Requested Features: Foundry

donperk

This is meant to be a companion to the "Requested Assets: Foundry" thread, which I and others have started to abuse to list feature requests. :P

So, to keep that thread clean, I'm starting this one. Here are some features I'd really like to see added:

1. Top of the list, and it should be trivial to implement: MAP TRANSITION OBJECTS ON SOCIAL GROUND MAPS NEED OBJECTIVE CIRCLES! I've been frustrated a number of times trying to find a map transition "door" that doesn't have an objective marker. It's gotten to the point where authors use inappropriate markers that are well-known (like the panel outside the transporter room at ESD or the panel in the transporter room on Qo'noS) just to get around it.
   
   
2. Let authors choose the number of BOFFs (0-4) that will accompany an away team! I know this may have some complications with people playing on teams, but as an author it's messy having four BOFFS hanging around in every scene.
   
   
3. Let authors recommend the types of BOFFs for an away team. This doesn't have to be strictly enforced, but the default BOFF type (engineering, science, tactical) for each slot should be something authors can select.

starswordc

The ability to have a boff's name appear in a dialog box instead of having to write "tactical officer" or whatever.

Dialog tags for sex of speaker, as detailed here.

Dialog tag for rank abbreviation (would spit out Radm. for a rear admiral, for instance). Dialog tag for rank short form (would spit out Admiral for all Fed flag ranks, Commander for Lieutenant Commanders, etc.).

The ability to designate particular mobs to spawn, giving us the power to call up dreadnoughts for boss fights and giving more freedom in reskinning. This is especially useful for factions like Fed, Klinks, and Terran Empire that have many possible mobs for a given class (as it is, Fed Cruiser can spawn anything from an Excalibur-class to an Oberth, while Fed Battleship will always give a Typhoon-class first and only spawns anything else if you're running the mission multiplayer).

The ability to designate mob groups as friendly, neutral or hostile without relying on faction. This would improve immersion by not forcing (for example) the writer of a Fed mission to use reskinned Fed ships if he wants to write an enemy-of-my-enemy with Klingon mobs (kinda breaks immersion to see a Negh'var with phasers and quantum torpedoes).

novapolaris

Different results on winning an engagement with an enemy, such as:

• Enemy is subdued (ground)
• Enemy flees (ground)
• Enemy beams up (ground)
• Enemy ship is disabled (space)
• Enemy ship warps away (space)
• Enemy ship flees (space)

With the option to set them to trigger at an author-definable level of health, such as 25%, 32%, 53%, 2%, etc.

Neverwinter room-building tech.

"Steam Workshop"-like tool that allows authors (and others) to create things for use in Foundry missions (or elsewhere), such as bosses and reward items. They would be boosted by vote and screened by a staff member.

Neverwinter room-building tech.

adverbero

starswordc wrote: »

The ability to have a boff's name appear in a dialog box instead of having to write "tactical officer" or whatever.

Dialog tags for sex of speaker, as detailed here.

Dialog tag for rank abbreviation (would spit out Radm. for a rear admiral, for instance). Dialog tag for rank short form (would spit out Admiral for all Fed flag ranks, Commander for Lieutenant Commanders, etc.).

The ability to designate particular mobs to spawn, giving us the power to call up dreadnoughts for boss fights and giving more freedom in reskinning. This is especially useful for factions like Fed, Klinks, and Terran Empire that have many possible mobs for a given class (as it is, Fed Cruiser can spawn anything from an Excalibur-class to an Oberth, while Fed Battleship will always give a Typhoon-class first and only spawns anything else if you're running the mission multiplayer).

The ability to designate mob groups as friendly, neutral or hostile without relying on faction. This would improve immersion by not forcing (for example) the writer of a Fed mission to use reskinned Fed ships if he wants to write an enemy-of-my-enemy with Klingon mobs (kinda breaks immersion to see a Negh'var with phasers and quantum torpedoes).

Pretty much this, i would also add that i would like to have triggers for race, and training, so that i can have some things tailored to a Vulcan engineer that will occour differently for an andorian Tactical offier

psycoticvulcan

- The ability to place Dreadnought mobs
- The ability to set an NPC to be disabled/stunned when their health drops below a certain percentage
- The import costume button returned
- The ability to use ships as contact portraits in dialogue returned

More to come.

lincolninspace

I think that being allowed to choose the spawn point of Boffs would be even more useful than choosing the number. If you didn't want all the boffs you could spawn them outside the map or if you wanted the player to meet their boffs al la Temporal ambassador, you could have them spawn elsewhere on the map and use a pop up dialog.

zorbane

You guys have to remember that multiple players can take part in a Foundry mission. We can't force a single player experience on people (yet)

realmalize

A single global boolean variable per mission...in the absence of "true" branching storyline, we can work around the rest.

drogyn1701

zorbane wrote: »

You guys have to remember that multiple players can take part in a Foundry mission. We can't force a single player experience on people (yet)

Would be nice to be able to set the number of players allowed in. I know a lot of us write and build assuming that the player is going through solo, and as a consequence some of it works less well with more people.

I know people would like some more tools to be able to create custom STFs, so this goes in line with that, setting your mission so that it can only be played with a full group. They would also need some way to add boss fights. Maybe if could be like this. You get a list of potential "boss" npcs culled from the existing STFs and it gives you some options for fight mechanics that you can put down, such as the ability to trigger NPC groups or objects to appear/disappear based on the amount of hit points the boss is down to.

mcduffie369

- Ship or shuttle based mission
- The number of boffs allowed
- IMPORT COSTUME!! Give it back!
- More control over custom maps terrain
- Enemy powers and stat editing
- Visual ship sets (borg set, etx)

paxfederatica

One word: Campaigns. (Something Neverwinter's already getting, BTW)

[Deleted User]

KDF start objects on DS9. Just copy the fed start map. They have starts on DS9.

lincolninspace

What I would like to see is the foundry toolset be like that of a grown up piece of software. Namely grids rulers and guides to help with map building.

http://pe-images.s3.amazonaws.com/photo-effects/color-grid/first-guide.gif

http://pe-images.s3.amazonaws.com/photo-effects/color-grid/photoshop-guides-added.gif

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_aTTGgLunfm4/SeVpS_1pugI/AAAAAAAAAG8/yyja9sPtMPg/s320/006_photoshop_ruler_guides.png

Yes I know we may get 3d editing but grids and guides would almost be as good.

starswordc

[FullName] dialog tag for player characters, so that we can have (for example) a Bajoran player character be addressed with the surname first, given name last.

mvp333

• 3-D View in Foundry Editor
• Allow Creation of Social Maps
• Allow Creation of STFs and Fleet Actions
• Ability to Create Chained Missions
• Additional Generic Starships Added to Space Costume Pool (Would also make exploration missions slightly more interesting)
• Addition of Generic Circular, Diamond, and Oval Combadges to Alien Creator (Not specifically a Foundry feature request, but would be the most handy there for me)
• Ability to Create Custom Starships:
  -Specify Costume
  -Choose hull material or special hull material (e.g. Jem'hadar)
  -Choose Powers
  -(If carrier) Specify Hangar Pet Costumes
  -Specify Weapons (If you want to make a ship that does nothing but spam Dispersal Pattern Beta and drop Chroniton mines all day, then you should be able to.)
  -Specify Death Animation (Disabled, Explode (Warp Core), Explode (Borg), Implode (Singularity), Fade, Warp Out (All currently-available types) or None)
• Allow Creation of Custom Interiors (Map maker) and Ground Maps (Terrain editor)
• Ability to Specify Character Entrance and Exit Animations
• Allow Creation of Timers, as Triggers and Objectives
• Addition of Support for (Direct) Creation of Optional Objectives
• Allow Creation of Custom Ground Map Skies and Celestial Bodies
• Addition of Planets to Space Sky Editor (Where there are currently only stars)
• Addition of Moons to Space Map Detail or Planet Assets.
• Custom Atmospheres (Fog distance, color, ambient light color, possible global rain FX)

...And much, much more, but that's the stuff I'd really like to see.

adverbero

Accolade Triggers

So that we can referance the players experience with particular factions in combat , or specific actions that grant accolades that might be relevant to the mission

drogyn1701

adverbero wrote: »

Accolade Triggers

So that we can referance the players experience with particular factions in combat , or specific actions that grant accolades that might be relevant to the mission

How about another trigger where we can award accolades!

adverbero

drogyn1701 wrote: »

How about another trigger where we can award accolades!

That too !!!!!

markhawkman

drogyn1701 wrote: »

How about another trigger where we can award accolades!

I foresee issues involving storage space, and accolade display. How many Foundry accolades could a person get? 9001?

lincolninspace

All I really want for Christmas is for the foundry to not get broken, costume import to be returned and for a decent search engine to be implemented. That said I would like water as something you can add to maps. I want to create a submarine base map with water outside. I would also like fountains and waterfalls.

markhawkman

lincolninspace wrote: »

All I really want for Christmas is for the foundry to not get broken, costume import to be returned and for a decent search engine to be implemented. That said I would like water as something you can add to maps. I want to create a submarine base map with water outside. I would also like fountains and waterfalls.

I know that water volume effects got mentioned earlier in this thread, but waterfalls would be great to have too.

donperk

markhawkman wrote: »

I know that water volume effects got mentioned earlier in this thread, but waterfalls would be great to have too.

It took us forever to get waterfalls in Far Cry ... I won't be holding my breath for getting them here.

starswordc

Allow us to use "Dialog Prompt Reached" with storyboard dialogs and contact dialogs, instead of forcing us to do something bass-ackwards like what I had to do just now to get some mobs to spawn at the end of what should've been a simple "Talk to Contact" objective. Instead of simply using "Objective in Progress", I had to tie a map popup to an interact with invisible object and tie the mobs' appearance to the end of the conversation. This is not only inelegant, it creates an interface spoiler when their kill objective appears before you're supposed to know they exist.

paxfederatica

I already mentioned campaign support, which is "the big one" for me, but there are a few others that I haven't seen mentioned here yet. In descending order of usefulness/criticality:

• Ability to designate missions for Romulan players
• Ability to make/designate PvP maps
• Ability to make ground/interior maps with hostile environments, requiring EV suits (such as Nukara Prime) or rebreathers (such as the Elachi interiors)
• Ability to customize map transition effects for the start and finish of each map (currently we only have warp-in/out effects for space and beam-in/out effects for ground/interior, which don't always fit the story)
• Map transition dialogs for moving from Foundry maps to sector space mid-mission (currently if you do this, it will show a blank "Go to next map?" dialog that you have no way to edit)

erei1

starswordc wrote: »

Here's another one: Make the profanity filter more useful by having it visually flag somehow the offending word(s) (either display it in the message window or highlight it in the text, I don't care which). I wasted fifteen minutes last night randomly deleting sections of text before I finally realized what set it off: the word "c**k", in the sense of "cocking one's head". :rolleyes:

This.
I might add, having the profanity filter set to the proper language when not writing an English mission. Douche is a shower and re-t-ard mean late in French, no sonic showers in my missions, but nobody's late. On the other hand, you don't want to know what kind of profanity I can write in French, without the profanity filter getting mad. I just want to keep "merde", after all it's canon.

I don't mind updating the profanity filter for my own native language, if you need it.


EDIT : according to the forum, I posted the message BEFORE the post I was quoting. Impressive feat.

starswordc

Here's another one: Make the profanity filter more useful by having it visually flag somehow the offending word(s) (either display it in the message window or highlight it in the text, I don't care which). I wasted fifteen minutes last night randomly deleting sections of text before I finally realized what set it off: the word "c**k", in the sense of "cocking one's head". :rolleyes:

borrowedtune

A graphic for dialogs with the ship's computer. It's already in game for Cryptic missions.

An invisible floor. I can't imagine this asset would take long to create.

lincolninspace

A search bar for the list of assets placed on your map. A spell checker. More maps instead of more npcs and detail objects.

starswordc

Let us use "Dialog Prompt Reached" and so forth as a condition for mob groups tied to kill objectives, instead of only "This Objective in Progress" being available. I've had to use a very ungainly workaround (block them from view with several asteroids and wall them off) to keep a Tzenkethi battle squadron that's supposed to appear at the end of a dialog from appearing when their kill objective appears and engaging the player right away.

EDIT: Never mind, turned out there was a much simpler way to do what I wanted here. We should still be less restricted in what trigger types we can use where.

starswordc

erei1 wrote: »

EDIT : according to the forum, I posted the message BEFORE the post I was quoting. Impressive feat.

Yeah, the whole forum was doing that Sunday.

I just discovered that the premade Ferasan NPC costumes can't use dialog animations. That goes for both male and female. This should be fixed.