Radiation poisoning has no symptoms

[minus1over12]

Description

Currently, the only indication of radiation damage without using a health analyzer is your health bar going down. This is confusing if you are not aware of radiation damage existing in the game, or what can cause it.

Reproduction

Stand next to a singularity for a few minutes, die with no explanation.

Additional context

The issue was brought up as a side effect of #34436, and identified as needing a separate fix.

Some solutions proposed there:

• You should start vomiting once you have enough radiation damage.
• Subtle messages should pop up on the player

[Alpaccalypse]

I've got an "Irradiated" damage group and a prototype of damageOverlayGroup sprite layers working. Not sure if I have done the damage group in the best way, but it works. Seemed to be the most obvious solution. Unlike burn and brute damage, the effect should probably be a bit more subtle and display symptoms a bit later perhaps.

I'm thinking of seeing if I can make you glow as you get more irradiated. Wondering if it is possible to do similar to how you can set point lights in prototypes, but imagine it might need some C# to get it working in response to damage thresholds. Some C# might be needed to get the damage group working in a more desirable manner too; though maybe my inelegant YAML solution is fine.

-I would like to get messages working and vomiting, but this is a little more tricky, from what I can tell. Damage from something like poison, is practically always reagent based. This makes it very easy to add effects and messages just with .yml files. Radiation is almost always more abstract and caused by an external source. I've not found a way to do it yet, using the existing C# components and systems using just .yml prototypes. As you can get irradiated in a full body suit, quite easily, it is sort of essentail to get this working to properly address this issue. I was looking into getting something like an emote action triggered after a certain damage threshold, like how you scream under certain reagent effects. Again, this is much easier to do with reagents though.

[ArtisticRoomba]

Bumping this because zero communication of radiation poisoning is just really bad.

It would be best if pop-ups started showing when you entered the poor state.

[MozarteanChaos]

Yeah, it's become a bit more dire since radioactive items have become more common - uranium sheets, and all that. If you're not paying attention, you might not realize that you're hanging out too close to the uranium pile - or that someone's brought something radioactive into the medical lobby - until it's too late.
Skill issue? Maybe, but it's one that can be mitigated by making it more obvious that you're dying.

[ArtisticRoomba]

I'm all for making things radioactive, I think it's cool and provides a roleplay element that makes sense. If I was new to the game I would feel really immersed if I had to handle stuff like uranium delicately.

The problem is that radiation isn't well communicated to the average non-engineer and it definitely needs some work. Some people have thought about this:

• Your jumpsuit could simply tell you that you're being irradiated but not by how much, just that you are. I think this is a bit of an extreme change though.
• Wide range radiation alarms for rooms that might face exposure to warm people. It could be as simple as a silent blinking bulb in some place you would expect (like a singularity containment!) but it would actually alarm if it detected radiation in places where you wouldn't expect (say a medical ward or security).

[Errant-4]

What if one of the effects was randomly getting "Tastes like metal"

[ArtisticRoomba]

I agree. 99% of nerds (SS14 players) understand (or will understand after they die to it the first time) the "metal taste" effect when they're exposed to radiation. Another effect you can have is have a "You smell ozone in the air" as a small popup every minute.

Yes, in real life, these types of things only happen when you're being nuked. However, since this is spess, we can forgo parity to real life. Intuitiveness is preferred compared to true 1:1 realism.