I did the exploration grind so I could get the components I needed to craft Mk XII Hargh'peng torps for my cannon build BoP. Literally the day after I went through the expense and trouble, (it cost dil for unreplicatable materials,) it became a DOff mission with 100% chance of success and zero required components or costs.
Exploration became repetitious after a while. Enter system, possibly beam to ground map, scan three items and/or fight five spawns, warp out. Repeat.
I see no way, short of injecting a human mind into the process, to create an exploration system which does not eventually recycle elements, and thus become repetitious after a while. The lists oy the f components may be long, but eventually you will begin to play them over.
I have to believe people calling for a return of the genesis system didn't spend hours and hours grinding B'Tran for marks back in the day.
Today you spent hours and hours grinding the exact same mission over and over again as opposed to having at least a bit of diversity in the missions you face. How is this better?
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
"Better" in that it is a different grind, to eventually be replaced by yet another different grind. If it was still the exact same repetitions, I would not still be a subscriber.
That's for me personally. Others might also argue that those scan/murder all the things, beam down and pick flowers, etc. missions were not up to the same standards of the content we're grinding today.
The sad thing is that Cryptic NEVER put forth any effort to improve the exploration system. I think it got a few new maps added to it in its entire run.
The problem is that using a randomizer the way they did was kinda like playing Mad Libs. It's funny because the results tend to be nonsense, like the infamous Third Borg Dynasty. The more layers of randomness, the more ridiculous it becomes.
I think the only way to make a better version would require it to be the focus of a season update or expansion.
I have to agree with @somtaawkhar. That's a bit beyond what STO can do, I'd imagine.
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"Better" in that it is a different grind, to eventually be replaced by yet another different grind. If it was still the exact same repetitions, I would not still be a subscriber.
If you don't like playing the game... why are you even playing the game?
I mean no offense by this. Honest question, I'm curious.
The thing is that the exploration system was one of the main selling points. Some of us bought STO retail back in the day and the box advertises the genesis system as one of the main selling points
Genesis was a spectacular tool for learning where procedural generation had to go next. It procedurally generated maps, which were reviewed and hand-tweaked, then STORED THEM in fully executed form instead of building the generator into the engine itself. It created swarms of maps that gobbled memory instead of being able to retain a seed number that created them in the first place. Hence the Genesis system getting axed because doing so removed 25 gigs of bloat from the game.
Believe me, stuff being done since then learned from that exact meltdown. The point isn't to be able to create large numbers of random environments, its to be able to unpack plausible environments from very small seeds, so the seeds can be shared and distributed between engine and many, many clients, with everyone in that space seeing the same thing. After that then its just the magic of combinatorial hashing which is were you get comments like "using a 90-digit seed (which is NOTHING in memory terms) can spew out more variations than there are atoms in the observable universe."
And what a certain bunch of coders working on the kind of system right now are discovering is that every time they do anything in the environment as hand-crafted assets, they shoot themselves in the foot. They're needing to rethink hand crafted cities/landing sites placed in procedural wildernesses and instead build tools that can procedurally generate settlements too because they're being able to build entire planetary wilds a million times faster than they can hand-craft a 6 square block settlement. The same thing happens with wildlife - the deeper down you go procedurally the more you're able to keep up with the other procedural elements. You don't want a menagerie of 60 hand-crafted critters, you want the engine to be able to mix and match six 1-10 choices to spit out a million critters, of which you may only ever see two to three thousand in all of your game play.
All of this being the exact sort of expensive, long-range R&D where after you commit to this kind of design the first planet/city/critter/whatever doesn't appear for two years or more... and then you have hundreds of them only seconds later. STO seems to being doing better than ever, these days, with a consistent pattern of releases, a relationship with Paramount (finally), a string of Anniversaries helping them reach out to Trekkies, and console versions helping them reach out to gamers. But doing better and "put ten brains in a box for two years and trust something amazing will come out the other end" is two entirely different levels of financial wellbeing. I think we'll see a lot more incremental improvement before we ever see that sort of wildly ambitious leap-of-faith projects pushed to Live.
I see no way, short of injecting a human mind into the process, to create an exploration system which does not eventually recycle elements, and thus become repetitious after a while. The lists of the components may be long, but eventually you will begin to play them over.
Let me assure you the human mind is grotesquely overrated in this capacity.
Perhaps they could re-instate the Genesis System (or something similar), but rather than it being randomly generated by the software, players generate the planets for exploration from a list of mix and match elements, creating planets for all players to explore with objectives and DOFF assignments. Make Exploration a Reputation Track: leveling the track would give players access to more options in the mix and match list, and access to more nebulae to create planets, one for each level. Federation players start off with access to Delta Volanis, Arucanis, and H'romi. KDF players start off with Azlesa, Eridon, D'kel, and T'ong. Romulan players start off with Afehirr, Kazan, and Eridan. Leveling to 2 and 3 gives players access to these other nebulae. Level 4 gives access to the Alpha Quadrant nebulae, and Level 5 gives access to B'Tran. Maybe the other nebulae could be hooked into this as well: Mutara, Yan, T'Kanis, the Kahless Expanse, the Briar Patch, Azure, Gon'cra, the Kelvani Belt, the Badlands. This would only be with regard to an Exploration System. The DOFF assignments available from Sector Space would still be available to all once DOFFing is unlocked.
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@sirsitsalot I disagree. Exploration isn't something that should be done INSIDE the ship. It should be done "out there". Going to planets, scanning space anomalies, beaming down with the Away Team.
Ship Interiors is a separate issue and one that I wholeheartedly agree needs something. But as I understand it, DOFFing was originally only accessible from the interior of the ship. Players complained about having to go inside to access those aspects of the game, and so it was removed to the UI. Ideas that I have for Ship Interiors have nothing to do with exploration, though, and so a conversation for another thread.
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Well, yes. But exploration, as it's been done so far in-game, in space takes place with us flying our ships around, scanning, etc., and on the ground has us beam down with an Away Team. Inside the ship, which is what you were talking about, just doesn't happen. So, yes, we go in a ship, but not IN a ship.
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The thing is that the exploration system was one of the main selling points. Some of us bought STO retail back in the day and the box advertises the genesis system as one of the main selling points
Genesis was a spectacular tool for learning where procedural generation had to go next. It procedurally generated maps, which were reviewed and hand-tweaked, then STORED THEM in fully executed form instead of building the generator into the engine itself. It created swarms of maps that gobbled memory instead of being able to retain a seed number that created them in the first place. Hence the Genesis system getting axed because doing so removed 25 gigs of bloat from the game.
Believe me, stuff being done since then learned from that exact meltdown. The point isn't to be able to create large numbers of random environments, its to be able to unpack plausible environments from very small seeds, so the seeds can be shared and distributed between engine and many, many clients, with everyone in that space seeing the same thing. After that then its just the magic of combinatorial hashing which is were you get comments like "using a 90-digit seed (which is NOTHING in memory terms) can spew out more variations than there are atoms in the observable universe."
And what a certain bunch of coders working on the kind of system right now are discovering is that every time they do anything in the environment as hand-crafted assets, they shoot themselves in the foot. They're needing to rethink hand crafted cities/landing sites placed in procedural wildernesses and instead build tools that can procedurally generate settlements too because they're being able to build entire planetary wilds a million times faster than they can hand-craft a 6 square block settlement. The same thing happens with wildlife - the deeper down you go procedurally the more you're able to keep up with the other procedural elements. You don't want a menagerie of 60 hand-crafted critters, you want the engine to be able to mix and match six 1-10 choices to spit out a million critters, of which you may only ever see two to three thousand in all of your game play.
All of this being the exact sort of expensive, long-range R&D where after you commit to this kind of design the first planet/city/critter/whatever doesn't appear for two years or more... and then you have hundreds of them only seconds later. STO seems to being doing better than ever, these days, with a consistent pattern of releases, a relationship with Paramount (finally), a string of Anniversaries helping them reach out to Trekkies, and console versions helping them reach out to gamers. But doing better and "put ten brains in a box for two years and trust something amazing will come out the other end" is two entirely different levels of financial wellbeing. I think we'll see a lot more incremental improvement before we ever see that sort of wildly ambitious leap-of-faith projects pushed to Live.
I was pondering games I've seen do stuff like this better, then realized that most of them didn't have 3d geo(Diablo 2, Dragon Warrior Monsters 2 and Dragon Quest 9). But... the way they worked was NOT to generate the map one tile at a time. This is the important part. They would place objects and then fill in the space between them. This did sometimes glitch out and do weird things. D2 had a glitch that'd create inaccessible rooms in caves and dungeons. This was minor since you didn't have any need to go to them. DQ9 would sometimes create these things that looked like it was trying to make a hallway, but not wide enough to walk through. But these were always purely decorative. DWM2.... Well I can't think of any actual glitches, but it had some hilariously bizarre combinations of environmental assets. Such as caves in a dismal world filled with the undead.... that have a floor covered in a carpet of flowers. But most of the time it worked ok.
Anyways, point is, randomized maps can use a system to builds things in chunks rather than one grain of sand at a time.
diablo 2 didn't even have procedural generation; those maps were all created beforehand and the game just randomizes between them each time you start up a new game - which is why, after a point, you can start predicting where everything is after uncovering a small portion of a map
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch." "We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Passion and Serenity are one.
I gain power by understanding both.
In the chaos of their battle, I bring order.
I am a shadow, darkness born from light.
The Force is united within me.
diablo 2 didn't even have procedural generation; those maps were all created beforehand and the game just randomizes between them each time you start up a new game - which is why, after a point, you can start predicting where everything is after uncovering a small portion of a map
Doesn't it randomize tiles that fit together? I'm sure it's not using set maps as many of the dungeon hallways seem to be fairly random. Integral parts of the maps are always the same, but they are shuffles around between random connecting tiles methought.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
Creating a random terrain and filling it with random objects is easy. Giving players something interesting to do there, something that will stay interesting after several runs, is the hard part.
Creating a random terrain and filling it with random objects is easy. Giving players something interesting to do there, something that will stay interesting after several runs, is the hard part.
This is a point I do not understand. Of course the goals are pretty much always the same but they are spiced up by random elements. Rplayability comes from facing varying challenges, maps and enemies. With hand-crafted missions you have basically no replayability. Every time you play you do *exactly* the same. Yet, somehow "repetition" is a often brought fore argument against randomizing gameplay.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
Creating a random terrain and filling it with random objects is easy. Giving players something interesting to do there, something that will stay interesting after several runs, is the hard part.
This is a point I do not understand. Of course the goals are pretty much always the same but they are spiced up by random elements. Rplayability comes from facing varying challenges, maps and enemies. With hand-crafted missions you have basically no replayability. Every time you play you do *exactly* the same. Yet, somehow "repetition" is a often brought fore argument against randomizing gameplay.
I didn't "argue against" randomizing gameplay, I said randomizing the gameplay is hard. STO's old exploration missions did a decent job switching around the graphics of the places you visited, but the gameplay was always exactly the same.
And I wouldn't say handcrafted missions have no replayability either. They can have their own variables, too.
I didn't mean you specifically, just something that popped into my mind and thought to get out.
Yes, you can hand-craft some variability, but ultimately you will always know what to expect and only replay to experience the narrative again, not to see something new. The basic design of a "exploration" mission is sto was and is of course limited. Scan, defeat, retrieve, escort, defend and all of those in multiple combinations (as in first do this, then do that) but you will never have a real narrative. But that is probably nothing people expect from randomly generated content.
^ Memory Alpha.org is not canon. It's a open wiki with arbitrary rules. Only what can be cited from an episode is. ^
"No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... and claw at you." -Worf, son of Mogh
"A filthy, mangy beast, but in its bony breast beat the heart of a warrior" - "faithful" (...) "but ever-ready to follow the call of the wild." - Martok, about a Targ
"That pig smelled horrid. A sweet-sour, extremely pungent odor. I showered and showered, and it took me a week to get rid of it!" - Robert Justman, appreciating Emmy-Lou
My prior experience in working on deploying to an online platform leads me to believe that "we have ideas on paper and cannot say more at this time" actually means:
"A couple of guys in the office like to talk about it sometimes. One of them has a few notes lying around about things it could be, but we've talked about it literally three times over two years. It'll probably never happen, but some vague notions we remember about it might show up in a mission or two, or some unrelated system."
If after all this time it's still "on paper," that's hopeful office talk for "it's not going to happen."
Comments
Exploration became repetitious after a while. Enter system, possibly beam to ground map, scan three items and/or fight five spawns, warp out. Repeat.
I see no way, short of injecting a human mind into the process, to create an exploration system which does not eventually recycle elements, and thus become repetitious after a while. The lists oy the f components may be long, but eventually you will begin to play them over.
Today you spent hours and hours grinding the exact same mission over and over again as opposed to having at least a bit of diversity in the missions you face. How is this better?
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That's for me personally. Others might also argue that those scan/murder all the things, beam down and pick flowers, etc. missions were not up to the same standards of the content we're grinding today.
@sirsitsalot : love your posts, but its kind of casting pearls before swine. Sadly.
I think the only way to make a better version would require it to be the focus of a season update or expansion.
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If you don't like playing the game... why are you even playing the game?
I mean no offense by this. Honest question, I'm curious.
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Genesis was a spectacular tool for learning where procedural generation had to go next. It procedurally generated maps, which were reviewed and hand-tweaked, then STORED THEM in fully executed form instead of building the generator into the engine itself. It created swarms of maps that gobbled memory instead of being able to retain a seed number that created them in the first place. Hence the Genesis system getting axed because doing so removed 25 gigs of bloat from the game.
Believe me, stuff being done since then learned from that exact meltdown. The point isn't to be able to create large numbers of random environments, its to be able to unpack plausible environments from very small seeds, so the seeds can be shared and distributed between engine and many, many clients, with everyone in that space seeing the same thing. After that then its just the magic of combinatorial hashing which is were you get comments like "using a 90-digit seed (which is NOTHING in memory terms) can spew out more variations than there are atoms in the observable universe."
And what a certain bunch of coders working on the kind of system right now are discovering is that every time they do anything in the environment as hand-crafted assets, they shoot themselves in the foot. They're needing to rethink hand crafted cities/landing sites placed in procedural wildernesses and instead build tools that can procedurally generate settlements too because they're being able to build entire planetary wilds a million times faster than they can hand-craft a 6 square block settlement. The same thing happens with wildlife - the deeper down you go procedurally the more you're able to keep up with the other procedural elements. You don't want a menagerie of 60 hand-crafted critters, you want the engine to be able to mix and match six 1-10 choices to spit out a million critters, of which you may only ever see two to three thousand in all of your game play.
All of this being the exact sort of expensive, long-range R&D where after you commit to this kind of design the first planet/city/critter/whatever doesn't appear for two years or more... and then you have hundreds of them only seconds later. STO seems to being doing better than ever, these days, with a consistent pattern of releases, a relationship with Paramount (finally), a string of Anniversaries helping them reach out to Trekkies, and console versions helping them reach out to gamers. But doing better and "put ten brains in a box for two years and trust something amazing will come out the other end" is two entirely different levels of financial wellbeing. I think we'll see a lot more incremental improvement before we ever see that sort of wildly ambitious leap-of-faith projects pushed to Live.
Let me assure you the human mind is grotesquely overrated in this capacity.
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Ship Interiors is a separate issue and one that I wholeheartedly agree needs something. But as I understand it, DOFFing was originally only accessible from the interior of the ship. Players complained about having to go inside to access those aspects of the game, and so it was removed to the UI. Ideas that I have for Ship Interiors have nothing to do with exploration, though, and so a conversation for another thread.
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Well, yes. But exploration, as it's been done so far in-game, in space takes place with us flying our ships around, scanning, etc., and on the ground has us beam down with an Away Team. Inside the ship, which is what you were talking about, just doesn't happen. So, yes, we go in a ship, but not IN a ship.
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Anyways, point is, randomized maps can use a system to builds things in chunks rather than one grain of sand at a time.
My character Tsin'xing
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
Doesn't it randomize tiles that fit together? I'm sure it's not using set maps as many of the dungeon hallways seem to be fairly random. Integral parts of the maps are always the same, but they are shuffles around between random connecting tiles methought.
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This is a point I do not understand. Of course the goals are pretty much always the same but they are spiced up by random elements. Rplayability comes from facing varying challenges, maps and enemies. With hand-crafted missions you have basically no replayability. Every time you play you do *exactly* the same. Yet, somehow "repetition" is a often brought fore argument against randomizing gameplay.
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And I wouldn't say handcrafted missions have no replayability either. They can have their own variables, too.
Yes, you can hand-craft some variability, but ultimately you will always know what to expect and only replay to experience the narrative again, not to see something new. The basic design of a "exploration" mission is sto was and is of course limited. Scan, defeat, retrieve, escort, defend and all of those in multiple combinations (as in first do this, then do that) but you will never have a real narrative. But that is probably nothing people expect from randomly generated content.
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"A couple of guys in the office like to talk about it sometimes. One of them has a few notes lying around about things it could be, but we've talked about it literally three times over two years. It'll probably never happen, but some vague notions we remember about it might show up in a mission or two, or some unrelated system."
If after all this time it's still "on paper," that's hopeful office talk for "it's not going to happen."