Update rules

[Chief-Engineer]

About the PR

Redirects rules to the wiki instead of having them in-game. Plan is to self merge when the rule rewrite goes into effect (within the next 1-2 days I think)

Feel free to suggest any wording or formatting changes. Ideally the link would be an actual link but afaik that's not supported.

Why / Balance

No one likes that there are two versions of the rules in two different places, it was like this because it became impossible to mirror the rules that are on the wiki into the game. Instead of telling players to read the wiki rules and then giving them a list of rules that are not the wiki rules, this just tells them to read the wiki rules and attempts to convince them to while also making it clear that these are WizDen servers and that there are roleplay rules.

Technical details

Many characters were meticulously replaced with much fewer characters. Each new character was typed by hand using artisanal typing techniques on a traditional keyboard layout. The keystrokes traveled down metallic highways surrounded by insulation designed to both keep them on their path and free of corruption. Arriving at their destination, they were bundled together and escorted by military grade encryption across the world to where they are now. Their digital form ensures that, unlike analog keystrokes, they are as pure as when they were created.

Media

• I have added screenshots/videos to this PR showcasing its changes ingame, or this PR does not require an ingame showcase

Breaking changes

Changelog

[EmoGarbage404]

so glad to see the rules are gone. I will have fun self-antaging once this is merged. Thank you!

[Chief-Engineer]

:despair:

[lzk228]

some players can have bad pc and even couldnt open game and browser in the same time to read the rules, so its better to keep it in, maybe in another way

[mirrorcult]

yeah i dont know that im fully happy with this

[mirrorcult]

not having it be available ingame is a huge amount of friction

[Chief-Engineer]

I don't know that it's possible to have it in the game with the new version because both the rules and space law have tables and afaik nothing in the game supports tables

edit: I guess the table in the rules could be converted to writing but the one in space law would probably be pretty clunky without a table

[moonheart08]

This is kind of a bad idea, especially friction wise. The ingame rules are necessary for onboarding, and any extra friction in the onboarding process beyond the existing massive friction the rules impose will reduce player join rates even further.

A proper approach would be to instead autogenerate the wiki rules from the ingame rules, likely by just writing a tool to parse guidebook doc markup (in-engine?) and convert that to styled HTML for rehosting on the wiki, website, or wherever else.

The in-game document markup can be extended to support tables without too much friction, as well.

[PJB3005]

Absolutely not. These should be in-game. If the problem is that the wiki rules go out of sync, remove the wiki rules.

[moonheart08]

So here's what I'd do:

• Port the rules screen to use the guidebook document system, if it doesn't already.
• Implement tables into that, likely just needs to support square, plain tables with a header to start with.
• Use the integration test frame tooling to write a guidebook-to-html conversion system, by constructing a document and then walking its control tree to produce HTML elements with styling information attached. This is the Hard Part and I can provide guidance for all of this.

Is this a lot of work? yeah. yeah it is. I'm busy with redoing StyleNano right now (which will actually make the last bullet easier just due to better styling management) but I can provide guidance for everything on this list.

but I don't think removing the ingame rules is an option.

[Chief-Engineer]

Absolutely not. These should be in-game. If the problem is that the wiki rules go out of sync, remove the wiki rules.

It's that we can't put the rules in-game because the game doesn't support things that are needed for the rules to be readable

[PJB3005]

Then modify the rules some more so they fit.

[Chief-Engineer]

Then modify the rules some more so they fit.

I spent weeks writing this draft after people complained endlessly about the last version, which I think also took the person who wrote it weeks to write, for a year without being willing to write a proposal themselves. If someone doesn't like the current or proposed rules they need to write and get a proposal passed themselves

[mirrorcult]

ideal solution is to just have table support and keep it ingame, @EmoGarbage404 is working on it

[moonheart08]

Then modify the rules some more so they fit.

I spent weeks writing this draft after people complained endlessly about the last version, which I think also took the person who wrote it weeks to write, for a year without being willing to write a proposal themselves. If someone doesn't like the current or proposed rules they need to write and get a proposal passed themselves

This doesn't justify the nuclear option.

[EmoGarbage404]

can everyone get off each other's throats i am literally halfway through adding table support to the guidebook

[engineer-pearl]

If there's disagreement here about showing the laws in the book, what about a wording like "The in-game rules page is undergoing some major changes. You can still view the current rules at [color=#a4885c]https://wiki.ss14.io/wiki/Server_Rules[/color]"

This wording still allows ChiefEngineer to handle a rewrite quickly, but indicates that the situation is not permanent (which may make it feel less like "the nuclear option").

[moonheart08]

If there's disagreement here about showing the laws in the book, what about a wording like "The in-game rules page is undergoing some major changes. You can still view the current rules at [color=#a4885c]https://wiki.ss14.io/wiki/Server_Rules[/color]"

This wording still allows ChiefEngineer to handle a rewrite quickly, but indicates that the situation is not permanent (which may make it feel less like "the nuclear option").

This game is about to have a major audience in some days, now's not the time for 'temporary' (fixed three months later) bad UX. It can be out of sync for a bit.

Just let emo write the thing needed so it can be fixed For Real.

[Tayrtahn]

While not needed for this, it would also probably be good to get an actual hyperlink rich text tag for possible future use.

[mirrorcult]

tables PR is merged, this can be updated

[Chief-Engineer]

tables PR is merged, this can be updated

I wish I had read this soon :despair:

[moonheart08]

Not sure anyone's said this yet so here's a big "Thank you" for keeping the rules in-game.

[Chief-Engineer]

Still experiencing the table issue but I'm not planning on making more changes unless the fix to that requires a different formatting or the delay from waiting for a fix is too long and I give up on using the table in the metashield for now

[Chief-Engineer]

Should resolve the main part of #19763

[Chief-Engineer]

Where things are at is that it works when tested with showrules, but links don't work because it isn't a guidebook window so the guidebook entries aren't loaded. Even if the links did work, it wouldn't be great because you'd have no way that you could go back.

Not really sure where to go from here because I hardly have any experience with our UIs. Emo said he'd try to work on it this week, but my goal for the new rules was the end of last week so if anyone wants to try to beat him to it please feel free

[Chief-Engineer]

Due to deletion of Resources/ServerInfo/Rules.txt, this needs to not be merged until #28647 is ready to be

stinky