Postby xander » Wed Apr 09, 2014 6:36 pm
A quick review for those who have forgotten (I say this not because I assume that the above posters don't know it, but because it is important to my points below): the regime system works by ordering the prisoners to go to a specific building during that time slot. Sleep means "go to your cell," eat means "go to the canteen," yard means "go to the yard" and so on. Any needs that can be fulfilled in the given room will be fulfilled, according to a priority that is (I assume) hard coded into the game. The only setting which does not follow this outline is the freetime setting (I suppose one might argue that work can have a similar effect, since only those assigned to work will do anything specific).
Your proposal of allowing prisoners to leave the canteen or shower once their needs have been met would have a couple of effects that I think you may not have considered:
The shower setting would become completely indistinguishable from freetime. Currently, if a prisoner needs to shower during freetime, they will go to the nearest shower and clean up. What you propose is that, during the shower regime setting, prisoners should only shower if they need to shower. There would be no difference between the shower setting and the freetime setting. I suppose that one could argue that the internal prioritization of needs could be rejiggered so that showing is prioritized during shower time, but I think that the in-game feedback in such a situation would be kind of confusing and ambiguous (again, there would be little difference to the player between freetime and shower time). I think that any approach would pretty much eliminate the need for a shower setting entirely.
The argument for meal times is somewhat more subtle, and I don't know how I actually feel about it. On the one hand, the general approach that the game has is that during freetime, prisoners can fulfill any need that they like, except eating and sleeping (unless it is night). Moreover, the eat setting does a couple of things beyond simply herding prisoners around, in that it gives the kitchen a target for having food ready to go. No food is prepared until a few hours before the scheduled meal time. Hence simply allowing prisoners to eat during freetime would not solve the problem of getting prisoners fed (this is kind of the opposite problem that one has with showers). This argues in favor of making meal time a freetime plus open canteen kind of block (side note: we could eliminate the eat setting entirely, and replace it with a control on the canteen---the canteen can be either open or closed; while it is open, the cooks will serve food and prisoners can go to the kitchen (assuming they have no other tasks to do) and eat if they are hungry; otherwise, the canteen is closed and prisoners cannot go there to eat---this might be interesting, but I see unforseen consequences in terms of actually satisfying the need to eat if other needs take priority in a given block of freetime).
On the other hand, I use the herding of prisoners around and requiring that they go to particular rooms is an important part of the game. It can alert the player to suspicious behaviour (seeing a prisoner outside of the assigned room should set off alarms), and can be used by the player to manage contraband and satisfaction of other needs. Requiring prisoners to go to the canteen is (in my opinion) an important part of that system.
xander
) for other prisoners still wanting to eat/shower. 
)
