[Suggestion] Station Guards as DoorMen

[Cheata]

Guards Stationed in an area should unlock doors in that area instead of having to wait for a free guard to run across the entire map just to open a door..

simply put there is a guard in the room so why cant he let people in and out of the room ...
This would be of particular benefit when making "Guard Houses" or control points / Checkpoints (basically a 5 by 5 box of walls with a double door on each side..)

Edit: Having observed for a while longer i have found that the stationed guards do in fact open doors in their assigned area however it still seems to be a little buggy as i am getting guards running from the far side of the map to unlock the door about 40% of the time... it gets worse the more unassigned guards you have on site.

On a side note: awesome game so far keep it coming

[Pugsley]

Yeah as you said the guard priority system is still a little buggy. You have to remember that this is still an alpha, albeit an extremely polished one. We're incredibly lucky to have such talented guys working on this game that listen to and understand their fans.

Guard paths will be fixed at some point in the future, of this i have no doubt

[xander]

Near as I call tell, there job queue. When a door needs to be opened, an "Open the Door" job is added to the queue and the nearest unoccupied guard is assigned to that job and goes to open the door. Once a job is assigned, it is not reassigned unless you manually redirect the guard that is on the way. As an extreme example, consider a prison with two guards. Guard 1 is right by the main entrance, and Guard 2 is off on the other side of the map. A cook gets to the main entrance and wants in, so Guard 1 is tasked to open the main gate. A second later, a worker arrives at another nearby door and wants to go through. Since Guard 1 is busy, Guard 2 is tasked with opening the door. Of course, Guard 1 finishes up with the cook long before Guard 2 arrives, but Guard 2 is already on the case. End of story.

There are a couple of ways to fix this. The easiest thing to do right now is hire more guards. This is less than ideal, but more guards means that all tasks get done faster, which means that it is more likely that at least one of the several nearby guards will be unoccupied at any time. Assigning more than one guard to rooms with a lot of transit is another work around.

From a development perspective, occasionally rejiggering the queue might make sense. For instance, every time a guard completes a task, the queue is repolled and guards reassigned. This could lead to race conditions (i.e. two guards are more or less the same distance from a task and get stuck in an indecision loop), but it might be feasible. Honestly, I know some of the abstract queuing theory that would make this work, but am not an expert, and certainly don't know the correct implementation or algorithms. It is a non-trivial problem, though I am sure that someone (probably Dijkstra) has already figured it out.

xander

[McLumberjack]

Same is true of workmen too. They're laying cables, shall they take the next one off the spool and put that one down... no, someone else is coming from 1000 yards away to do it so just mill about this area I guess. What? Some garbage on the other side of the prison needs collecting? I AM ON IT.

I just imagine them as sucking air through their teeth and then saying 'more than my job's worth mate.' Bloody cowboys.

[paktsardines]

Nothing to add, just applauding your avatar. Nice job.

[nikozc]

Slightly off topic but somehow related.
We could have an automatic door, it would be as safe as the jail door, but would not need a guard nearby.
On the other hand it would be more expensive (high tech eg. biometric identification).
Or a semi-automatic door that could work like the cctv, would need a monitor and a guard to operate, but a guard could operate various doors.
It would be nice to those trying to keep the staff number low.

[_alphaBeta_]

I've observed the same regarding staff job queues. For the most part it works alright, especially with lots of staff as was said. There are the annoying situations though where having staff that recently completed a job look around for other jobs and call off the previously assigned staff. Would be a very nice addition.

Slightly off topic but somehow related.
We could have an automatic door, it would be as safe as the jail door, but would not need a guard nearby.
On the other hand it would be more expensive (high tech eg. biometric identification).
Or a semi-automatic door that could work like the cctv, would need a monitor and a guard to operate, but a guard could operate various doors.
It would be nice to those trying to keep the staff number low.

There's others like it, but here's some additional ideas about an electronic door rather than repeating them here. Agree that these special types of doors would increase efficiency and security for high-traffic or strategically important doors.

[TokMor]

If you put a guard on a patrol that is very short and crosses the doorway, then you shouldn't have an issue anymore.

[_alphaBeta_]

If you put a guard on a patrol that is very short and crosses the doorway, then you shouldn't have an issue anymore.

I've tried this, but the game tends to prioritize unassigned guards to open doors. Since the patrolling guard is technically assigned, you still have to wait for an unassigned guard to come sometimes. Luckily, if there's no unassigned guards that close, the game does seem to choose the patrolling guard most of the time. There seems to be a distance threshold there, which probably needs some tinkering eventually.

[Gondlar]

I think the queuing-system is one of the parts of the game that most desperately need a change at the moment. Not only is it terribly inefficient when guards have to come from elsewhere, but it also lacks realism to some extent: One guard is unlocking a door when a prisoner sets off the metal detector next to it. Since the guard is already busy an other guard from elsewhere is called in to search him. Since unlocking doesn't take long he won't arrive before it is finished, so the prisoner can happily pass the door, smile at the patrol inside and hide the contraband before he is finally searched.

In reality one would expect the guard to stop unlocking the door to search the prisoner first. That being said just changing the way tasks from the queue are assigned to idle guards wont do the job. Queuing theory also won't give a "better" result in the sense that it aims to be close to perfect, but reality is not. What we really need in my opinion is a way for guards to react to what to what they see: If one is unlocking a door and a metal detector is set off, search the prisoner before unlocking; If one is is searching a prisoner and a riot is started nearby, stop searching and care about the riot; etc.

More technically speaking:

• Every Task has a priority (maybe editable by the player).
• All unassigned tasks to do go into a global "pool" of tasks (probably a heap) as they appear.
• Stationed guards and guards on patrol have a default task "walking patrol" with the lowest priority.
• An idle guard is assigned the highest priority task from that pool, using the distance only as tie-breaker for equally important tasks (who cares if those visitors are let out the visitation room next to me if there's a riot down the hallway?).
• Whenever a guard encounters a task with a higher priority he switches to that task if the assigned guard for the new task is not also nearby. His old task is returned to the pool (if it wasn't "walking patrol"). The guard that was assigned the old job gets a new job from the pool as described above (if he was on patrol/stationed he would be nearby).
• When a task is finished, the guard is idle again (and thus is assigned a new task from the pool) or returns to his patrol/station.

I think this would incorporate Cheata's idea since the stationed guard would be nearby his door and feel much more "natural".

@xander: That line about Dijkstra made my day

[xander]

@xander: That line about Dijkstra made my day :)

Glad I could make someone's day. :P

xander

[sidster51]

What? Some garbage on the other side of the prison needs collecting? I AM ON IT.

XD that is sooooooooooooooooooooooooo true

[RMJ1984]

In reguards to this, i think later on, it would be awesome if with the security room and cameras, and more expensive eletric doors, you could have a guard that remotely opens certain doors.