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Upcoming Item Change for Season 10
flyingtarg
Member Posts: 105 Cryptic Developer
Captain, long range sensors are picking up a massive Wall of Text headed on a collision course.
First, here’s the TL;DR: We have removed a ton of items from the game, but nothing should have changed for your characters. Be on the lookout for inventory slots containing a black box that cannot be moved or deleted. Also be on the lookout for items have either incorrectly changed into a different item, or have the wrong mark level, quality, or mods. Please report any of these issues to us in this thread so that we can fix them on Tribble as quickly as we can.
And now for the Wall o’ Text:
As a part of the Season 10 update, we’ve made a very large, but hopefully invisible change to the items in your inventories. This change should arrive on Tribble sometime today. Explaining this change will require a little bit of history and a brief look into how we make items in Star Trek Online.
When Star Trek Online was first developed, we made the decision to make every permutation of every item in the game as a separate item object. For example, we made one Phaser Sniper Rifle item for every mark level, quality and mod combination that could possibly exist. If we imagine that there are 12 mark levels, 4 qualities (Common, Uncommon, Rare and Very Rare), each getting a different number of mods, and then 5 mods on top of that (Damage, Crit Chance, Crit Severity, Knockback and Damage Over Time), with Knockback and Damage Over Time only being allowed to appear once per item no matter how many mods it can have, we get…
12 common Phaser Sniper Rifles,
12 * 5 Uncommon Phaser Sniper Rifles,
12 * 3^2 + 12 * 4 + 12 * 3 Rare Phaser Sniper Rifles and
12 * 3^3 + 12 * 3 + 12 * 3^2 + 12 * 3^2 Very Rare Phaser Sniper Rifles.
Add all of that together, and we have 624 different Phaser Sniper Rifles. But we also have 6 different damage types that all have their own Sniper Rifles, which itself is just one of 12 different types of ground weapons. In total, this adds up to 44,928 different items for Ground Weapons alone.
There’s more than just ground weapons of course, we also had to make items for all the different types of Ground Armor and Ground Shields. Then we move on to Space, where we have nearly as many Space Weapons, plus Shields, Deflectors, Engines, Warp Cores, Consoles…
It’s a ton of data. Fortunately, we did not have to generate all of this data by hand; we made tools that automated the process of making these items. But these tools, and the sheer number of items we had to create using them did not come without other costs. Server startup times on Star Trek Online were significantly slower than our other games, and any tool we created that had to interact with our item data was hindered by the sheer amount of data it had to process.
We knew this was a problem, but it was a problem we lived with for four years, until we started talking about increasing the level cap for Delta Rising. We were facing the prospect of adding two new mark levels of equipment on top of what we already have, which would cause an even further increase in the number of items we have. Additionally, we wanted to rework crafting and create a new item upgrade system. Both of those tasks were going to be very difficult to accomplish with our current method of making items.
We decided to invest the necessary time to make a new item system to help accomplish all of the above tasks. We took a very hard look at how we were creating items, and built a new set of parameterized “Dynamic Items” that could accomplish the same goals as our old automated item creation tools. The idea was that instead of needing 624 different Phaser Sniper Rifles, we could create just one Phaser Sniper Rifle that has a set of rules that tell us things like how many and what mods it gets based on quality, and how powerful it is based on its mark level. The quality, mark level and mods on the item would no longer be stored on the items we created as developers, but would instead be stored in the database on the server.
With these new Dynamic Items, adding in Mark 13 and Mark 14 was easy. Upgrading an item from Mark 10 to Mark 11 was as simple as adding 1 to the mark level of that item in the database. Similarly, the new crafting system could now very easily vary the mark level, quality and mods of any items being created.
This was great! We accomplished our main goal of making our Crafting and Upgrade systems possible to develop, while also enabling us to easily add higher mark levels and qualities with relative ease compared to how we had to do it before. But that still left us with two big problems: First, all of the items in your inventories were from the old system, and would not work in the new Crafting and Upgrade systems. Second, we still had hundreds of thousands of items choking our server’s load times and slowing down development of the game.
These two problems, as it turned out, were interconnected. We needed to allow you to upgrade any item you wanted to, whether it was one of the new Dynamic Items or not, but we also wanted to remove all of the old items from the game now that they are no longer needed. To facilitate this, we created a conversion system.
When you attempt to upgrade an item, if it is not already a Dynamic Item, we try to transform it into one. Once the item is transformed into a Dynamic Item, it can be upgraded as normal. If the conversion is successful, none of the stats on the item will have changed. The only indication that anything has changed at all, in fact, is a subtle change in the item’s icon.
For the most part, this system already works well. The vast majority of items in the game can be converted and upgraded successfully. Those items that do not convert successfully can usually be fixed with a simple repair operation, and we can then update the conversion process to account for any mistakes we made.
We’ve been using this conversion system ever since the Crafting and Upgrade system launched more than half a year ago, and it is finally time to take the next step. The change we are pushing to Tribble today will remove over 160,000 items from our data, and will add automated conversion to the new Dynamic Items for any data that we deleted.
What this means for you is that the game’s overall size will be a few hundred megabytes smaller than it would have been without this change, and loading times should be slightly faster. What this means for us is that development will be faster and easier, and we can that much more rapidly and efficiently bring you more content.
However, there is the chance that we missed something important in our item conversion process. If we did miss something, it would manifest in one of two ways: Either the item will appear as a black box in your inventory that cannot be moved or deleted, or the item will either be incorrect as a whole, or will have incorrect quality, mark level or mods. If you see any of those problems on Tribble, please let us know immediately in this thread.
We want to make sure that once Season 10 arrives on Holodeck that all of your items are exactly as you left them. We’ve done a substantial amount of testing to try to make sure we didn’t miss anything. However, the sheer amount of data makes it physically impossible for us to test every single item we deleted, which is why we’re asking for your help and understanding. We have done our best to make this change as seamless as possible, but we want to be as certain as we can be that we did this right.
And if you lasted this long into the post, thank you for reading my massive Wall o' Text! Let me know if you have any questions, I'll do my best to address any concerns.
First, here’s the TL;DR: We have removed a ton of items from the game, but nothing should have changed for your characters. Be on the lookout for inventory slots containing a black box that cannot be moved or deleted. Also be on the lookout for items have either incorrectly changed into a different item, or have the wrong mark level, quality, or mods. Please report any of these issues to us in this thread so that we can fix them on Tribble as quickly as we can.
And now for the Wall o’ Text:
As a part of the Season 10 update, we’ve made a very large, but hopefully invisible change to the items in your inventories. This change should arrive on Tribble sometime today. Explaining this change will require a little bit of history and a brief look into how we make items in Star Trek Online.
When Star Trek Online was first developed, we made the decision to make every permutation of every item in the game as a separate item object. For example, we made one Phaser Sniper Rifle item for every mark level, quality and mod combination that could possibly exist. If we imagine that there are 12 mark levels, 4 qualities (Common, Uncommon, Rare and Very Rare), each getting a different number of mods, and then 5 mods on top of that (Damage, Crit Chance, Crit Severity, Knockback and Damage Over Time), with Knockback and Damage Over Time only being allowed to appear once per item no matter how many mods it can have, we get…
12 common Phaser Sniper Rifles,
12 * 5 Uncommon Phaser Sniper Rifles,
12 * 3^2 + 12 * 4 + 12 * 3 Rare Phaser Sniper Rifles and
12 * 3^3 + 12 * 3 + 12 * 3^2 + 12 * 3^2 Very Rare Phaser Sniper Rifles.
Add all of that together, and we have 624 different Phaser Sniper Rifles. But we also have 6 different damage types that all have their own Sniper Rifles, which itself is just one of 12 different types of ground weapons. In total, this adds up to 44,928 different items for Ground Weapons alone.
There’s more than just ground weapons of course, we also had to make items for all the different types of Ground Armor and Ground Shields. Then we move on to Space, where we have nearly as many Space Weapons, plus Shields, Deflectors, Engines, Warp Cores, Consoles…
It’s a ton of data. Fortunately, we did not have to generate all of this data by hand; we made tools that automated the process of making these items. But these tools, and the sheer number of items we had to create using them did not come without other costs. Server startup times on Star Trek Online were significantly slower than our other games, and any tool we created that had to interact with our item data was hindered by the sheer amount of data it had to process.
We knew this was a problem, but it was a problem we lived with for four years, until we started talking about increasing the level cap for Delta Rising. We were facing the prospect of adding two new mark levels of equipment on top of what we already have, which would cause an even further increase in the number of items we have. Additionally, we wanted to rework crafting and create a new item upgrade system. Both of those tasks were going to be very difficult to accomplish with our current method of making items.
We decided to invest the necessary time to make a new item system to help accomplish all of the above tasks. We took a very hard look at how we were creating items, and built a new set of parameterized “Dynamic Items” that could accomplish the same goals as our old automated item creation tools. The idea was that instead of needing 624 different Phaser Sniper Rifles, we could create just one Phaser Sniper Rifle that has a set of rules that tell us things like how many and what mods it gets based on quality, and how powerful it is based on its mark level. The quality, mark level and mods on the item would no longer be stored on the items we created as developers, but would instead be stored in the database on the server.
With these new Dynamic Items, adding in Mark 13 and Mark 14 was easy. Upgrading an item from Mark 10 to Mark 11 was as simple as adding 1 to the mark level of that item in the database. Similarly, the new crafting system could now very easily vary the mark level, quality and mods of any items being created.
This was great! We accomplished our main goal of making our Crafting and Upgrade systems possible to develop, while also enabling us to easily add higher mark levels and qualities with relative ease compared to how we had to do it before. But that still left us with two big problems: First, all of the items in your inventories were from the old system, and would not work in the new Crafting and Upgrade systems. Second, we still had hundreds of thousands of items choking our server’s load times and slowing down development of the game.
These two problems, as it turned out, were interconnected. We needed to allow you to upgrade any item you wanted to, whether it was one of the new Dynamic Items or not, but we also wanted to remove all of the old items from the game now that they are no longer needed. To facilitate this, we created a conversion system.
When you attempt to upgrade an item, if it is not already a Dynamic Item, we try to transform it into one. Once the item is transformed into a Dynamic Item, it can be upgraded as normal. If the conversion is successful, none of the stats on the item will have changed. The only indication that anything has changed at all, in fact, is a subtle change in the item’s icon.
For the most part, this system already works well. The vast majority of items in the game can be converted and upgraded successfully. Those items that do not convert successfully can usually be fixed with a simple repair operation, and we can then update the conversion process to account for any mistakes we made.
We’ve been using this conversion system ever since the Crafting and Upgrade system launched more than half a year ago, and it is finally time to take the next step. The change we are pushing to Tribble today will remove over 160,000 items from our data, and will add automated conversion to the new Dynamic Items for any data that we deleted.
What this means for you is that the game’s overall size will be a few hundred megabytes smaller than it would have been without this change, and loading times should be slightly faster. What this means for us is that development will be faster and easier, and we can that much more rapidly and efficiently bring you more content.
However, there is the chance that we missed something important in our item conversion process. If we did miss something, it would manifest in one of two ways: Either the item will appear as a black box in your inventory that cannot be moved or deleted, or the item will either be incorrect as a whole, or will have incorrect quality, mark level or mods. If you see any of those problems on Tribble, please let us know immediately in this thread.
We want to make sure that once Season 10 arrives on Holodeck that all of your items are exactly as you left them. We’ve done a substantial amount of testing to try to make sure we didn’t miss anything. However, the sheer amount of data makes it physically impossible for us to test every single item we deleted, which is why we’re asking for your help and understanding. We have done our best to make this change as seamless as possible, but we want to be as certain as we can be that we did this right.
And if you lasted this long into the post, thank you for reading my massive Wall o' Text! Let me know if you have any questions, I'll do my best to address any concerns.
Daniel "FlyingTarg" Razza
Star Trek Online Lead Programmer
Star Trek Online Lead Programmer
Post edited by flyingtarg on
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I sincerely doubt this would have any impact on any server lag you're experiencing. For the most part, the servers are running at the full speed we expect them to run. Any sources of lag you're experiencing are likely not related directly to the server processes themselves, but are more likely due to network issues unrelated to the actual server hardware or processes.
Star Trek Online Lead Programmer
Sooo am I right in thinking that no items are going to be removed from game just swapped out to new ones so to speak if I am making sense
Was a pretty interesting read - that explained pretty well what happened there with some of the items when dropped into the upgrade window and they would "change" even f they didn't change (some might just be a change to the listed Rank or nothing at all). So it's going to be along those lines...but for everything in the game, eh? Nero: UPGRADE EVERYTHING! Kinda - sorta, without the upgrade - just the conversion to dynamic. Interesting...
Hrmm, that would also potentially address any of the lurking inconsistencies on items that were generated but not updated where wee bits here and there might be off then too, yeah? Cause instead of the potentially faulty data in the object itself, it will be pointing to the same data that other similar objects would be sporting, eh?
Course, I'm biting my tongue on the question of just how dynamic that system might be...in allowing...er...customization of mods on things. Ahem, I'll shhhhh on that for the moment and just say cool, thanks for letting us know - the technical wall o' text stuff is always fun to read.
Regardless, I already like this change.
STO Screenshot Archive
In and of itself this process does not make an item upgradeable. Dynamic items can be upgraded, but only if they have an upgrade definition set up that tells the engine how to upgrade them. Items that don't have an upgrade definition will still not show an upgrade option.
well, network requires a lot of information to process. The game for me does not lag when there's just me and a mate doing storyline, but if we bring in a wide range of people with different stuff, especially rainbow boats, we end up with lag. While not exactly related to Cryptic and your servers, it's a lot of information to be going back and forth.
This seems to reduce the amount of information, it could help with the lag. It'd also explain why Cryptic sees good activity but someone who has to be routed through certain networks get serious slowdowns.
It's a good idea and I'm curious to see if this will help with that.
I'm also curious to see the rage that will occur during the transition so of course I'll help with tribble.
Correct. We're not actually deleting items from your character, we're just changing them to point to different item data and then updating them to store all the information about your items on the database.
No promises on that front. For the most part, the items that were deleted were all fairly consistent in how they worked. But there might be a few things that were inconsistent or not working correctly before that were changed to work correctly after.
Star Trek Online Lead Programmer
Assuming that the item change goes live on Holodeck and we have an item you missed in the conversion, that's in our inventory or in our banks...
Do we lose that item permanently?
What should we do with our items in advance of this change to help insure that we're not stuck with a black box taking up one of our bank slots?
Does this change affect anything besides equippable gear? (Say, food, commodities, tribbles, Boff candidates overflowing from the candidate roster, etc?). To put it another way... what's the definition of "item" in relation to this change?
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
No, it won't mean you lose that item permanently. We have a few systems in place that can help fix broken items once we find them. If this change makes it to Holodeck and we missed something, we can make the appropriate data fix, and there will be a way to force a "retry" of the conversion for any items that were broken.
This only affects equippable gear. Does not affect food, commodities, tribbles, boffs or devices.
Star Trek Online Lead Programmer
http://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/2xe7dp/nonupgradeable_gear_list/
I'm not sure how outdated it is, but it's a nice checklist of things to be on the lookout for when copying to Tribble.
I'm looking forward to that change.
Off the top of my head, I'd recommend checking old Aegis sets, old Borg weapons (ground and space) and Nukara environmental suits. Those were (are) behaving less than standartly. I could note that Borg weapons, for instance, don't get a rarity increase in damage for the Borg mod currently (AKA they behave like blue weps, only with 3 mods).
Also, I see quite a few people unhappy about certain build techniques going out of the window with making all gear items dynamic.
Toi'Va, Ti'vath, Toivia, Ty'Vris, Tia Vex, Toi'Virth: Add Tier 6 KDF Carrier and Raider.
Tae'Va, T'Vaya, To'Var, Tevra, T'Vira, To'Vrak: Give us Asylums for Romulans.
Don't make ARC mandatory! Keep it optional only!
The Choose you own mod should not come to this game
1st. of all the dpsers will calculate what the best mod is for more dps
2nd. i removes the fun of RNG
3rd. the exchange whill get heavily inflated with expensive items
Some of those have been fixed internally. I know QA has had their eye on that list, because they've sent me several bugs from that.
Star Trek Online Lead Programmer
Let'S stay with the example of the federation sniper rifle.
A Standard Mk II rifle will look pretty plain and some might argue it is the best looking version.
if you replace that by higher mark and quality version those item visuals will have added doodads and at a certain point holographic blinkies added on top of it.
If there is now only one version of the item in game with dynamic stats, which visual will it have?
(I wouldn't minf, just teh basic one as I (and many others) loathe the holographic TRIBBLE on higher level versions)
Thanks! Good to know!
Link: How to PM - Twitter @STOMod_Bluegeek
The Dynamic versions of the ground weapons vary their appearance by their mark level, same as the old versions. That was actually a big challenge when making the Dynamic Item system. Ground Weapons are special because they change appearance completely as their mark level increases.
Star Trek Online Lead Programmer
RNG is needed and can be fun in the right places. But crafting and upgrading have enough crutches that RNG just makes it aggravating.
YMMV.
STO Screenshot Archive
1) Min/Maxers already have calculated the best mods for DPS.
2) You're the only person I've come across to consider the RNG based system "fun". I may not have heard from a fully representative sample, of course, but there's enough dislike of it out there for me to consider your opinion to be very much a minority one.
3) The Exchange will correct, as such things do.
Edit: as for the original post -- very glad to see communication that lets us peek "under the hood". The data format change makes a lot of sense and I hope it goes smoothly for you.
I'll be sure to do new copies of my characters to Tribble once this hits, and report any problems I see.
Sometimes it can be more interesting to see the reasoning behind the changes. Rather then just covering what will be changed.
I'm confused.
Perhaps I can ask you to confirm an example?
Say I'm a Romulan Republic character.
- I purchase a Mk I wide beam plasma pistol from a Romulan ground weapon vendor (either on the flotilla, or New Romulus Command)
- I grab one of these juicy Omega tech upgrades and apply them along with a 1.5 research multiplier. Then I get to upgrade my item repeatedly with chances of getting it up to Epic.
- Low and behold, Mark VIIIish, and my pistol is epic [ctrD]x2 [CtrH]x2. I was fairly lucky.
- I keep upgrading said pistol until it reaches Mk XIV.
Question: Does the Wide Beam Plasma pistol retain its appearance back when I purchased it at Mk I, or does it change to match with the 'latest' appearance had for such weapons, which is now the unattainable Mk XI Dilithium store appearance model of those weapons?Wow, this is fantastic news! In addition to the benefits you describe it could also open up the possibility of allowing us to upgrade to specific modifiers as well as allowing us to change modifiers on our gear (for a price obviously).
Right off the bat the items that probably won't take your changes well is the old Season 5 [Borg] gear as we can't safely upgrade them in the new system without losing the [Borg] modifier.
--->Ground Combat General Bugs Directory
Real join date: March 2012 / PvP Veteran since May 2012 (Ground and Space)
It will change to match the "latest" appearance. So all Mark 11 Wide Beam Plasma pistols will look the same, but will all look different from the Mark 2 version.
Star Trek Online Lead Programmer
i also need to say that i really like the overall tone of the OP. i love it when people get a bit technical and talk about why and how and all. keep doing that
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That sucks you know. Most of the early weapons look so much better than their later counterparts
Flyingtarg, out of curiosity, how are the TP values for items stored? Two items with exactly the same mark, rarity, and modifiers could have different TP values, depending on how much was spent upgrading the items. For example, Alice's Phaser Sniper Rifle Mk XII could have a different TP value than Bob's Phaser Sniper Rifle Mk XII. It seems to me that every instance of an item (not just every permutation) would need separate storage. You can use programming technobabble in your explanation if you wish; I'll probably understand it.
P.S. Why isn't this thread stickied?