Frequently Created Threads (F.C.T)

askray

The team constantly sees questions that get asked over and over again, even when developers have responded. As such, those questions we see a lot of and their respective answers are now located here, in a Frequently Created Threads post! Please realize that the answers in this thread are from developers, community managers or management of Cryptic Studios so consider them 100% official. This also has some moderation threads that are no longer allowed for new discussion because it always leads to the same thing - warnings and closures.

Any threads created about the topic's below will now be closed with a link to this FCT. We will continue to keep this updated as need be.

If you think something should be added to this list or have questions, send a PM to any Moderator or Community Manager.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and your understanding

---

Will we see my X transfer over to console?
Currently there are no plans to.


T5U vs T6 is Wrong and Here Is My Solution to upgrade to T6
While we appreciate the feedback and suggestions from our community, the T5U vs T6 topic has been fast tracked to our FCT, and any threads concerning this topic will be closed. We understand the community is very concerned with this topic, however, the myriad of solutions and demands posted so far have not lead to a change in this system, and leaving these threads to fester will not improve community moral, or have the entire system changed.



Steam usage stats proves this game is dying!
No, it doesn't.

pweadamanteus wrote: »

Ok, let's say a few things here...

First, only a very small portion of STO's playerbase comes from Steam...this has always been the case. So, using the steam charts that many seem to be quoting and using every couple weeks really is not giving you a good picture.

Second, Steam users have had to deal with some Zen purchasing errors over the past couple of months as Steam is switching from using a universal currency to the currencies of individual countries/regions. I.E. Steam enables new currencies without a heads up to developers, users start to have purchasing errors in games/companies that have their own currency, and then the developers have to figure out what happened and make adjustments to their billing systems and coding in the game so the new currencies are supported. This has driven some users to abandon STO on Steam and go through Arc or directly through the launcher.

Third, as we do have the Arc platform, it is easier to run contests, post news, etc. on Arc so more users are using Arc since you get the most up to date news and contests by using it. And Arc is not spyware or bloatware for those making that accusation. There are even other players who have checked out the Arc coding themselves and there is no spyware or bloatware associated with Arc.

Basically, what I'm saying, is that all you get for STO from looking at the steam charts site is that less people are using STO through Steam. That doesn't reflect on any other statistic. While I can't release our total numbers, I can say that the Steam charts do not follow the pattern of the total numbers and the steam charts cause us no worries at all.

Scheduled Maintenance downtimes
This comes up quite often with people asking why downtime is always at the same time. The reason is very simple - the server population is at a low point during those hours, and it is close to the time developers come in to the office. Do realize that unscheduled maintenance (example - crashes) and emergency maintenance windows are unpredictable and can happen at anytime.

End Game Constitution Class ship
The answer to the T5 connie ship has been a no for 4 years and that answer comes from CBS. Due to recent changes, the end game kelvin version of the constitution class has come about and as such, discussions can continue about it.

Tovan Khev needs to be dismissable
Hawk has constantly commented on this. His last comment is this -

adjudicatorhawk wrote: »

I've answered this many times. When we made LoR, we had an underlying assumption throughout all the missions that Tovan would be one of your boffs. You would not be able to dismiss him, no matter what - and consequently, all of the content was written and structured with that in mind. We will never be able to allow you to dismiss Tovan, since changing an assumption that fundamental to the construction of many parts of our game is an extremely risky change to make.

K'Gan and Elisa were the 2nd rev of the same concept. We saw that, while many players loved Tovan, many others also wanted to be able to marginalize him - and we allowed that with the K'Gan and Elisa.

I think every time I've answered this question, it's been phrased as "PLEASE DEVS FINALLY GIVE US AN ANSWER". It's been answered, it's just not the answer you wanted. :P

Star Trek Online License
People keep thinking the license is going to expire. Official Answer from Brandon -

pwebranflakes wrote: »

STO's license does not end in 2015. Our exclusive contract extends for years beyond that and we have the option to renew.

Cheers,

Brandon =/\=

Star Trek Online 2.0

Since the license isn't due to expire for some time, "nothing has been announced," regarding a STO 2.0 either.

ARC is full of bloat/spyware
This has come up a lot since ARC was launched, and while the ARC team along with other players have said it doesn't, and it really doesn't. Official quote from Adam -

pweadamanteus wrote: »

<snip>
Arc is not spyware or bloatware for those making that accusation. There are even other players who have checked out the Arc coding themselves and there is no spyware or bloatware associated with Arc.
<snip>

Full custom interiors

tacofangs wrote: »

Bridges/Interiors take far longer to make than ships. As such, if there is sufficient reason to make a full ship interior (such as the newish Romulan Ship interior, being used all over LoR) we'll make one. If there isn't, we won't. Making a custom bridge, let alone a full interior for the Corvette (while cool) would be a significant investment of time/resources. So, we could have skimped on Risa more, and built an interior, or done what was done, and skipped the interior which would have served little purpose anyway, and went with beefing up Risa.


Building custom bridges takes longer than a couple of days. Something like the Suliban/Andorian/Tholian Bridges, were each 5 days of Environment work from me. Then it needs design time to hook up any interactables, doors, etc.

Doing a full interior is significantly longer (i.e. 3 weeks to a month)

Flying your ship from the bridge

tacofangs wrote: »

I've definitely gone over this plenty of times in the past, but my search-fu seems to be weak today.

Note that I don't think I've ever used the word 'impossible.' It's all code, nothing is impossible given enough time, money, and manpower.

However, what I have said in the past, and will repeat now, is that our game, as it stands today, is not set up for this at all. It's not an engine limitation per se, and it's not because our engine is old. It's because it's not how the game was designed. Again, possible, but not probable.

The problem, as stated by others, is that your "character" is both a ship, and a captain, simultaneously. When you are in space, you are drawn as a ship. When you are on the ground, you are drawn as a person. So, when you are in sector space (as a ship) and go to your bridge (as a person), your ship ceases to exist in sector space. You are no longer there. You are ONLY on your bridge. When you leave your bridge, and go back to sector space, you become a ship again, and your captain (and the bridge) cease to exist.

So, there is no easy way to track you through sector space while you are actually on another map. Again, this is likely possible, but is not set up, and would require significant coding.

To my (non-programmer) mind, the best alternative is the count-down method others have mentioned. Instead of "flying" your ship from the bridge, you go to your helm officer, tell him which system to go to, and a timer counts down however long it takes to get there. During the countdown you can meander around your interior, doing whatever captainy things captains do. When the timer is up, your helm officer informs you that you have arrived, and you can load that map.

The problem with the above is what happens when you leave your bridge part way through the count down. If you leave at the start, you go back to where ever you left to get to your bridge. If you leave at the end, you go to your destination. If you leave in the middle, where do you go? Remember, there is nothing tracking you through sector space, so we have no functional idea where your "ship" is right now. Instead, we just know that you're 50% done with the countdown. So, we can't drop you in the right spot in sector space, do we dump you back at the start? We can't let you cheat by going to the end point. . .

Another issue is how to determine the timing. I guess we could manually fly from every planet to every other planet to get a baseline, but that's annoying. IMO I think this idea best works with a unified sector space, so that there is no map loading between sectors. Timing things in that mode would be a much simpler task, as we could just determine distances between them. A unified sector space would also make it easier to drop you in an appropriate spot if you were to leave your bridge part way through your journey. It's something that has been tossed about, but I haven't heard anything concrete about that in a while.

In addition, I wouldn't really want to do this unless we did some major bridge refresh as well. I think we have a lot of terrible bridges in the game. I also think it would be cool if your viewscreen could reflect the system you are at, but that would be more tech, and wouldn't really work until the above bits happened. They're all nice ideas, and I think everyone on the team would love to see it, but there is a LOT of work involved, and a lot of edge cases that can break things horribly. It's not a trivial undertaking.

Keep in mind, the above suggestion would only be for travel, not fighting anything. That would be an even bigger can of worms to wrestle with.

The monitor overlay idea has been raised a number of times before, but imo it would just feel chintzy. We couldn't do a full 3d bridge overlay, it would just be a texture. Basically cutting a viewscreen out of cardboard and pasting it onto your monitor. I don't think anyone would be satisfied by that.

Dev's don't read our bug reports/Don't come on the forums!
Note - This is taco's reply to some people and it's relevant so I left it all. We are not going to close threads about bug reports mind you :P

tacofangs wrote: »

lucho80 wrote: »

Would be nice to at least get a "bug acknowledged, on the list of things to fix" once in a while . . . *snip*

What purpose does this serve? Going by previous experience, when we acknowledge a bug, or say it's on our list, if that bug is not then fixed immediately, we get yelled at about never fixing bugs. If we say nothing, we get yelled at about never fixing bugs. So to us, the output is the same. Why would we expend energy doing something that offers no different result?
As it is, it's better to just fix things as we can, and let the patch notes be the informant.

f2pdrakron wrote: »

I cannot say I agree with that, Josh Sawyer posted a lot during New Vegas development without that happening, it depends on the tone.

Different Game, Different Forum, Different Audience.
Apples and Broccoli.

f2pdrakron wrote: »

And thats why I said unfortunately, you are pretty the only one as everyone else pretty much only posts as a decree or down to the point, I dont mind the to the point but I dont like the tone used in decrees that are very much "this is how WE decided, there is NO ROOM for discussion".

That's because we no longer include the forums, or players in general (outside of more controlled interview settings) to see the process, talk about what we're planning on doing, or what's up coming. Instead, by time we are ready to talk about a thing, it pretty much is set in stone. That's not saying there isn't some wiggle room. We'll take feedback on how something was put in, and tweak some stuff, but the process has likely already been going long enough that we can't just dump it all and start over again.

I know it's hard to swallow, but we ARE the ones to decide how something is going to be. We are the one's being paid to do so. You are welcome to disagree with us, and we will gladly listen to your opinion on the matter, and may even change something because of it, but at the end of the day, we are the developers of the game. We're always hiring, if you'd like to sit on this side of the fence, PLEASE APPLY!

f2pdrakron wrote: »

The problem I have is a Internet Forum is "an online discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages", at least is what I use it for but thats not really he problem I have, its the "feedback".

Feedback right now is just divided in 2 camps ... positive and negative, if feedback is negative it seems to be simply disregarded regardless of its constructive or not, I got The Secret World last year and I no longer play ... you know why? because the Forums were overrun with "game is perfect, you are a troll/suck" type of comments despite the game having serious issues, even the game own chat was filled with people that if I had a problem then it was me, not the game (I had a lot of problems beating a boss on the abandoned playground).

If the only feedback allowed to be given is praise then its nothing but poisoned, granted this doesnt happen in STO but when was the last time Al Rivera posted? or Daniel Stahl?

I am sure its comfortable just answering pre-selected questions, I also noticed when people bring up uncomfortable questions the answer is silence, even if forums offer feedback I really dont think its going to change per-determined notions or what the metrics say.

Yes, you interact with the players yet what I feel is that I am a data point ... I dont like ARC, I am ignored because if I leave its assumed someone else will take my place, I dont like being ignored when I say reputation is a endless grind when having more that one character, when someone even bothers to address the issues I raise, is to downright dismiss them.

Who's stopping you from posting anything negative? I see negative posts on this forum CONSTANTLY. No one here is deleting posts, or regulating what emotions you can have about the game. Yes, editing happens when something violates the TOS, but there is nothing in the TOS about not posting negative opinions.

Now, when will a Dev choose to reply to something? That's not so easy. You're right, that we likely don't respond as often to negative posts as we do to positive posts. There are a couple of reasons for that.

1) Positive posts make us feel good about ourselves. It turns out devs are humans, and as humans, we like to feel good. This includes people talking well of something we have done. Negative posts generally make us feel bad about ourselves. And as valid as it might be, we don't like feeling bad about ourselves.

2) In general, we want to keep a positive and uplifting tone to our forums, and want people to feel positive about our game. This encourages more people to play it. When we post, we draw attention to a thread. If that thread is negative in nature, the people who read it will tend to feel worse about the game. Since we draw attention when we post, we potentially draw more people into that thread than would go to it naturally, and thus, more people end up feeling bad about the game than might have otherwise. The inverse is true for positive posts.

Why don't Geko or Stahl post more? They're CRAZY busy. They are the LEADS of the project. They're in meetings something like 27 hours a day. And when they have down time, they likely don't want to even think about the game, let alone open themselves up to the forums. (note my previous post).

You are clearly not being ignored, you are having a conversation, right now, DIRECTLY with a Developer who works on this game. That's pretty much the opposite of being ignored.

Kickstarter Threads

ambassadorkael#6946 wrote: »

This is not something we would likely ever do, for a multitude of reasons both legal and practical. While I can't speak to the legal reasons, I can speak to the practical to a certain extent:

1) Have you ever seen one of those lists floating around the internet about all the gaming projects that fail on Kickstarter? Or are massively funded and still come up with something that isn't what the fans believed they were getting? That's because game development is a weird, wonderful, difficult and expensive world that you can't simply solve by throwing money at a problem. For example: Say we get X amount of money, which is enough to hire 2 designers to work on a New Thing. When that money runs out, those people are out of a job. It's unlikely that we'll attract any talent who only want to come and work on a game temporarily when there are so many opportunities in this area for full time work.

2) What would we make? Even in this thread, there's at least ten different ideas of what people would want us to do with their money. We'd have to pick one idea to throw into this hypothetical kickstarter, and it wouldn't please everybody, or possibly anybody. Even the ideas that regularly come up on these forums that seem to be the most popular have their massive detractors.

3) I, personally, am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a game that already has a revenue stream coming to the players and asking for an additional revenue stream. Players already have a way to support our game and allow us to fund projects within it, and that's buying things within the game. To turn around and say, "Well, hey, give us even more money to make a thing" seems...not right.

The team is constantly working on new content for you guys, and I'm really excited for you to see what's coming down the pipe. There's some really cool stuff in the future. They also take as much time as they can to provide bug fixes and quality of life improvements that you request, because everybody here deeply cares about making sure this game is great. While we appreciate the enthusiasm, we're not likely to ever do crowdfunding.

The below is threads we are not allowing due to moderation issues (as in flaming, trolling or harassment of other players happens every time).

Disco Balls (Party Amplifer) threads
The items are obviously added to the game and aren't going anywhere. However, everytime people make threads about them they tend to turn into threads of flaming, trolling and harassment. As such, we aren't going to allow these threads anymore unless something changes with them.

Doom! threads
At this time, we are going to keep the main fun one going, but overall they are landing in each sub forum and getting out of control. Perfect World Entertainment, Cryptic Studios, Star Trek Online and so fourth are not in any financial problems, isn't dying, player base is getting low that they're going to shut down etc. Since they just turn into troll fests we're going to keep the Dooommm!! The Game is Finsihed!! Everything is Doomed Thread!! and if you really need to post about the destruction of STO, PWE and such do so there.

General Rage Threads
"I hate this so everyone else should hate this too"
"I hate this bug & I hate the devs for not fixing it NOW!"

Not liking something in-game is fine. Hating something in-game is fine. Starting a rage thread insulting staff members, products, or the companies who work very diligently to bring you STO is a violation of our TOS and will be acted on as such.

I Demand X Or Else Threads
"As a player with experience in X field, I demand X immediately. If I don't get it (insert threat here)."
"I have made an app/website so therefore everyone at PWE/Cryptic is lazy for not doing what I say."

It is understandable that players of any game will eventually get frustrated with decisions out of their control for the focus or intent of the games they love. Unfortunately, the habit of demanding resolutions and making threats can longer be tolerated as it creates a hostile forum environment that is neither welcoming to new users, or useful for fostering a sense of community.

Rank/Level change threads
These come up a lot and the answer has been, no it's not happening. It also sparks huge debates that turn into flame wars.

Threads with Vague or Incomplete Thread Titles
These are not helpful to forum users, as the title doesn't communicate clearly the thread topic for users to find it, serving only as "click bait" and possible forum spam. They also make moderating difficult for the same reasons and in trying to keep threads on topic, especially in cases where the original post itself is also vague.

---

askray

Day/Night Cycles and Lighting 2.0

Per Tacofangs (tumerboy) on Reddit:

The lighting model of the game, is OF THE GAME. It is not, nor can it be, dependent on the map you are on. We have a hybrid model simply due to our being a pre-existing game with a significant playerbase that run on older hardware.

That said, 2.0 has numerous other benefits, not just the light adaptation (which actually existed in 1.0, but was so bad we barely used it). Reflections are drastically improved, ambient lighting is better, performance on higher end cards is better, etc. etc.

I understand that you want the day/night cycle back. I do too. But if we were to get it back, it would be by moving forward and finding a solution to update the probe data, not by going backwards and kludging things to force people's preferences on a specific map. And since none of that tech exists, I wouldn't want to speculate on it being "easier."

There is no tech to store multiple sets of probe data, and switch them out. That's what would be needed to get day/night cycles functional again. But it doesn't exist, and we'd need a way to make it exist and not drastically bloat the amount of data needed to load a map.

Day/Night Cycles don't work with our current lighting model, which is across the game. New maps are not an exception. Making a new map would have no impact on the functionality of day/night cycles.

Shadows aren't the issue. We can move individual lights around a bit, we just can't do really drastic changes to the lighting of a map, like say, go from Noon, to Sunset, to Midnight.

The direct lighting can all change easily, the light from a torch, or from the sun. The shadows can move. The issue is the ambient light, the light that bounces around a scene and makes the shadows something other than pure black. That ambient light is now much, much more accurate to the scene. It used to be that we just set a single color for the ambient of a map. So something like Risa would be bluish in the ambient. Now the objects and lights in the world affect the ambient of objects around them. If we have a big, bright red ball, with the sun shining on it, a white wall right next to it will get some red bounced light off of that ball, just as it would in real life, rather than the white wall just appearing kind of bluish.

That ambient light is what's baked in, and can't change on the fly.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/66keim/risa_lighting_20_and_discussion_on_what_to_do/


Why No Vortas or Female Jem'Hadar in the Dominion Faction?

First, it's specifically a Jem'Hadar Faction not a Dominion Faction due to the nature of its storyline (I specifically asked for clarification on this). Second, Jem'Hadar themselves are genderless, so the notion of gender doesn't apply to them. The only way to get as close as possible to depicting a genderless character model is with the male model for obvious reasons. In the livestream it was even stated that they would love to remove the gender buttons from the Tailor for Jem'Hadar, but cannot because it would cause things to break. But you're encouraged to roleplay your Jem'Hadar as female if you so choose. (Time code: 43:00:00 - 48:05:00)

Additionally, it was also stated that the VIL storyline is very Jem'Hadar-centric, so playing as any other race wouldn't make sense from that perspective. Adding Vorta wasn't stated as something "they want to do", but rather something that they weren't entirely ruling out, because there's "always a chance" that they might. Someday. (Time code: 1:10:15 - 1:11:25)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krUrwQwxn6g&amp;t=4249s

More information regarding playable Vorta or other playable species for the Dominion/Jem'Hadar: It was originally thought that there would be other playable Dominion species. However, as the story began to take shape, it made less sense, as the story became very Jem'Hadar-centric. Even having a Vorta BOFF made no sense, as a Vorta would never report to a Jem'Hadar. So, it was decided that for VIL, it would be playable Jem'Hadar only for story reasons. (Time code: 1:26:50 - 1:29:41)

But, without promising anything, it was stated that making other playable species available for the Dominion/Jem'Hadar through an unlock by playing through the entire VIL storyline might be considered. (Time code: 41:05 - 43:20)

As of this writing, 2018 06 15, the entire story arc for VIL has yet to be revealed, so in time it should make sense.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DNES7unUXM8&amp;t=4689s

Can we have fan-designed ships or ships of other Star Trek licensees in the game?
No.

• For ships from other Star Trek licensed properties, for example Star Trek: Starfleet Command, the tabletop RPGs by FASA or Last Unicorn Games, or any original ships Pocket Books' novel writers may invent in the future, Cryptic has to negotiate for rights to each design individually with the other license-holder, as they did pre-launch with the Luna-class reconnaissance science vessel (Pocket Books' Star Trek: Titan) and Vesta-class multi-mission explorer (Pocket Books' Star Trek: Destiny). It's simply faster and cheaper for them to create their own original ships.
• There are several fan-designed or fan-named ships already in the game, but the fracas that ensued over the "Design the Next Enterprise" contest has led the development team to decide against soliciting further such designs. There has been one further competition since then to design what became the Jupiter-class carrier, but it involved variations of developer-made designs.

Any ship that appeared in a Star Trek TV show or film is still potentially fair game.

askray

Taco (aka Tumerboy) made a great thread in the Art of Star Trek Online sub forum that had a bunch of FCT's as well so I'm going to repost what he posted there with some edits. Please note - these are listed because it's a great resource and are NOT locked discussions (Note: This may change at any time at the sole discretion of the moderation/community management team).

The edits done are to remove those we are ready to declare are no fly zone type posts and are listed above in the original post

His original thread is located at - http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?p=12004001

How do I take decent screenshots?

tacofangs wrote: »

Reposting from an old post of mine in a now archived thread:

Using the printscreen key should put a screenshot into your STO/shard/screenshots/ folder. That could reside a number of places, but the most likely CapnBludd mentioned above.

Keep in mind that each shard will have it's own screenshot folder. So if you're on Holodeck, it will end up in LIVE/Screenshots/ but if you're on Tribble it will be something else/screenshots/.

By default these will be JPGs with no UI at whatever resolution you're running the game at.
You can also type into the chatbox things like:

/screenshot
/screenshot_jpg
/screenshot_UI
/screenshot_UI_jpg

If you want to make your shots looks really good, change your renderscale (/renderscale #), and then resize the image to fit your monitor after the shot has been taken. The Default is 1
/renderscale 2 will take a shot at double your screen's default dimensions, 3 will be 3 times. Keep in mind, these are rectangular areas, so renderscale 3 is actually 9 times the total pixels.
You should not run renderscales much higher than 2 or 3, you WILL crash the game.

Most screenshots we take will be on a computer running at 1680x1050, and we'll take them at renderscale 2, and then resize afterwards. This gives a cleaner look to things, and provides a type of antialiasing.

In addition, if you are finding that ships/backgrounds are LODing in your shot (that is, they are dropping to a lower resolution version of the model) you can run /visscale # to change the draw distance. 1 is default. Going past 5 is pretty much pointless, and again, may crash your game.

Keep in mind that with both of these, the higher you set the number, the more unstable your game will be. We DO NOT RECOMMEND RUNNING WITH THESE ON ALL THE TIME. They are handy aids in taking screenshots, but are not meant to be permanent fixtures in your game.

Lastly, both commands will take non-integer #'s, and you can go below 1 to allow your game to perform better. i.e. renderscale .5 will be drawing your screen at half resolution. Visscale .5 will only draw models out to half the distance they would normally draw. This can be a boon when your computer starts to chug, but will make everything look pretty ugly.

*Note that abusing these commands is done at your own peril. Tumerboy, his affiliates, Cryptic Studios and Perfect World claim no responsibility to any injury or damage occurring as a result of the use of these commands.

Why aren't view screens in 3D?

tacofangs wrote: »

:::sigh:::

I'm not reading through all of this right now, it's bed time. I'll take a read through in the morning.

However, Yes, the screens should be 3d.
No, ours are generally not 3d.

Cutting a Hole in the wall works for some instances. i.e. If there's a planet out there, or stars streaming by, or something. However, were we to cut holes in things, the bridges would have to be very carefully constructed, such that you couldn't look out that hole, and see the ready room off to the side (for instance). We also can't represent personal interaction via that method. We would have to enlarge an NPC, and potentially his surroundings to fit the screen properly, and none of that is trivial.

The proper solution is to use portals (like the game Portal) where a specified camera can be projected onto a 2d texture. However, that is an immense undertaking, and is very, very unlikely.

I'm sorry you don't like how we're doing it, but that really is the best way at the moment. We can see about cutting holes in some things going forward, but we will probably not be going back and retrofitting old bridges with such a method.

Why can't I fly my jetpack everywhere?

tacofangs wrote: »

...snip...

What I have said, and will say again, is that up until the Risa Revamp, maps were not made with flying in mind. I've worked on two Superhero MMOs, both with Flying characters, and I can assure you that flying is not a simple matter. If you're going to have flying in a game, it is much easier to build your maps with that in mind, than it is to retrofit old maps to work with flying.

Video Games are like movies. In both cases, we only build what the camera is able to see. Movies have much tighter controls over that camera, but we have a few controls ourselves. We can direct where you are able to go within a map, and we (until Risa) know that you aren't going to be able to fly, or get up high to look down on things. As such, like movies, we essentially build sets. False fronts, so it looks like the map continues on in the backgrounds, even though it doesn't really. Movies do the exact same thing. Old Westerns are probably the most famous for it, but it's true today as well.

So, on any given map now, we might have buildings with no roofs. We might have alleyways that go around a corner to nothingness. We might not have a ground plane outside of the few streets you can see. This means that if we just turned on flying, you could not only see, but get to all of those places. Which (imo) runes immersion rather quickly, and can actually have adverse effects on the game/server stability.

In addition, many maps are built with your computer's performance in mind. When you can see for a very long distance, your video card has to draw many, many more objects. This slows down/heats up your card, and your framerate can drop significantly. We often rely on methods to block your line of sight, to keep performance good. If you can now fly up over the walls of a city, and can now see 20x farther than you could before, your computer won't like it.

There is also a matter of gameplay. If you can fly, it becomes much easier to game the AI, or even bypass large parts of the mission. We had a major problem in Champions, where players would simply fly over all of the enemies in a map, and then just fight the boss. We tried putting in powers on the mobs to essentially shoot down flying players, and players hated it. It is not an easy problem to deal with.

Our maps are not broken, they simply were not designed for flight, and retrofitting old maps for flight is not an easy process.

Why is X ship out of scale with the other ships?

tacofangs wrote: »

As stated by others, shuttles are bigger than they should be next to most ships, but most ships are roughly in line with each other, and most shuttles are the same.


Here are the actual models, side by side, in an orthographic view in 3d Studio Max.
We model in feet, and at a much smaller scale for space, so I had to do some conversion math, but it should be pretty close.

The Defiant was shown in vastly different scales at different points in the show, so there is really more of a range for it's length than an actual number. Your 122m for the Defiant is on the small side of that range. Generally it's somewhere between 120m and 170m. We're at that upper end, but still well within the loose canonical size for the ship.

Hope that helps.

Why doesn't ESD Orbit Earth?

tacofangs wrote: »

azurianstar wrote: »

I'm sorry, you misunderstood my "orbital rotation" comment. I didn't mean ESD orbiting over the Earth, I meant the Sun and Moon around the Earth from that stationary position. :P

Meaning if you guys did turn Earth into a skyfile, the Sun and Moon would be orbiting around the Earth model. Of course, you guys likely would just keep them in a permament stationary position. Though be interesting if we did see them change positions. Especially the light from the Sun.

Sorry, my mistake. Making the sun rotate around the Earth/ESD is feasible (but would need some tech work). Having the moon move at it's proper rate (one rotation every 28 or so solar rotations) is not doable within the current system.

tacofangs wrote: »

azurianstar wrote: »

Well, if you guys do work out the tech, I could see it being benefitial to both you and the community. (You get a new tool, and the community get some more immersion).

And if you can get the Sun to move, surely you could have the Moon move as well as a seperate layer. Imagine the aw everyone would have when you have that rare moment of an actual in-game solar eclipse.

Making the moon move isn't the question, it's making it move at the proper rate. We have time in game. A full 24 hour cycle. In one of those cycles, the sun should orbit the Earth (visually, not actually) once. The problem is that our skyfiles work within that 24 hour period, expecting that the skyfile will loop at 0/24 hours. Since the moon needs to move only 1/28th of an orbit in one cycle, we're boned. I could make it move 1/28th of an orbit in that 24 hour cycle, but at the end of that cycle, it would pop back to where it started, not continue on.

Hypothetically, you could take the opposite approach, and have the moon set the standard, so that it orbits once in that 24 hour cycle, and have the sun orbit 28 times, but I think that would look rather crazy, since the time is hard coded, and would be moving at the same pace it always does.

It may not be 'right' but I think the best solution would be to have the sun orbit, and the moon not.

Why is the scale of ______ so off?

tacofangs wrote: »

kirksplat wrote: »

I can compare as well.

http://starbaseugc.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ships.jpg

Come on Kirkfat, you've been around long enough to know that the shuttles are not in line with the main ships. This has all been discussed before ad nauseum.


Let's see how many other common points I can hit without reading the rest of the thread:

DS9 is big because when tested at it's 'actual' size, people thought it was too small, and not fun to fly around.

Planets/system maps can't be scaled to actual proportions due to computational limitations in an MMO.

Sector space is Astrometrics, it is representational. It is not meant to be your actual ship flying around the actual galaxy.

The Defiant has no 'true' canon size. It has a range, from 120m-175m. Ours is at ~165m, well within the canonical range.

I have no idea why K7 is as massive as it is, but it's unlikely to change, due to the same issue as DS9

ESD's main doors were shown to just barely fit the Ent A, but then in TNG, they were also show to just barely fit the Ent D.

How'd I do?

o1derfull1 wrote: »

Ok maybe it's just me, and I've been misinterpreting things wrong for years.

I would have sworn that starbase > starship. Period. End of story. Any free-floating startbase should automatically be far far larger than a mobile warp-capable starship. Otherwise, what's the point of the startbase being stationary? If it's that small, slap some nacelles on it (instead of dinky thrusters) and just have 'bases' whereever you need them. Or heck, just don't have starbases, just have ships in geosynchronous orbit.

This is definitely not true. While many stations are larger than starships, it is entirely dependant on their function. It's also dependant on their time. K7 in ToS was larger than the Connie, but would be dwarfed by the Oddyssey.

As for ships being used as outposts, in the short term, sure. But in the long term (years/decades) ships are not a good fit. They need regular maintenance, and aren't set up for extended stays like that. A station would be designed for it's intended purpose.

Why are planets so small?!

tacofangs wrote: »

I agree with most of the above. Our planets ARE far too small. We are limited however, by math. We can't make objects much bigger than we do, without causing significant issues within our engine.

I have played with/tested the idea of putting planets into the skyfile such that they render in the background. I did this at Utopia Planitia, though no one actually got to fly around outside, so I guess that's fairly moot. Personally I feel that the backdrop planets DO feel much bigger, they feel appropriate, they feel right. You get that sense of objects moving in front of a stationary giant object, like you see in nasa films from the ISS, etc. I'd like to do this more, and likely will continue to try it in cases that don't require you to "approach the planet." It's problematic as it's incongruous with all of our existing maps, but I think a map or two at a time can change that in the long run (similar to my semi-famous sun/lens flare).

tacofangs wrote: »

trek21 wrote: »

I can understand that having bigger planets might cause issues... but that begs a question:

During the KDF mission Alpha, we have an absolutely HUGE gas giant planet in the mission map, at least by the game's standards. If having bigger planets causes issues, how did you squeeze that one in? Or is that because you didn't get to approach the planet?

I'm curious

Yes, Alpha was trickery, similar to putting it into the backdrop. In reality, that planet can appear bigger because only half of it is made (the half facing you) and there is no collision.


All Engines have limitations. Our engine is actually very good overall, and we hear that everytime we hire someone from another company. Yes, there are limitations, but we are always adding to it, and improving on things. We will not be tossing it out and using something else.

Many of the limitations we work with, are due to the types of games we make. MMOs have special limitations over most single player games. Turns out, having to render 100's of characters at once, and sync data between all of them is a bit of a hindrance.

Why doesn't everyone, everywhere have proper voiceover?!

tacofangs wrote: »

To my mind, there are a couple of problems with voicing everything.

1) Cost. Voice work isn't free. And while I'm not privy to what we paid Mr. Dorn for his contribution, I imagine it isn't peanuts. I think that we focused our voice over budget on the important part, Worf.

2) Patch size. You're mistaken about "those few megabytes." One of the biggest single patch bloats out there is Audio. Doing full voice work for the whole episode would have expanded the patch size significantly. And that carries a bunch of problems with it. It takes more space on everyone's hard drives. It takes longer to download. It takes up more bandwidth from the rest of the game. Etc.

While I think we'd all love to see the whole thing voiced, it's not practical.

askray

The F.C.T has been updated.

Two things have been added also some wording has been changed to the beginning statement. -

Steam usage stats proves this game is dying!
No, it doesn't.

pweadamanteus wrote: »

Ok, let's say a few things here...

First, only a very small portion of STO's playerbase comes from Steam...this has always been the case. So, using the steam charts that many seem to be quoting and using every couple weeks really is not giving you a good picture.

Second, Steam users have had to deal with some Zen purchasing errors over the past couple of months as Steam is switching from using a universal currency to the currencies of individual countries/regions. I.E. Steam enables new currencies without a heads up to developers, users start to have purchasing errors in games/companies that have their own currency, and then the developers have to figure out what happened and make adjustments to their billing systems and coding in the game so the new currencies are supported. This has driven some users to abandon STO on Steam and go through Arc or directly through the launcher.

Third, as we do have the Arc platform, it is easier to run contests, post news, etc. on Arc so more users are using Arc since you get the most up to date news and contests by using it. And Arc is not spyware or bloatware for those making that accusation. There are even other players who have checked out the Arc coding themselves and there is no spyware or bloatware associated with Arc.

Basically, what I'm saying, is that all you get for STO from looking at the steam charts site is that less people are using STO through Steam. That doesn't reflect on any other statistic. While I can't release our total numbers, I can say that the Steam charts do not follow the pattern of the total numbers and the steam charts cause us no worries at all.

ARC is full of bloat/spyware
This has come up a lot since ARC was launched, and while the ARC team along with other players have said it doesn't, and it really doesn't. Official quote from Adam -

pweadamanteus wrote: »

<snip>
Arc is not spyware or bloatware for those making that accusation. There are even other players who have checked out the Arc coding themselves and there is no spyware or bloatware associated with Arc.
<snip>

askray

Updated end game discussions about constitution class as it's been released to the public.

baddmoonrizin

Added the topic of STO 2.0 to the FCT

Star Trek Online 2.0

Since the license isn't due to expire for some time, "nothing has been announced," regarding a STO 2.0 either.

baddmoonrizin

Added the topic Kickstarter Threads to the FCT

Kickstarter Threads

ambassadorkael#6946 wrote: »

This is not something we would likely ever do, for a multitude of reasons both legal and practical. While I can't speak to the legal reasons, I can speak to the practical to a certain extent:

1) Have you ever seen one of those lists floating around the internet about all the gaming projects that fail on Kickstarter? Or are massively funded and still come up with something that isn't what the fans believed they were getting? That's because game development is a weird, wonderful, difficult and expensive world that you can't simply solve by throwing money at a problem. For example: Say we get X amount of money, which is enough to hire 2 designers to work on a New Thing. When that money runs out, those people are out of a job. It's unlikely that we'll attract any talent who only want to come and work on a game temporarily when there are so many opportunities in this area for full time work.

2) What would we make? Even in this thread, there's at least ten different ideas of what people would want us to do with their money. We'd have to pick one idea to throw into this hypothetical kickstarter, and it wouldn't please everybody, or possibly anybody. Even the ideas that regularly come up on these forums that seem to be the most popular have their massive detractors.

3) I, personally, am deeply uncomfortable with the idea of a game that already has a revenue stream coming to the players and asking for an additional revenue stream. Players already have a way to support our game and allow us to fund projects within it, and that's buying things within the game. To turn around and say, "Well, hey, give us even more money to make a thing" seems...not right.

The team is constantly working on new content for you guys, and I'm really excited for you to see what's coming down the pipe. There's some really cool stuff in the future. They also take as much time as they can to provide bug fixes and quality of life improvements that you request, because everybody here deeply cares about making sure this game is great. While we appreciate the enthusiasm, we're not likely to ever do crowdfunding.

baddmoonrizin

Added the topic:

Threads with Vague or Incomplete Thread Titles
These are not helpful to forum users, as the title doesn't communicate clearly the thread topic for users to find it, serving only as "click bait" and possible forum spam. They also make moderating difficult for the same reasons and in trying to keep threads on topic, especially in cases where the original post itself is also vague.

baddmoonrizin

Added the topic:


Day/Night Cycles and Lighting 2.0

Per Tacofangs (tumerboy) on Reddit:

The lighting model of the game, is OF THE GAME. It is not, nor can it be, dependent on the map you are on. We have a hybrid model simply due to our being a pre-existing game with a significant playerbase that run on older hardware.

That said, 2.0 has numerous other benefits, not just the light adaptation (which actually existed in 1.0, but was so bad we barely used it). Reflections are drastically improved, ambient lighting is better, performance on higher end cards is better, etc. etc.

I understand that you want the day/night cycle back. I do too. But if we were to get it back, it would be by moving forward and finding a solution to update the probe data, not by going backwards and kludging things to force people's preferences on a specific map. And since none of that tech exists, I wouldn't want to speculate on it being "easier."

There is no tech to store multiple sets of probe data, and switch them out. That's what would be needed to get day/night cycles functional again. But it doesn't exist, and we'd need a way to make it exist and not drastically bloat the amount of data needed to load a map.

Day/Night Cycles don't work with our current lighting model, which is across the game. New maps are not an exception. Making a new map would have no impact on the functionality of day/night cycles.

Shadows aren't the issue. We can move individual lights around a bit, we just can't do really drastic changes to the lighting of a map, like say, go from Noon, to Sunset, to Midnight.

The direct lighting can all change easily, the light from a torch, or from the sun. The shadows can move. The issue is the ambient light, the light that bounces around a scene and makes the shadows something other than pure black. That ambient light is now much, much more accurate to the scene. It used to be that we just set a single color for the ambient of a map. So something like Risa would be bluish in the ambient. Now the objects and lights in the world affect the ambient of objects around them. If we have a big, bright red ball, with the sun shining on it, a white wall right next to it will get some red bounced light off of that ball, just as it would in real life, rather than the white wall just appearing kind of bluish.

That ambient light is what's baked in, and can't change on the fly.

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/66keim/risa_lighting_20_and_discussion_on_what_to_do/

starswordc

Added the topic:

Can we have fan-designed ships or ships of other Star Trek licensees in the game?

No.

• For ships from other Star Trek licensed properties, for example Star Trek: Starfleet Command, the tabletop RPGs by FASA or Last Unicorn Games, or any original ships Pocket Books' novel writers may invent in the future, Cryptic has to negotiate for rights to each design individually with the other license-holder, as they did pre-launch with the Luna-class reconnaissance science vessel (Pocket Books' Star Trek: Titan) and Vesta-class multi-mission explorer (Pocket Books' Star Trek: Destiny). It's simply faster and cheaper for them to create their own original ships.
• There are several fan-designed or fan-named ships already in the game, but the fracas that ensued over the "Design the Next Enterprise" contest has led the development team to decide against soliciting further such designs. There has been one further competition since then to design what became the Jupiter-class carrier, but it involved variations of developer-made designs.

Any ship that appeared in a Star Trek TV show or film is still potentially fair game.