Add voice overs and custome objects in foundry

archofwinter

While I have yet to have the time to experience foundry in depth, I have played various foundry missions and they are on par with some of the Crypic's in house mission.

These extraordinary authors goes far and beyond to give us regular players wonderful new story and missions to experience. They should be allow to add in some custom objects and voice over if they want to.

Of course there will be worries about abusing the system and copy right violation, so I suggest a premium reviewing system.

For a small fee, authors can have their map and added content go through a review by Cryptic or PWE (or even some part-timer working for them) to ensure the quality of these foundry mission. To reward the authors for their efforts, they will receive 125% worth of zen from the small fee if they pass the review and therefore publish their mission to a new 'Skilled authors' foundry category. However, if they failed the review, they'll get a detail reason explaining why and 75% worth of zen.
So if the fee is 10 USD to have your mission reviewed, you'll get 1250 zen back if you passed or 750 zen back if you failed. (I am going off of how 1000 zen are sold in retail stores for 10 USD)

They can even make an elite-foundry subscription with its own foundry veteran rewards program that unlock additional foundry assets.

twg042370

Foundry missions load slow enough as it is.

bluedarky

Neither would ever happen as they'd need to get GMs to check them all before the missions entered the mission list to ensure that nothing against the EULA or TOS got into the Foundry missions.

ajstoner

I am 100% against anything that would restrict access to the foundry only to those who pay extra for it. This is a horrid idea.

*Cryptic would have to dedicate several people to doing just this which means slower development of the game and bug-fixing which are already issues.

*Garbage missions (made by dolts who simply buy their way to the top) will clog this list.

*Many Foundry authors will simply stop producing missions entirely.

drogyn1701

Yeah I'm afraid voiceovers is just not gonna ever happen.

However, what I and many others have said we'd like is a library of the sound effects that Cryptic already has in-game that we could place on the maps and set to go off using triggers. That doesn't seem unreasonable.

crunch2600

I'd really like for this to happen. Voice overs are just so much more engaging than reading a text box. I really dislike the idea of paying to get that privilege. Perhaps there could be some sort of trust system, so the most popular authors get access? Employ a zero tolerance policy, people can flag down offenders. There's too much to gain, in my opinion, to not pursue this, even if it does introduce some challenges.

There's a big gap between a mission with voice acting, good cutscenes and a mission presenting dialogue in a popup, text box. It just elevates the quality of Foundry missions across the board. Custom objects that you can directly upload to your project might be a stretch, but maybe there could be a system where the community can submit and have approved objects/props.

Anyway, I'm all for pursuing more freedom for Foundry authors, since they're the most vibrant and interesting aspect of STO's future in my opinion.

pendra3780

There was a notion to add a barcode like system into the dialog boxes. A small app running in the background would then read that barcode, and load the appropriate mp3 file which could contain VOs, sound effects and the like. It was designed to be almost setup free. As long as the mp3 files are loaded onto a 3rd party server, all you would need to do is to run the app. The barcode had 20 bit length, so it could encode thousands of missions each having something like 256 mp3 clips.

The app also created the barcode itself for the mission creators. So all you needed to do is copy and paste the characters to the dialog box, name the mp3 clip accordingly and move it to the proper folder.

Never took off the ground. I guess it is one thing to talk about VOs, and another thing to actually make them.

In all fairness, I have to admit, the only 1 mission which had this working, was a blast even with the computer synthetized VOs.