Turning gates to vgates

[Mr_Bober]

It would be nice to have a way to turn normal gates into visitor gates, without needing to bash the gate and rebuild it. This would be especially beneficial to newbies who don't know the difference (after someone tells them they shouldn't have normal gates opening on their main base), as well as expanding bases which want to turn the former outer gates (now inner gates) to visitor for extra security.

I figured it could work very similarly to locks.
Prerequisites: a visitor flag (new item), the master key to the gate (if locked).
Steps:

• Craft the visitor gate, an item requiring cloth (maybe wool cloth?), wood, red pigment
• While holding the visitor flag, right-click the gate you want to apply it to
• Wait for the animation. In order to reduce weird abuses, I'd suggest extending the animation to a full minute or so.

Congrats! You're not the proud owner of a brand new visitor gate!

Ps. I was going to suggest a way to do the opposite as well, but I think there's some more security concerns involved and more chances for abuse. So that might be something to be considered and discussed in a different thread.

[vatas]

I don't remember exact details, but one patch included "in the pipe" -note where Jorb was considering to allow this exact thing. I don't remember the details but I think it was deemed to have too many potential edge cases and/or noob traps to not implement (at least as a priority.)

EDIT: viewtopic.php?f=39&t=71518&p=887295&hilit=visitor#p887295

[Mr_Bober]

I don't remember exact details, but one patch included "in the pipe" -note where Jorb was considering to allow this exact thing. I don't remember the details but I think it was deemed to have too many potential edge cases and/or noob traps to not implement (at least as a priority.)

EDIT: viewtopic.php?f=39&t=71518&p=887295&hilit=visitor#p887295

Interesting.
Jorb's example ("presently unknown infiltrators with master keys being able to flip visitor gates to normal gates, for example") is exactly why I think turning Vgates to normal gates might be an issue. But turning normal to Vgates shouldn't be a problem.

[SnuggleSnail]

There should only be one gate type.

The system we have now was introduced to remove safepalis, but for some reason Ngates + unpickable locks were introduced which essentially bring safepalis back to world 10 effectiveness.

The only thing thing the separation of gate types does is get a surprisingly large quantity of nabs who don't understand the system raided, and make safepali construction slightly more convoluted.

[Mr_Bober]

There should only be one gate type.

Well, gates could be completely reworked, to make them less annoying in general. But that sounds like a lot of work, with great abuse potential if not perfectly tuned. So for now I'd settle for a simple way to switch gate type.