Blog Post: The Police Force

It's nice to see a removal of the "battering ram" from roleplay and the addition of keycards. My concern about keycards able to be stolen is that players will run up to cops on the street, yank them from players pockets and run away.

 

"Recruitment will occur around the same time as the beta"

Teddi, it's in beta.

 

Sounds very, very promising.

However, I have a few questions:
1. By what method keycards can be stolen?
2. Are there any alternative illegal methods to access the police station?
3. How does the Armory stocked and regulated?
4. Are officers issued any weapons (non-lethal or lethal) normally?
5. According to the Criminal Justice Act, carrying or storing a deadly weapon is illegal on the island. Does this mean that civilians cannot have weapons, even for the purpose of self defense? A concealed carry licence for handguns would seem far more appropriate to me, however perhaps that would just end up with gung-ho civilians running around.

 

Issue all officers with an in-game handbook they can look down at to remeber all of this. xP

A tazer or pepper spray could be quite nice for standard issue for officers on street patrol.

 

But what if Biff and his street gang start to shoot at me while riding around in their beat-up midsized sedan?

 

Call an armed response team!

Actually, the whole army should just about handle Biff and his Grove Street Homies. :<

 

Not really, and by beta I mean beta testing, which isn't currently occurring.

Through a punch-up system where you literally assault the person for the items they're carrying. More info on this will be available later on. The police are encouraged to store high-clearance cards in the bank to avoid them being stolen.

Nope, we want to avoid the "you're now a mob boss, use lockpick to gain unlimited access to the station." You'll need someones card to open the doors, whoevers that is.

Lack of info at this point, Teddi can answer this better than me. Ideally every time armoury weapons are taken there's a log made via the computer, which can be reviewed in-character. Naturally if unnecessary withdrawal of weapons are made then it'll be taken under investigation.

On their persons they'll carry a baton and taser and a few other non-weapon related items, such as the radio and handcuffs. They'll carry nothing lethal unless they withdraw it from the armoury.

Weapons are just outright illegal, this island isn't America where everyone stores guns in their home (stereotype soz). Considering myself, Teddi and Killermon (IIRC) are British this is probably playing a part in the basis of the laws, but it's something we're looking to enforce. Guns, legally, will only be carried by the police force. Perhaps in the future we'll look to introducing gun licences though. We'll make up for it by making the laws of the road driving on the right side!

I don't have enough info on the assault system at this point, but the police will lock out any card stolen fairly quickly to ensure they can't be used, and follow up any assaults with arrests.

There's a good dozen threads reserved for those accepted into the police force which deal with issues such as confrontations with citizens, keeping your keycards safe and avoiding station compromises.

 

For stocking the Armoury the general idea is that we keep a close eye on it over time so the police stay on top overall in terms of weaponry. Every so often their Armoury will be stocked with a set amount of items and armour. Having to add a third mechanic of making them scavenge for their own materials to make stuff seems over the top and puts too much focus on the police side of things. The police should always be an underlying force that is a force to be reckoned with. That's not to say they're invincible but they will make for a challenge for anyone that dares to challenge them.

For the beatdown system only certain items can be dropped from the player however this is down to optimization limits and not because I don't want you dropping everything. It'll be harder to beatdown police but it will be more than possible.

 

Thanks for answering my questions, but I have one other question:

Is the server for [BB] RP going to much more powerful then the ones we have currently? If TTT is lagging the servers (even if the maps/gamemodes are poorly optimized), I can't see a complex Roleplay gamemode set in a giant map with tons of players from multiple regions simultaneously playing being much better in terms of lag.

 

We believe we've isolated the cause for the lag on TTT which is basically the voice mute system.

 

Even then, though, [BB] Build crashes/lags quite easily. You much more about the servers than I do, but are you sure they can support a gamemode of this magnitude?

 

Well TTT isn't our gamemode, and Build is basically sandbox which can lag at any time.

There's a heavy amount of optimization in RP already, and we'd like to keep that trend going.

 

Build is effectively Sandbox with my own stuff on top of it. I cannot help the fact it gets like that although do keep in mind that all servers at the moment (bar TTT) are running the VMute system. I'll update it so we have a more effective way of voice muting players without causing a slowdown to the entire server.

It's not the machine lagging, I've showed Bundt and Kaiden statistics from that, it's the daemon itself (srcds). Because of the way voice muting is done I end up clogging up the thread it's on and thus it causes a slowdown in processing actual gameplay. This is why when I ran TTT without BBase we ran into no issues.

Effectively the issue is the way I do voice muting-

Code:

//Comments added for forum
hook.Add("PlayerCanHearPlayersVoice","VMooted",function(plist,ptalk)
	if !Amen.PunTable then return false,false end //If the table doesn't exist then return false
	if !plist:IsPlayer() or !ptalk:IsPlayer() then return false, false end //If the player(s) don't exist return false
	for _,mu in pairs(Amen.PunTable) do //For all the (active) punishments loop through the table
		if ptalk:SteamID() == mu.SteamID and mu.Punishment == "vmute" then //If we find a steamid does it have a matching punishment?
			if tonumber(mu.Expires) > os.time() then //Has the punishment expired yet?
				if !ptalk.VMuteTold then  //Have they been told why they're voice muted?
					ptalk:Error("You have been voice muted for: "..mu.Reason..".")
					ptalk.VMuteTold = true
				end
				return false,false //Apply the mute
			else
				return true,false //Allow them to talk
			end
		end
	end	
	return true, false //If no punishment is found for the player, we allow them to talk by default. 
end)

That snippet of code is ran 8 times per second for each player on the server. Because TTT makes use of the PlayersCanHearPlayersvoice function quite heavily, it means that this slows it all down once too many players are online. We have another way of doing it as effectively which will be implemented sometime soon.

 

Still can't wrap my head around why you would do it like that

 

Any chance of sticking mumbles positional audio in there? Dark RP uses a shitty one were once you reach a certain point you stop hearing stuff while mumble makes great usage of surround sound

 

Because it's the most flexible. I do agree it's rather dirty though.

As far as I'm aware of this is a setting within Mumble itself and I shouldn't need to do anything. However if you have more information on it that'd be great.

 

The forum failed at setting up the police sections and for some reason the police private chat was public to quite a few people. Pretty disappointed those people didn't bring this to anyone's attention when they obviously shouldn't have been able to see it, but it's fixed.

 

How many people are in the beta right now?

 

Not too many people saw it as only members logged in could see it. If they didn't take a copy then they can't see it anymore.