Explorer Overhaul and Gateway Retirement

[OctusGit]

What Does This PR Do

This PR enables Explorers as a roundstart role, offering 4 slots in pre-game, like other roles. A new spawn room equipped with survival gear, such as flashlights, small medkits, picks, shovels, etc., is introduced for explorers. Consequently, the gateway areas on stations are now gear rooms for explorers and no longer contain gateways. Explorer exploration will now focus solely on space ruins and space itself.

Why It's Good For The Game

Roundstart Explorers:

A PR for roundstart explorers was proposed five years ago but rejected due to the prevailing climate of Paradise at the time.
#6431
The addition of roundstart explorer roles has some clear advantages:

1. It eliminates the inconvenience of roundstart queueing and waiting for a HoP. Though Explorers remain under the HoP's supervision, this change reduces setup times, as the previous PR aptly stated:

This PR removes that artificial barrier of going to the HoP for access.

2. Offering more roles enhances players' learning experiences and simplifies access to new jobs. Explorer is already a popular role, so it makes sense to officially recognize it as a job, given the existing infrastructure and code support.

3. To further legitimize Explorers as a job, the gateway room will be transformed into a spawn area/locker room for gearing up for exploration.

Retirement of Gateway

The gateway has some fundamental issues, summarized as follows:

1. It detracts from gameplay by providing an easy, risk-free escape from problems, favoring antagonists and reducing tension during crises.

2. It lacks new content and proper management, resembling abandoned features like space pods. Without interest in addressing its issues or expanding on it, the gateway has become obsolete. The only available map is the beach.

3. Removing the gateway promotes space exploration and consolidates focus on one area, improving the overall experience, as evidenced by points 1 and 2.

4. As a bonus critique, the newest map, Farragus, lacks a gateway or portal, indicating a declining or aging mechanic.

Given these points, retiring the gateway and adding Explorers as a roundstart job would benefit both the server and the explorer role. This change would legitimize Explorers as an official roundstart role and concentrate exploration maps solely on space and space ruins, streamlining the job and allowing for a more focused allocation of resources and time for role-related content.

Images of changes

Testing

Tested, explorer options are available

Changelog

🆑
tweak: You can now become an explorer on roundstart, 4 slots are open on roundstart
tweak: The Gateway room has been converted into a gear room for roundstart explorers
add: Added an expedition room to Cere station inside EVA
add: added some new zone and landmark sprites
del: Removes Gateway and its unused content from the code
del: Removed bloat maps like evil_santa and example map
/:cl:

[DGamerL]

Yes.

[kano-dot]

Removal of gateway had it coming for sure, though i think it'd be sad to lose beach party area. There's still a lavaland ruin that may aswell serve the same purpose as this one did but it's clearly not the same.

spider and USSP gateway had it own issues to not remain as space ruins but i think there's no reason to not have beach party surface area (excluding underwater and pirate camp side parts) as a space ruin like what has been applied to xenomorph station, just an opinion.

[ATP-Engineer]

Maybe in a way, a rework of the gateway to be an actual station project varying between rounds like the BSA/Harvester makes sense, and opens for SO MUCH MORE possibilities in a fully fleshed out fine tuning of the feature.

[GDNgit]

Please keep tiny test, it's helpful for testing

[pismorizzo]

As someone who has played an intense amount of explorer and abused gateway even beach alot, it sadly does have to go. Only thing I can add is that you should add some jetpacks to the gear room so the 3-4 explorers don't have to fight over the 2 that are in EVA on most maps and can leave them for other crewmembers to use.

[Sadhorizon]

Okay, one thing that PROBABLY should be changed alongside making explorer a job, is their starting uniform. AT THE VERY LEAST they shouldn't have a randomly colored jumpsuit and black shoes, unless we really want them to feel like assistant+ (which we probably don't)

Besides it however, I do like the idea behind this PR and am curious to see it in practice.

[SynthTwo]

My poor gateway... What have they done to my BOI!

Otherwise, good change. But I hope we add more things to Space once this is added... Because space is really lacking and tedious.

oh yeah for sure, space is a bit predictable right now. its always get cool loot, come back and get arrested cause cool loot is contraband lmfao. more stuff added would be cool. i wonder if randomizing space each round could become possible?

[AffectedArc07]

i wonder if randomizing space each round could become possible?

It is

[OctusGit]

It is

they prob mean like, having randomized generated ruins, which I feel would just make alot of really shitty or garbage quality ruins

[SynthTwo]

It is

they prob mean like, having randomized generated ruins, which I feel would just make alot of really shitty or garbage quality ruins

yup thats what i meant, my bad, but yeah it probably would do shitty ruins sadly. or just insanely amazing one; pain to balance. either way, hopefully this PR will encourage people to update space exploring even more

[Ordosian]

yup thats what i meant, my bad, but yeah it probably would do shitty ruins sadly. or just insanely amazing one; pain to balance. either way, hopefully this PR will encourage people to update space exploring even more

Space uses the Nightmare system basically. Inserts ruins into the space z levels. Making it create randomized ruins is basically impossible. You would have to make different presets for each ruin so then the nightmare system could choose from that and insert it.

[AffectedArc07]

Config changes approved

[Sirryan2002]

remind me to look at this more in the following week if there's not more approving reviews by Monday/Tuesday

[Henri215]

Forgot to remove that shutter button? (Cyberiad)

[SteelSlayer]

Codewise looks good.

Please remove the button that Henri mentioned, and then deconflict.