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Some ideas for improving the foundry.
cstorey
Member Posts: 6 Arc User
in The Foundry
I've been playing for over two years now, and the foundry is definitely one of the things that's kept me hooked on Neverwinter for so long. However, there are a few things that I, and possibly the rest of the foundry community would love to see implemented, if these are possible.
1) Increase the detail limit
The current detail limit in foundry maps can sometimes be too restricting for people making more detailed maps. Instead, having a detail limit of maybe 300 per room for indoor maps, and 3000 for outdoor maps would give more freedom.
2) Change the way room builder rooms work
The invisible room builder rooms give more freedom with designing rooms, but can cost quite a lot of detail to make. Instead, I suggest some method of room generation for them. Options to choose the walls, ceiling and floor to be pre-generated from kits of the player's choice, as well as selecting the height of the room. Linking two of these rooms together with a door, the player can choose to have either a doorway of their choice, or just to delete that section of wall.
3) Animated objects
An idea I've been wanting to see in the foundry since I saw the giant gears in Dwarven Valley. Should the player choose to make an object move, they would choose starting position, then add more. With each position, they adjust the coordinates to change the position and orientation of the object, allowing gears to spin, or platforms to move.
4) Resizing objects
Some objects, like Kelvin's cairn and the Chasm cliffs are simply too large to be used in player created maps. Some option to change the size of objects, making them much smaller or bigger would give more freedom with objects and allow players to use props they'd normally never use.
5) Custom encounters
The idea I have for this, is allowing the player to tweak the stats of any encounter to make it more difficult, as well as creating more realistic boss fights. However, setting a limit on exactly how high the stats can go would be good to stop people from creating a Drufi army. Also, possibly having the custom stats scale to the number of players in the map so that it's always the right amount of challenge.
6) More than five players per foundry
The five person limit can be very limiting, especially to people who use foundry maps for roleplaying. One way of doing this would be allowing queue groups to enter foundry maps, and if a player joins the group, they are transported to the same map as everyone else, without the need for everyone to exit, and then regroup in the same instance to re enter
7) Multiplayer foundry editor
It would be a nice addition to allow the creator of a quest to grant and revoke permissions for a friend to help work on the quest.
1) Increase the detail limit
The current detail limit in foundry maps can sometimes be too restricting for people making more detailed maps. Instead, having a detail limit of maybe 300 per room for indoor maps, and 3000 for outdoor maps would give more freedom.
2) Change the way room builder rooms work
The invisible room builder rooms give more freedom with designing rooms, but can cost quite a lot of detail to make. Instead, I suggest some method of room generation for them. Options to choose the walls, ceiling and floor to be pre-generated from kits of the player's choice, as well as selecting the height of the room. Linking two of these rooms together with a door, the player can choose to have either a doorway of their choice, or just to delete that section of wall.
3) Animated objects
An idea I've been wanting to see in the foundry since I saw the giant gears in Dwarven Valley. Should the player choose to make an object move, they would choose starting position, then add more. With each position, they adjust the coordinates to change the position and orientation of the object, allowing gears to spin, or platforms to move.
4) Resizing objects
Some objects, like Kelvin's cairn and the Chasm cliffs are simply too large to be used in player created maps. Some option to change the size of objects, making them much smaller or bigger would give more freedom with objects and allow players to use props they'd normally never use.
5) Custom encounters
The idea I have for this, is allowing the player to tweak the stats of any encounter to make it more difficult, as well as creating more realistic boss fights. However, setting a limit on exactly how high the stats can go would be good to stop people from creating a Drufi army. Also, possibly having the custom stats scale to the number of players in the map so that it's always the right amount of challenge.
6) More than five players per foundry
The five person limit can be very limiting, especially to people who use foundry maps for roleplaying. One way of doing this would be allowing queue groups to enter foundry maps, and if a player joins the group, they are transported to the same map as everyone else, without the need for everyone to exit, and then regroup in the same instance to re enter
7) Multiplayer foundry editor
It would be a nice addition to allow the creator of a quest to grant and revoke permissions for a friend to help work on the quest.
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Comments
I'm still trying to figure out how they work in general. If I use too many doors on the Room Builder rooms, the map won't load. I'm guessing it has something to do with the game trying to solve the visibility between each room, but, I'm still not sure XD
Would be interesting to have more "blank room" options in general. Or room sizes: my door/visibility issues would be solved if there were just a Room Builder room that was twice the size of the large one. Right now I have four of them together with "doorways" across the four intersecting walls.
I think the issue with the generating walls idea though is the height of the door. How is the game supposed to know where you want it to be? Or would it just slice out that section of wall from floor to ceiling?
This is really interesting... I'm not sure I fully understand what you mean by the player choosing, however I think it could work really easily IF we could use DETAILS as COSTUMES. So like, have a friendly encounter set to "patrol, ignore all,' and it's costume set to a detail like a block/boulder. When the player has a dialogue with it, it could start it's one-way patrol and move out of the players way.
Rotating gears would have to be some new logic though I think, or at least new animations for "spin 180 clockwise, looping," and "spin 45 counter-clockwise, once."
But in general, being able to move or animate "objects" would be awesome, and I think being able to use objects as costumes for encounters would accomplish a lot by using the existing patrol points like animation key-frames. Perfect? No. Workable? Yeah, I think so.
YES TO THIS SO MUCH! I'll mention something similar in my own ideas down below, but yes - to straight up be able to resize details like the "height" slider for encounter costumes would be soooooo useful. I don't know how their backend works, but if they could do it, that'd be awesome. I do have to say though, I have looked to see if Cryptics own tools have this exact functionality, and I have yet to find a detail in the main game that is a different size than I'm used to seeing it. So this may not exist at all. We can hope though!
The encounters already do scale, but, I agree some more difficult "boss" encounters would be a very welcomed addition. Even if they were a new encounter type that had a "1 per map" limit and were straight up bosses from dungeons. Don't know if it would work just like the main dungeons do, since those lower the player level, whereas Foundry Quests adjust the encounter levels, but, perhaps that would be an easier route to go.
This would be cool as hell - I'd ask my Guild Leaders about starting a monthly "Guild Foundry" skirmish event if 10-30 people could join. They do all kinds of giveaways, and maybe they'd be open to doing something like "highest DPS gets X, highest healing gets Y, etc"
Also just creating a dungeon-run style map with that many players could be awesome. I'm thinking of doing a shorter quest once I finish An Old Battle that would see the player running into a Thayan building in a race to stop a ritual, fighting through hoards of Thayan warriors in the path with a team of friendly NPCs helping you. Would be epic if it was 20 guild mates doing the raid instead of having NPCs.
Oh the possibilities with this... Even if it had to be one-at-a-time, it would be so useful. Like the original author sends an invite to another player, and then that player can edit the Foundry Quest for 24 hours. Only the original author can publish it, and there would have to be a backup of the Foundry Quest from right before the invitation was sent, and the author probably couldn't be able to edit the Foundry Quest while the invitation was active to avoid conflicting edits, but damn...
"Hey dude, wanna work on a Foundry together? Here's this idea I have - if you're into it, I'll host it (be main author) and do weekends and Wednesdays, you do Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. We'll make something great over the next two weeks."
The tips and credit would have to be split evenly though, and this sounds like a loooot of work for Cryptic, but, it would be so fun and so good for The Foundry Community.
[Work in Progress]
"The Legacy of Shaylia,"
NW-DITFP6QSI
So, in the 2D Editor we can drag and select a group of details/encounters/etc and move them along X and Z all at once. What we can't do though, is change the Y value for all of them at once - or edit the Editor Display Priority of them all at once.
Being able to change these values for multiple objects at once would save so much time... I just built a zone in mostly the 3D Editor, and it has a lot of overlapping details. Soooo once I got back to the 2D editor, I had to change the Display Priority for over 150 Details to "Low" before I could see what I was doing again - all ONE.AT.A.TIME. Took forever, and all I accomplished was being able to use the 2D Editor again. It's a really big bottleneck.
But even another case in this same map where it would have saved time: I used Thayan Roof details to create a walkway over some water, only to load up the 3D editor an realize that the collision for them is only in the very center - you fall right through the edges. So I have to replace them with another detail, one by one. Thankfully, we can just switch out the detail and keep the "object" with the position, rotation, etc, but, I still had to do all of those one-by-one. Could have used that time to be finishing the map.
This has to be something that already exists in Cryptics tools, otherwise, it's gotta be slowing down the release of their own content too. Either way, there is either existing code they can repurpose, or code that should be written for them and us both hahaha.
This ties into what you were saying about re-sizing objects, though it's more like a baby-step version. I think it would save time if their were just a way to sort the existing details in the browser window. For example, search for "Mossy," then check the filter for "Rock," then sort those results by "height," and you can easily find the shortest or tallest detail in the "Mossy Rock" set.
I'd also suggest that Width and Depth values be grouped into "Area" for sorting, so sorting a search for "platform" by "Area" with the filter of "Rock" would show results in order of how much space each detail takes up width-by-depth wise. So an author could quickly find a medium sized cave rock platform to build a battle arena on.
If Cryptic wanted to get really fancy, maybe things like "animated only" - so if an author typed "tree" into the search or checked the filter for "tree," and then maybe checked a box for "animated only," they'd just get a list of trees that move in the wind. Not entirely sure how that would work code wise, because I don't this "Is Animated" is a property of details hahaha, but, I'm dreaming on this last one.
I'm actually thinking of taking the time to compile a list of all the animated/clothsim/wind enabled details just so I know which ones are which. That's probably enough for animated details since there aren't very many of them... not counting effects of course, but we already have a straight up filter for those... maybe that would be a better solution for animated details? A filter, just like "Rock," "Tree," etc? Would still probably require some sort of "Is Animated" state for all the existing details though... and that still sounds like a nightmare for Cryptic.
Sorting the browser though! That shouldn't be too hard, since the values for Name, X*Z, and Y already exist in each detail. So I'm just brainstorming with the animated bit, but really suggesting sort by Name, Area, and Height.
So, Encounters already have a form of "groups." There is the main encounter object, then all the individual NPCs exist inside it. It would be another huge time saver if we could create groups from selected details that worked the same way - a new "Detail Group Object" would be created that functioned exactly like that top-most Encounter Object (can name it, move it, duplicate it, delete it, etc), then whatever details you had selected would be children to it, just like the individual NPCs under the parent Encounter Object. They could be moved individually (just like the NPCs in Encounters) but also you could move the group to move them all at once. The only difference is that the pivot-point for the group should be the bottom-center of the bounding box for all the details, and that once the group is created, all the position values for the children details should be relative to the parent "Detail Group" object - that way, even though authors can't create a group in the 3D editor, they can still move them as a group there.
Another example: I was using Barbarian Torches, with FX - Indoor Torchs, topped off with Dynamic Orange Lights to light a scene. I built this stack four times, switching between both the 2D and 3D editors to get the positioning and rotation right for each one, before I gave up and used something else entirely. The load screens between the two editors were time-killing... what could have taken 5 minutes was taking nearly an hour.
However, if I could have built this stack of details once in the 3D Editor, then created a group from them and copied it to the X,Y locations I needed all of them in the 2D editor, I could have just loaded up the 3D Editor one last time to adjust the rotation and Y value for each GROUP one last time, and been done in 5-10 minutes. Not to mention, anytime an author decided they needed another stack of those same details somewhere later on, they could just go into the component tree and find one of the copied groups, and copy it again.
Though, since it is so talked about, there may be some big back-end reason that it simply can't be done. And that might be true for a lot of these ideas, and we have to keep that in mind. Some things really can't be done, not just because of budget or Cryptic wanting to give us these kinds of features, but because the engine itself just might not be set up to work in some of these ways.
That said, I think it's good to share our wish lists. The main playerbase does, and Cryptic certainly listens, and while the final results may not be exactly what the players asked for, or done in the way the players expected, Cryptic does try, and I think those requests do que them in to ideas/bugs/etc that sometimes just simply get missed in QA.
So let's keep this going
[Work in Progress]
"The Legacy of Shaylia,"
NW-DITFP6QSI
Requests/Suggestions
08-14-2013 Shifting a portion of normal loot drops to Final Chest & Encounter loot caches
08-22-2013 Foundry Doubloons - awarding experience/rewards for non-combat objectives
06-25-2013 Foundry Rewards and multiple Chests loot tables
10-12-2013 Reset Average Quest Duration when re-published
11-09-2013 Contact NPCs need Idle Dir. & Animation, Contact Dir. & Animation
11-10-2013 Ability to transition to previously visited maps
11-13-2013 Requests: Standard Content Not Available In Foundry
11-24-2013 Request: Alternative Selection Boxes on Large Detail Assets
12-03-2013 Request: Sounds For Foundry
12-10-2013 Non exploitable author placed Skill Nodes
12-11-2013 Request: Individual actor encounters for each elite/solo
12-11-2013 Request Behavior: Spawn AT Encounter Complete
12-11-2013 Request: Zen Store assets for Foundry "Product Placement"
12-16-2013 Expose "leash" radius in encounter UI
01-01-2014 Request: Fight to Submission Behavior option on ALL Behaviors
01-17-2014 Request: Editing Quest Description of Featured Quests
01-17-2014 Request: Allow authors to reply to reviews
01-17-2014 Request: Version Release Notes for UGC Quests
01-28-2014 Component Complete on one-time Sound Effects
01-28-2014 Component Complete on one-time Animation Effects
02-20-2014 Request: Insert Dialog Before First Node
02-24-2014 Request: Replace Red X in Foundry editor with "DELETE" labeled button
04-03-2014 Request: Fix for foundry Rhix and daily rewards
05-03-2014 Request: Desert Terrain maps
06-09-2014 Request: Drop/Require/Consume multiple Quest Items
06-09-2014 Request: Allow Drop/Require/Consume Quest Items at Dialog Response Nodes
06-15-2014 Request: Ask user to Subscribe to author AFTER submitting 4-5 star review
06-18-2014 Request: Visual Effects for Foundry
06-22-2014 Request: Visual Outline of Volume Effects in edit mode
07-01-2014 Request: Camera Zoom in 3-D editor and Increased Zoom Level in 2-D editor
08-10-2014 Request: More Costume Options
09-02-2014 Temporary Zen Store Item Rewards
01-10-2015 [new] Completely Preventing Foundry Exploitation implementation
02-08-2015 [new] Request: Dialog/Visible If values beyond Name/Skill
Encounter Matrix | Advanced Foundry Topics
Featured Foundry Quest: Whispers of an Ancient Evil [v3] - NW-DQ4WKW6ZG
Foundry Quest: Harper Chronicles: Blacklake - NW-DCPA4W2Q5
- A World of Wonder ( NWS-DAT9OXYQL )
- Easterden Horror ( NW-DTIKVUOC3 )
simplyshawn's grouping idea would be helpful, too (most of these ideas are excellent)!