Posted by: bc_designs
Posted 26 days ago
One of the bigger goals with Advanced Station Tool has always been to make it the central place where you define how your server is actually structured.
When AST was first being developed, that mostly meant Stations and the different locations and equipment attached to them. Since then, that structure has grown quite a bit. AST now understands Agencies, Departments, and Stations, which gives the rest of the Advanced ecosystem a common structure to work from.
But there was still a pretty big piece missing.
AST could tell another script what a station is, where it is, and who it belongs to, but it had absolutely no idea what area that station or department was actually responsible for.
That's where Dispatch Zones come in.
Dispatch Zones are a new part of Station Manager that allow server admins to physically draw coverage areas directly onto an interactive map. You select the Agency the zone belongs to, optionally assign it to a specific Department, give it a name, and start drawing.
The goal from the beginning was to make this something you could configure visually instead of throwing another giant collection of coordinates into a config file.
The editor itself has gone through quite a bit of work to make drawing larger or more complicated districts actually practical. Points snap to a 10-meter grid, left-click places new points, right-click removes them, and neighboring zones can snap directly onto each other's existing points.
That last part became pretty important once I started actually drawing real coverage areas with it. If two districts share the same road or boundary, you shouldn't have to try to draw that exact same line twice and hope they match. Just snap the new zone onto the existing one and they share the same border.
Zones can also overlap, and that's completely intentional.
There are plenty of situations where multiple agencies or departments may cover the same area, so zones don't have to be completely separate from each other. A Sheriff's Office zone can overlap with a City PD zone, departments can share coverage areas, and you're not forced into making every zone fit perfectly together.
There were a few different ideas for how I wanted to handle all of this early in development, including having admins physically create zones from inside the game world by moving around and placing points.
Technically, it worked.
Actually using it made it pretty obvious that nobody wants to walk or drive around an entire county dropping points just to set up a dispatch district.
So instead, the zone editor became part of Station Tool itself and I think that fits much better with what AST has gradually become.
AST isn't really just about placing lockers, terminals, props, or station equipment anymore. It's becoming the underlying structure that tells the rest of the ecosystem how your server is organized.
Agencies tell it who you are.
Departments tell it how you're organized.
Stations tell it where you operate.
Dispatch Zones tell it where you respond.
That last piece is going to become particularly useful as development continues on Advanced Fire Dispatch
I'll leave exactly how the two interact for another Dev Diary.
More soon.
