check it's wire state by passing it's own path, with instant failure if it doesn't have a wire assigned at all, otherwise success or failure determined by the status of it's wire in the device....
And then the possibilities of a packet gathering device that reveals all of the codes and devices during a N-second interval...
Well, that was getting too far into the future, but those are all potential ideas for the next few decades of development.
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Topic: Space Station 13 *READ RULES ON FIRST POST* (Read 825335 times)