Community Projects for Older (official) Episodes.

tobywitczak

So one thing I have been wondering. If it is possible for Cryptic to open source their older Episode/Invasion Zones so the foundry community members can debug and/or update the episode (updated assets, better missoin strucutre, etc...). One thing I hear constantly from my fleet is the number of legacy missions that seem to have bugs in them that for one reason or the other Cryptic will never fix. I think the simple solution is to let foundry member go in and fix them. This should be a win-win. We will get a better Mission, and Cryptic doesn’t have to do anything other than review it for quality.

spiritborn

tobywitczak wrote: »

So one thing I have been wondering. If it is possible for Cryptic to open source their older Episode/Invasion Zones so the foundry community members can debug and/or update the episode (updated assets, better missoin strucutre, etc...). One thing I hear constantly from my fleet is the number of legacy missions that seem to have bugs in them that for one reason or the other Cryptic will never fix. I think the simple solution is to let foundry member go in and fix them. This should be a win-win. We will get a better Mission, and Cryptic doesn’t have to do anything other than review it for quality.

It's a legal minefield Cryptic doesn't want to tackle unless they have to, besides not every Foundry member (I'd even dare say most) have programming knowledge to debug/fix official missions even if that was an easy thing to allow us to do. A lot of those "it's so easy to fix" issues probably aren't as easy to fix as you or your fleetmates think.

Collectively our troubleshooting is very much limited to map building and simple scripts within the limits of the Foundry tools.

duncanidaho11

tobywitczak wrote: »

So one thing I have been wondering. If it is possible for Cryptic to open source their older Episode/Invasion Zones so the foundry community members can debug and/or update the episode (updated assets, better missoin strucutre, etc...).

Short answer: no.

Long answer:

• The Foundry community is not a modding community.
• The Foundry editor is not what the devs use to create missions.
• There is no tool that allows authors to import missions.
• The technical underpinnings of Cryptic and Foundry missions are significantly different. (This is why Cryptic can't easily export select Foundry missions to the console.)
• Foundry authors are not qualified to debug official missions or make changes to their structure.
• The changes a Foundry author might make to subjective elements (like mission structure) may not be appropriate to what that mission is, where it fits in a given arc, and where it fits more broadly in STO player progression (that all depends on Cryptic's priorities, not ours.)
  
• The Foundry community should not be given access to official mission content without full oversight and responsibilities to management.
• Foundry authors generally don't have the experience and skill set to make successful applications to Cryptic (it's a very competitive industry and we're coming in from all walks of life.)
• Working on official bug fixes means we can't make missions in what little time we have to dedicate to our hobby. The Foundry community is special because it exists outside of the main pipeline.

Easy alternative: just keep submitting bug reports on what you feel needs fixing.

Not every report gets a fix. That depends on a number of internal factors (ex. can they identify the exact cause, is someone available to fix the problem, is it ultimately worth fixing over other issues) and those won't always converge when you first report a problem. But they my line up in later dev cycles. It's up to players to keep technical issues affecting them on Cryptic's radar through the occasional, well detailed, and nicely stated bug report...and odd jab at Kael on Ten Forward Weekly (ie. a much better person to turn to if you're concerned about the state of specific mission bugs than the Foundry community. He can actually get results. )

thegreendragoon1

Yeah, unfortunately, missions created by the devs and missions inside the Foundry are fundamentally different things. Official missions are created in a separate program exported and loaded into the game as actual files (which are then patched into the game.) The Foundry on the other hand lives inside the game, editor and all. The Foundry is essentially a database of parameters which reference a set of pre-existing stock assets.

I think the best analogy would be to thing of all the missions and zones in the game as the different sections and rooms onboard the Enterprise. The Foundry exists inside the Holodeck. Yeah, you can make it look like Main Engineering, but it's still fundamentally different and wouldn't work as a substitute.