Speaking of keypads, their behavior across the game is an absolute mess from a consistency standpoint.
On the surface, you'd expect keypad doors to act just like key
card doors. That is, once unlocked they behave exactly like any other door. This behavior of keycard doors is almost (but not entirely) consistent across the entire vanilla game. But that consistency only happened because of a feature of the card slot script: After being unlocked, it will pass along any TurnOn/TurnOff messages it receives. So mission authors could easily wire up keycard doors like so:
tripwire --> card slot --> door
Thus automatically allowing the tripwire to control the door after the card slot is unlocked. But the keypad script, inexplicably, DOES NOT have this message-forwarding feature. It will pop open the door on initially entering the correct code or hacking the keypad, but any functionality beyond that is left up to the mission author.
Unsurprisingly, most authors decided it wasn't worth the effort to work around this shortcoming of the script, but some did, and none of them did it the same way. Which gave us this mess:
earth/266: no code (Navy training)
- Closes: On timer after hacking. Closes and becomes locked again after three seconds.
- Open from inside: Button
- Open from outside: Must hack again
medsci1/1681: 45100 (Cryo Recovery A)
- Closes: Never
- Open from inside: n/a
- Open from outside: n/a
medsci1/222: 00000 (Cryo Retraining Storage; code never given)
- Closes: Never
- Open from inside: n/a
- Open from outside: n/a
medsci1/809: 12451 (Maintenance Access Shaft)
- Closes: Never
- Open from inside: n/a
- Open from outside: n/a
medsci2/1148: 98383 (Sub-armory; unhackable)
- Closes: Exit tripwire on inside
- Open from inside: Enter tripwire
- Open from outside: Frob keypad
eng1/1372: 59004 (Utility Storage 4)
- Closes: Exit tripwire spanning both sides
- Open from inside: Enter tripwire
- Open from outside: Enter tripwire or frob keypad
eng1/1500: 00000 (Utility Storage ?; door already open)
- Nonfunctional
eng1/1726: 34760 (Aux. Storage 5; unhackable)
- Closes: Never
- Open from inside: n/a
- Open from outside: n/a
eng1/1181: 15061 (Engineering Control; unhackable)
- Closes: Never
- Open from inside: n/a
- Open from outside: n/a
eng1/910: 94834 (Engineering Override; unhackable)
- Closes: Never
- Open from inside: n/a
- Open from outside: n/a
rec1/1955: 11111 (Crew Annex)
- Closes: Never
- Open from inside: n/a (but there's a button on the inside wired up to open the door if it's closed)
- Open from outside: n/a
rec1/270: 12345 (Crew Safe; code never given)
- Closes: Never
- Open from inside: n/a
- Open from outside: n/a
rec2/624: 50220 (Maintenance Access Shaft; broken; code never given)
- Closes: Timer (10 seconds)
- Open from inside: Button
- Open from outside: Frob keypad
rec2/122: 34093 (Garden maintenance tunnel)
- Closes: Never
- Open from inside: n/a
- Open from outside: n/a
ops4/333: 13433 (Weapons lockup)
- Closes: Timer (8 seconds)
- Open from inside: Button
- Open from outside: Frob keypad
command2/1609: 83273 (Security Station)
- Closes: Never
- Open from inside: n/a (but there's a tripwire across the door wired to the keypad)
- Open from outside: n/a (ditto)
So yeah... I normally prefer to go with "majority rules" when making things consistent, but of the keypad doors where the author tried to make them behave realistically,
there is no majority, even within the same map!
I'd say it comes down to a choice between two approaches:
- Make them behave exactly like keycard doors.
- Pro: Safest and simplest
- Con: Would require stripping out a few existing buttons
- Make them close behind you when walking through the door, then require explicitly frobbing either the keypad from the outside or a button from the inside to re-open the door.
- Pro: Differentiates keypad-secured areas from keycard-secured areas, making them feel more like the extra-secure locations they're supposed to be
- Con: Would require adding a lot of buttons
AAAAaaaggghhh....