Foundry Mod 5 Changes

eldarth · November 2014

After a quick look, here's what I've found so far...

Mod 5 Foundry Updates

New limitation - "Too many traps/trap triggers in small area" -- must be 10' apart
New limitation - "Too many actors in small area" (definitely broke many, many "timer" hacks)
176 new details -
- lots of near duplications/texture changes
- 2 duplicated interlocking/jigsaw "floor" tiles (21x21 and 22x22)
- 2 new brazier fires -- black/purple, and white
- 5 extra large fire/smoke effects pretty much usable only for far away backgrounds
- HE/portal tower pillar of lightning
- Huge active/inactive dragon portals
FIXED - "state transition has no component selected" missing error message fixed
Teleporters STILL broken

Impression...

A couple of "small area" limitations? likely to limit "farming" quests
- ...yet more limitiations, and breaks many existing timer/logic hacks.
Fixed a missing error message
A dump of "new" detail objects, more of the same that we already have - virtually nothing we've been begging for the last year or so -- floors, walls, roadways, detail objects, furniture, flora, fauna, etc. zilch.
Oh yeah, did I mention - Teleporters STILL broken!
"Big foundry development push?" I, personally, barely see it.

reiwulf · November 2014

If there's in fact still a big foundry push, I doubt this is it, this is just a few more assets from the new module.

zbkolde · November 2014

eldarth wrote: »

New limitation - "Too many actors in small area" (definitely broke many, many "timer" hacks)

You know what would be nice, if they would deal with the "farming" quests that we report over and over, and then stop making new limitations to keep honest and legitimate authors from publishing their quests.

You're welcome, moderators, for me refraining from the ginormous list of profanity and rage that i would really love to say here.

colonelwing · November 2014

Too many actors in a small area... I mean this broke my entire bossfight (since there aren't rly bosses available in the foundry.) Is there a workaround for this? Because i spent quite some time trying to make a decent bossfight... How far do the encounters have to be apart from each others and in which quantity?

This is driving me insane. Instead of deleting the imp farms, they're restricting legit foundry users even more...

hustin1 · November 2014

New limitation - "Too many traps/trap triggers in small area" -- must be 10' apart

Well that totally breaks my workaround for not allowing different chat text in the same encounter (mix encounters then dispose of the extra mobs with spike traps). I tried and tried using killplanes instead but the live server kept either refusing to kill them off or kept moving them to accessible areas -- and if they don't die then the entire encounter eventually respawns!

This is driving me insane. Instead of deleting the imp farms, they're restricting legit foundry users even more...

They could have simply followed an earlier suggestion of mine: limit the number of spawning portals per map, limit the number of spawning portals per quest, and limit the number of imps that each can spawn.

Devs, if you're going to add new limitations could you at least eliminate the need for these workarounds in the first place???

<insert profanity-laced rant here>

eldarth · November 2014

colonelwing wrote: »

Too many actors in a small area... I mean this broke my entire bossfight (since there aren't rly bosses available in the foundry.) Is there a workaround for this? Because i spent quite some time trying to make a decent bossfight... How far do the encounters have to be apart from each others and in which quantity?

This is driving me insane. Instead of deleting the imp farms, they're restricting legit foundry users even more...

I managed to shift a few "timer" encounters of mine around a little bit to get them more distance between them, and I had to convert from using Easy Undead Ranged to Easy Drow Melee (which will INCREASE my timings!) :mad:

I measured the distance between trap/trap triggers to require 10' but have been so annoyed that I haven't bothered to waste my time figuring out exactly what their minimum range/number of actors is now (SINCE THEY WONT GIVE US ANY **** PATCH NOTES DETAILING WTF THEY HAVE DONE THIS TIME TO BREAK EXISTING FOUNDRIES!).

colonelwing · November 2014

eldarth wrote: »

I managed to shift a few "timer" encounters of mine around a little bit to get them more distance between them, and I had to convert from using Easy Undead Ranged to Easy Drow Melee (which will INCREASE my timings!) :mad:

I measured the distance between trap/trap triggers to require 10' but have been so annoyed that I haven't bothered to waste my time figuring out exactly what their minimum range/number of actors is now (SINCE THEY WONT GIVE US ANY **** PATCH NOTES DETAILING WTF THEY HAVE DONE THIS TIME TO BREAK EXISTING FOUNDRIES!).

Well, i just tried 10 feet, 20 feet and all it does is increasing the /!\ (too many actors in a small area) radius...

I think, the foundry is officially dead. The best part is, my quest wasn't even an exploit farm... It took 17+ minutes to kill the 50 encounters (1 by 1, not all at once) which i used as a bossfight... I am speechless.

----

If a developer would be so nice to tell us:

1. How far do the encounters have to be apart from eachother.

2. In which quantities are we able to stack them in the same spot.

I'd be more than happy.

hustin1 · November 2014

"Big foundry development push?" I, personally, barely see it.

I don't recall any Foundry development announcement -- did I miss it? Didn't that guy say they weren't doing much with the Foundry because it wasn't a money-maker?

blarg mad, stupid exploiters ruin everything...

No, it's because the developers decided to kill an ant with a thermonuclear weapon -- but what do I know, I only develop aircraft flight control software, you know, where we have to analyze and test any changes to the n'th degree and move Heaven and Earth to never break anything.

colonelwing · November 2014

Well, if i knew the two questions i asked... I could just create boss-stages.

(Anime cliche - power ups for bosses, oh well...)

colonelwing · November 2014

People are asking where to find summoning portals and are happily creating imp farms, as i'm typing this. So the "fix" didn't really do anything other than breaking legit foundries, because i doubt that exploiters care if a fight makes sense and where the encounters spawn...

This is ridiculous.

colonelwing · November 2014

I figured out the radius, the encounters have to be ~40 feet apart... (wth?)

Still no clue about the stackable quantity, but i'm trying to figure this out, too.

edit#1: The stackable amount of encounters is 20.

edit#2: Stacking seems to be bugged, i've been able to stack 1-20, but only 21-40... (gg devs)

---

Anyway, i hope this data helps people whose foundries have gotten ruined.

mrgiggles651 · November 2014

hustin1 wrote: »

I don't recall any Foundry development announcement -- did I miss it? Didn't that guy say they weren't doing much with the Foundry because it wasn't a money-maker?

There was a dev post way back when that there would be a Foundry dev push between module 2 and 3. Then people thought it was going to happen between 3 and 4, 4 and 5.... etc

That was before they said in the Neverwinter interview "the metrics weren't there", but long before that we'd heard "the metrics aren't there" from the Star Trek foundry person.

eldarth · November 2014

mrgiggles651 wrote: »

... they said in the Neverwinter interview "the metrics weren't there", but long before that we'd heard "the metrics aren't there" from the Star Trek foundry person.

Isn't it odd how "the metrics aren't there" and yet the existence of the Foundry is a front-page major "selling point" for the game.

I guess it's time to embrace all their "crippling" limitations and make some hard core totally farming foundries instead.

apocrs1980 · November 2014

I can not express how utterly disappointed I am with the direction this went, down the toilet fast. Thank you so much for killing off the Foundry, it was one of the best ideas in gaming ever conceived and yet PWI managed to totally screw the pooch.

"YOU THERE CRYPTIC DEV!!! I want you to make a zone fast and make it so players have to farm it for months and dump tons of cash into it!" "Cryptic: But boss, the Foundry needs some attention it is the best thing we ever..." "Quite you! And do what I say or I find some one that will!"

RIP Foundry it was the most awesome tool and I was really excited about it until I found it was just a half baked marketing gimmick.

And gratz to the exploiters for winning this 1 year + battle. enjoy the 1 google of farming foundry's cuz the legitimate authors have moved on. :mad:

kithlis · November 2014

Well. <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>. I have a feeling my quests are completely broken.

iandarksword · November 2014

kithlis wrote: »

Well. <font color="orange">HAMSTER</font>. I have a feeling my quests are completely broken.

Both the "Featured" version, and the (still improving) "Extended Edition" version of my quest came through relatively unscathed. Still working on #2...

reiwulf · November 2014

yeah, not feeling like working on the foundry much at all after reading this

I use lots of actors close together for boss battles (since you know, they haven't given us the ability to have actual bosses)

imaginaerum1 · November 2014

Another change that I just noticed... anyone else experiencing this?

In the past, when you had a contact that was set to disappear at dialog prompt, and that prompt was within the contact's own dialog, the moment you got to that prompt, the contact and the open dialog both disappeared. To let the player read that last dialog, I used a workaround of adding another dialog after the "final" one with text of "..." and made that the dialog prompt reached target. Thus, when it went *blip* no actual necessary dialog was lost.
Now, when you reach the dialog prompt, it keeps you in dialog until you leave the dialog prompt in question. All sorts of things could be going on around, you, but you won't know, because you're still stuck in dialog. While this does eliminate the need for a workaround, it also eliminates the ability to have a forced eject from the dialog if you get to a certain point, which is important if someone is actually teamed to run your foundry quest.

Anyway, not so much irked at the change (although it means I have to go back through my foundries and "fix" the dialog), as that they didn't bother to tell us they are doing this, because as Eldarth mentioned before, they don't tell us what changes they make to Foundry.

eldarth · November 2014

I think I also noticed that NPC/encounter "paths" now show a sparkly trail following the path.

....which is basically completely worthless since the walkmesh/pathing is calculated when you publish and it's always slightly different.

bardaaron · December 2014

I go away for one month to write a novel and this happens...

orangefiree · December 2014

Well, I'm going to be devil's advocate I guess.

The new stuff is actually really nice. New portal energies, black flame, white flame, the rising flame effects which are nice for extraplanar quests, and dragon statues. Also a new set to build buildings that puts a little more variety in hand build projects.

The new limits are annoying, but it honestly isn't has bad as it sounds. In a medium sized room I could probably fit everything I need for a major boss encounter easily due to the fact that the range isn't as bad as it first sounded like, and with some follow/patrol settings they can easily all be in the same fight at once while the timers do their job mostly the same.

Also, for the major foundry push they actually announced that before they got Wizard's of the Coast throwing content at them with set dates to release it, so I'm honestly surprised we got anything for the foundry at all while they were struggling to make these dates in time.

reiwulf · December 2014

I don't get how they don't see the HUGE advantage the foundry could give them against other random MMOs.
Instead of capitalizing on that advantage they choose to completely ignore it and do the same boring stuff every other MMO is doing (probably better in some aspects too).
It doesn't sound like a very smart business idea.
Whatever, it's their game and their loss.

zahinder · December 2014

orangefiree wrote: »

The new limits are annoying, but it honestly isn't has bad as it sounds. In a medium sized room I could probably fit everything I need for a major boss encounter easily due to the fact that the range isn't as bad as it first sounded like, and with some follow/patrol settings they can easily all be in the same fight at once while the timers do their job mostly the same.

The problem with constantly changing limits (or other assets) is that it means for every mission you make, you have a constant drain of time every patch to update and rework it to fit the changes. Constantly.

Frankly, at this point, the overhead of trying to keep the three missions I managed to produce is so high, I not only don't want to bother making more, but at this point I'm not sure I'm ever going to bother republishing my missions.

orangefiree · December 2014

zahinder wrote: »

The problem with constantly changing limits (or other assets) is that it means for every mission you make, you have a constant drain of time every patch to update and rework it to fit the changes. Constantly.

Frankly, at this point, the overhead of trying to keep the three missions I managed to produce is so high, I not only don't want to bother making more, but at this point I'm not sure I'm ever going to bother republishing my missions.

Hmm, that seems rather odd if none of yours republished on their own.I have 9 quests, many of which have timers and such, and all of them republished fine.

bardaaron · December 2014

The Foundry was seriously THE ONLY thing that made this game special, and they have chosen time and time again to **** on it, and it seems like they are intentionally sabotaging their own product. I don't get it at all. Ok, so they can't give us bosses. At least they came out and said it. So at least make the improvement you CAN. But instead of fixing problems, they just choose to make new ones. I don't know if it is just monumentally stupid overhead management, or if the Devs really don't know what they are doing.

eldarth · December 2014

Amazing isn't it? And yet -- it is one of FOUR key featured selling points for the game...

Completely Free-to-Play
Engaging Action Combat
D&D Experience
Infinite Content

Someone should tell marketing they aren't supporting that anymore.

hustin1 · December 2014

Don't get me started on marketing types. I can point to the time they sold a certain product to a certain customer as costing xx man-hours without consulting the engineers. When they finally come to us with the contract in-hand, we inform them that they had missed a trailing zero in their sales pitch. Imagine being declared behind schedule by the higher-ups on the very first day working on it.

Then there was the time (at a different company) where I had to explain a new product we had developed. While I'm still in the room I get to see them stretch and twist my description to where they're implying all sorts of things the product cannot do -- without explicitly lying. It was sickening.

The infinite content is technically true, but we know that it's woefully under-supported, or at least appears so. It sure would be nice if we had a clear explanation on the plan, if any, for the Foundry.

idiotamongus · December 2014

Everyone seems to be putting the blame on Cryptic or the Dev's. I don't think it is. Cryptic makes the game, maintains it, improves and expands it, but that's mainly as far as it goes. There is one major factor that is part of it and one thing everyone forgets...Perfect World Entertainment.

I found this video which basically explains it better than I could. it's related to Warframe though but it's relevance has many similarities to Neverwinter. Check this out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x96rMYoRQRI

If you listen to the entire video - or most of it at least, you will understand what I mean.

As you might tell I am VERY critical on PWE. If Cryptic didn't merge with them, I think this whole mess would have been "properly" fixed long ago.

RE-POST: Don't get me wrong. Neverwinter is an excellent game. Cryptic are awesome for it, but I don't see Cryptic or the Devs as the cause of it.

eldarth · December 2014

idiotamongus wrote: »

As you might tell I am VERY critical on PWE. If Cryptic didn't merge with them, I think this whole mess would have been "properly" fixed long ago.

Yep. PWE is pretty much the kiss-of-death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=11UyPv56WhM

moonchipz · December 2014

*sigh* Honestly not surprised they nerfed all of our workarounds. While it allowed us to make great quests, it was kind of sketchy in terms of whether or not we should be doing it because it was obviously not intended for the purposes we used it for. Before someone mentions the fact that some of the spotlighted / featured quests worked with those mechanics, let me remind you about how sketchy PWE/Cryptic has been about enforcing/not enforcing the proper use of bugs in the game.

Sad to see the foundry is in an even worse state than when I last checked 3 months ago. Still no timers?

eldarth · December 2014

moonchipz wrote: »

Sad to see the foundry is in an even worse state than when I last checked 3 months ago. Still no timers?

Why bother. Games only got to limp along another year maybe -- why spend money on developers when you can just sell zen as fast as you can then move on to the next Freemium flavor-of-the-year.

Foundry Mod 5 Changes

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