Right now, the main bug I've found in the foundry that's annoying me to no end, is the placement icons. Currently, they're all going somewhere off into the top left hand corner of the editor. I can't see them at all, and when I scroll in on the one map I've been working on, due to this, The biggest one, a romulan rock, covers the whole screen. Not sure what the problem is here either, but it definitely makes putting a map together a serious headache.
While I support this thread, more assets, or even a complete overhaul of the foundry. Right now, I'll... just take a fix for that.
Right now, the main bug I've found in the foundry that's annoying me to no end, is the placement icons. Currently, they're all going somewhere off into the top left hand corner of the editor. I can't see them at all, and when I scroll in on the one map I've been working on, due to this, The biggest one, a romulan rock, covers the whole screen. Not sure what the problem is here either, but it definitely makes putting a map together a serious headache.
While I support this thread, more assets, or even a complete overhaul of the foundry. Right now, I'll... just take a fix for that.
The asset will appear where you place it, but it's visual representation is offset from the map by a large margin. This is irritating but doesn't stop placement of assets, just makes them more difficult to get right first time. Hopefully this, and the ESD 2410 map preview CTD will along with inability to customise new characters will be right at the top of the next fix.
I know, I still work on the map itself. The offset here is rather weird as well. As I mentioned, it's some how linked with zooming in and out. I zoom out all the way, everything is off in the top left hand corner. I zoom in say a quarter of the way, the rock appears top left hand corner. Any more than that, and the rock is all I'll see, no matter where on the map I'm working.
And as you said, it's not impossible to place pieces. It just takes three to four times as long to get a piece placed correctly. Thankfully this is mainly on floor pieces, walls and such. Other details, the /loc trick still works.
My biggest problem with the Foundry is how hard it is to actually get anyone to try a mission you create. I created the start (the first two) episodes of my Bob From Accounting adventures, but wow, getting people to play it was practically impossible. At one point, I got so frustrated, I just left the game for about six months and did something else. Then, like always, I came back only to find out that the first one had been played a lot and comments left that were very supportive.
Nothing on part 2. To be honest, I'm not sure what happened to it because it's not even listed. This weekend, I'll go back into the editor and see what happened.
One thing that bothered me a lot about Foundry missions is that amount of work to get people to first play it. It's like writing a novel, publishing it on Amazon and then trying to hand out copies on every corner. Come to think of it, I think that's exactly how Amazon is.
Anyway, the previous experience has kind of soured me on continuing the series, even though people keep sending me emails asking when they're's going to be a Part 2 (there was, but again, it just disappeared).
Fleet Admiral Duane Gundrum, U.S.S. Merrimack
Fleet Admiral Ventaxa Proxmire, U.S.S. Shaka Walls Fell
Blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/?page_id=1990
Foundry series: Bob From Accounting & For the Sake of the Empire
My biggest problem with the Foundry is how hard it is to actually get anyone to try a mission you create. I created the start (the first two) episodes of my Bob From Accounting adventures, but wow, getting people to play it was practically impossible. At one point, I got so frustrated, I just left the game for about six months and did something else. Then, like always, I came back only to find out that the first one had been played a lot and comments left that were very supportive.
Nothing on part 2. To be honest, I'm not sure what happened to it because it's not even listed. This weekend, I'll go back into the editor and see what happened.
One thing that bothered me a lot about Foundry missions is that amount of work to get people to first play it. It's like writing a novel, publishing it on Amazon and then trying to hand out copies on every corner. Come to think of it, I think that's exactly how Amazon is.
Anyway, the previous experience has kind of soured me on continuing the series, even though people keep sending me emails asking when they're's going to be a Part 2 (there was, but again, it just disappeared).
I've had some luck by getting people from my fleet to play it, also by requesting reviews on the Foundry subforum.
"Great War! / And I cannot take more! / Great tour! / I keep on marching on / I play the great score / There will be no encore / Great War! / The War to End All Wars"
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Nothing on part 2. To be honest, I'm not sure what happened to it because it's not even listed. This weekend, I'll go back into the editor and see what happened.
During an auto republish (part of the process bringing us back from downtime) missions may fail to get through. Most of the time it's just because (and all you have to do is manually republish, I had to do that this time for ~2/3rds of mine) but sometimes there's a bug preventing the Foundry from bringing that mission back online. Check to see if you've used the ESD ground map (that's broken ATM) and if not you should be good to go just by republishing.
Bipedal mammal and senior Foundry author.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
So... Has this thread resulted in one single thing on Cryptic's end to be done to fix/improve the Foundry? We can drone on for weeks and months about what we find wrong with the system as it is, and what we think can make it better, and what we know good and well has to happen in order for it to be even a blip on PWE's priority radar. But unless there's something official stated, we might as well just be screaming into the wind.
So is this thread actually doing some good for the foundry?
In a word: no.
I just redownloaded the game for the first time in IIRC two years. And when I say "two years", I'm referring to a time I redownloaded the game for about half a week after an absence of several more years. I don't remember exactly, but I think it's been nearly half a decade since I played the game in earnest, and this is my first return to the official forums since that initial time (IIRC I left not long after the Romulan playable faction was first added, if that helps date things).
Here's the thing: threads exactly like this were a dime a dozen beck then. This is anything but a new conversation, and it has always been ignored.
The foundry was a big part of why I left. My mains were at cap, endgame was the empty hamster wheel it is in most MMOs and so I turned to foundry content. Loved the idea, and made the leap to making my own missions.
I never published a one. I had three I was actively building, one of which was planned to be a series, but the process was SO long and painful due to the state of the editor. But I was excited, I was into it. One day Crypic issued a content update that broke one of the maps I was making. I'd spent a week and half laboriously building a "hidden" shuttle campsite amidst desert rocks. spending hours upon hours positioning props to make it look believably "lived in". Came back after the patch to find all the baked-in rock formations on the map had been shuffled around, completely ruing all that work. I could spend another week rebuilding, but why bother if that too could get broken at any time without warning? What if it happened after publishing the mission? I'd seen that exact sort of thing tank other people's missions via a sudden spike in negative reviews.
Around the same time, all space maps all had their lighting effects broken. Maps where I'd worked hard to create a specific atmosphere were reduced to flat, even lighting that ignored even the basic direction of the sun. This couldn't be rebuilt at all, because entire features had been removed wholesale rather than merely changed.
I was crushed. I walked away from the Foundry, and soon after, the game.
Came back a few years later, checked on my old foundry projects, and found that not only was everything still broken, but even more stuff had been broken since. I could count the number of assets added in that time on one hand.
Only reason I'm back here now, typing this, is because I redownloaded the game to use the Foundry to make character portraits for a Star Trek P&P game I'll be DMing in a few months. Only to find the foundry down, which lead me here to find out if this was a standard post update downtime, or if Cryptic had finally given up and shuttered the foundry for good at some point while I was away.
The foundry has always been held together with duct tape and baling wire. It has always been falling apart faster than it gets fixed or added to. The community has always held onto the illusion that their shrinking band of enthusiasts can get players at large and thus Cryptic re-invested in the foundry, mostly by "promoting" the foundry primarily to a forum audience consisting of their own shrinking ranks.
I LOVE the idea of the foundry. I still really, really want it to be the thing it promised to be back in the day. As a Trek fan, I could spend an unhealthy amount of time with the game if it was. But there's literally no avenue to that happening. Cryptic isn't interested, has never been interested, and can't be made interested without the influences that literally can't exist without them already being interested (monetization or other changes to make player foundry interest a meaningful profit metric, much better official promotion, a major re-vamp of the mission browsing and search UI, etc.).
The rumors back in the day were that Cryptic's STO team was essentially a skeleton crew who had to spend all their combined time on new monetizable official content, to the extent that even major bug fixes for the main game were relegated to occasional lunch break work. This does not appear to have changed either. Even if a non-trivial number of that crew were very interested in the foundry, they didn't/don't have the time to spare for it without preexisting numbers showing it to be more profitable than the main content. And the main content is a story wrapper around a power-creep and collectible treadmill designed to sell zen store stuff, so that's big ask even if the foundry was tied into that economy, which it isn't.
The foundry adds content that keeps people playing.,. but foundry content is outside the base game's balance ecosystem, and thus does not even indirectly contribute to the cash shop economy. On a business level it's superfluous, especially if you barely have the staff/man hours to cover the stuff that actually does make money. The foundry could be monetized or integrated into the game economy, but with an understaffed team doing so would require a potentially suicidal diversion of resources.
My bad. I cleared the spam queue last night and basically restored ALL the eaten posts back to the forum. I posted about this in the Edit Monster thread. Again, apologies if it looks like folks are "spamming" threads suddenly. It's not their fault.
Star Trek Online Volunteer Community Moderator and Resident She-Wolf
Community Moderators are Unpaid Volunteers and NOT Employees of Gearbox/Cryptic
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
So... Has this thread resulted in one single thing on Cryptic's end to be done to fix/improve the Foundry? We can drone on for weeks and months about what we find wrong with the system as it is, and what we think can make it better, and what we know good and well has to happen in order for it to be even a blip on PWE's priority radar. But unless there's something official stated, we might as well just be screaming into the wind.
So is this thread actually doing some good for the foundry?
In a word: no.
I just redownloaded the game for the first time in IIRC two years. And when I say "two years", I'm referring to a time I redownloaded the game for about half a week after an absence of several more years. I don't remember exactly, but I think it's been nearly half a decade since I played the game in earnest, and this is my first return to the official forums since that initial time (IIRC I left not long after the Romulan playable faction was first added, if that helps date things).
Here's the thing: threads exactly like this were a dime a dozen beck then. This is anything but a new conversation, and it has always been ignored.
The foundry was a big part of why I left. My mains were at cap, endgame was the empty hamster wheel it is in most MMOs and so I turned to foundry content. Loved the idea, and made the leap to making my own missions.
I never published a one. I had three I was actively building, one of which was planned to be a series, but the process was SO long and painful due to the state of the editor. But I was excited, I was into it. One day Crypic issued a content update that broke one of the maps I was making. I'd spent a week and half laboriously building a "hidden" shuttle campsite amidst desert rocks. spending hours upon hours positioning props to make it look believably "lived in". Came back after the patch to find all the baked-in rock formations on the map had been shuffled around, completely ruing all that work. I could spend another week rebuilding, but why bother if that too could get broken at any time without warning? What if it happened after publishing the mission? I'd seen that exact sort of thing tank other people's missions via a sudden spike in negative reviews.
Around the same time, all space maps all had their lighting effects broken. Maps where I'd worked hard to create a specific atmosphere were reduced to flat, even lighting that ignored even the basic direction of the sun. This couldn't be rebuilt at all, because entire features had been removed wholesale rather than merely changed.
I was crushed. I walked away from the Foundry, and soon after, the game.
Came back a few years later, checked on my old foundry projects, and found that not only was everything still broken, but even more stuff had been broken since. I could count the number of assets added in that time on one hand.
Only reason I'm back here now, typing this, is because I redownloaded the game to use the Foundry to make character portraits for a Star Trek P&P game I'll be DMing in a few months. Only to find the foundry down, which lead me here to find out if this was a standard post update downtime, or if Cryptic had finally given up and shuttered the foundry for good at some point while I was away.
The foundry has always been held together with duct tape and baling wire. It has always been falling apart faster than it gets fixed or added to. The community has always held onto the illusion that their shrinking band of enthusiasts can get players at large and thus Cryptic re-invested in the foundry, mostly by "promoting" the foundry primarily to a forum audience consisting of their own shrinking ranks.
I LOVE the idea of the foundry. I still really, really want it to be the thing it promised to be back in the day. As a Trek fan, I could spend an unhealthy amount of time with the game if it was. But there's literally no avenue to that happening. Cryptic isn't interested, has never been interested, and can't be made interested without the influences that literally can't exist without them already being interested (monetization or other changes to make player foundry interest a meaningful profit metric, much better official promotion, a major re-vamp of the mission browsing and search UI, etc.).
The rumors back in the day were that Cryptic's STO team was essentially a skeleton crew who had to spend all their combined time on new monetizable official content, to the extent that even major bug fixes for the main game were relegated to occasional lunch break work. This does not appear to have changed either. Even if a non-trivial number of that crew were very interested in the foundry, they didn't/don't have the time to spare for it without preexisting numbers showing it to be more profitable than the main content. And the main content is a story wrapper around a power-creep and collectible treadmill designed to sell zen store stuff, so that's big ask even if the foundry was tied into that economy, which it isn't.
The foundry adds content that keeps people playing.,. but foundry content is outside the base game's balance ecosystem, and thus does not even indirectly contribute to the cash shop economy. On a business level it's superfluous, especially if you barely have the staff/man hours to cover the stuff that actually does make money. The foundry could be monetized or integrated into the game economy, but with an understaffed team doing so would require a potentially suicidal diversion of resources.
Well said.
Are you listening PWE?
This is another customer lost due to lack of even basic maintenance for the Foundry - how many more does he represent?
PWE just posted that 2018 was the second best year they had for STO. Probably could have been the best if more customers had stayed because the Foundry was keeping the game fresh for them...
Comments
While I support this thread, more assets, or even a complete overhaul of the foundry. Right now, I'll... just take a fix for that.
I know, I still work on the map itself. The offset here is rather weird as well. As I mentioned, it's some how linked with zooming in and out. I zoom out all the way, everything is off in the top left hand corner. I zoom in say a quarter of the way, the rock appears top left hand corner. Any more than that, and the rock is all I'll see, no matter where on the map I'm working.
And as you said, it's not impossible to place pieces. It just takes three to four times as long to get a piece placed correctly. Thankfully this is mainly on floor pieces, walls and such. Other details, the /loc trick still works.
Nothing on part 2. To be honest, I'm not sure what happened to it because it's not even listed. This weekend, I'll go back into the editor and see what happened.
One thing that bothered me a lot about Foundry missions is that amount of work to get people to first play it. It's like writing a novel, publishing it on Amazon and then trying to hand out copies on every corner. Come to think of it, I think that's exactly how Amazon is.
Anyway, the previous experience has kind of soured me on continuing the series, even though people keep sending me emails asking when they're's going to be a Part 2 (there was, but again, it just disappeared).
Fleet Admiral Ventaxa Proxmire, U.S.S. Shaka Walls Fell
Blog: http://www.sarbonn.com/?page_id=1990
Foundry series: Bob From Accounting & For the Sake of the Empire
I've had some luck by getting people from my fleet to play it, also by requesting reviews on the Foundry subforum.
— Sabaton, "Great War"
Check out https://unitedfederationofpla.net/s/
During an auto republish (part of the process bringing us back from downtime) missions may fail to get through. Most of the time it's just because (and all you have to do is manually republish, I had to do that this time for ~2/3rds of mine) but sometimes there's a bug preventing the Foundry from bringing that mission back online. Check to see if you've used the ESD ground map (that's broken ATM) and if not you should be good to go just by republishing.
Notable missions: Apex [AEI], Gemini [SSF], Trident [AEI], Evolution's Smile [SSF], Transcendence
Looking for something new to play? I've started building Foundry missions again in visual novel form!
In a word: no.
I just redownloaded the game for the first time in IIRC two years. And when I say "two years", I'm referring to a time I redownloaded the game for about half a week after an absence of several more years. I don't remember exactly, but I think it's been nearly half a decade since I played the game in earnest, and this is my first return to the official forums since that initial time (IIRC I left not long after the Romulan playable faction was first added, if that helps date things).
Here's the thing: threads exactly like this were a dime a dozen beck then. This is anything but a new conversation, and it has always been ignored.
The foundry was a big part of why I left. My mains were at cap, endgame was the empty hamster wheel it is in most MMOs and so I turned to foundry content. Loved the idea, and made the leap to making my own missions.
I never published a one. I had three I was actively building, one of which was planned to be a series, but the process was SO long and painful due to the state of the editor. But I was excited, I was into it. One day Crypic issued a content update that broke one of the maps I was making. I'd spent a week and half laboriously building a "hidden" shuttle campsite amidst desert rocks. spending hours upon hours positioning props to make it look believably "lived in". Came back after the patch to find all the baked-in rock formations on the map had been shuffled around, completely ruing all that work. I could spend another week rebuilding, but why bother if that too could get broken at any time without warning? What if it happened after publishing the mission? I'd seen that exact sort of thing tank other people's missions via a sudden spike in negative reviews.
Around the same time, all space maps all had their lighting effects broken. Maps where I'd worked hard to create a specific atmosphere were reduced to flat, even lighting that ignored even the basic direction of the sun. This couldn't be rebuilt at all, because entire features had been removed wholesale rather than merely changed.
I was crushed. I walked away from the Foundry, and soon after, the game.
Came back a few years later, checked on my old foundry projects, and found that not only was everything still broken, but even more stuff had been broken since. I could count the number of assets added in that time on one hand.
Only reason I'm back here now, typing this, is because I redownloaded the game to use the Foundry to make character portraits for a Star Trek P&P game I'll be DMing in a few months. Only to find the foundry down, which lead me here to find out if this was a standard post update downtime, or if Cryptic had finally given up and shuttered the foundry for good at some point while I was away.
The foundry has always been held together with duct tape and baling wire. It has always been falling apart faster than it gets fixed or added to. The community has always held onto the illusion that their shrinking band of enthusiasts can get players at large and thus Cryptic re-invested in the foundry, mostly by "promoting" the foundry primarily to a forum audience consisting of their own shrinking ranks.
I LOVE the idea of the foundry. I still really, really want it to be the thing it promised to be back in the day. As a Trek fan, I could spend an unhealthy amount of time with the game if it was. But there's literally no avenue to that happening. Cryptic isn't interested, has never been interested, and can't be made interested without the influences that literally can't exist without them already being interested (monetization or other changes to make player foundry interest a meaningful profit metric, much better official promotion, a major re-vamp of the mission browsing and search UI, etc.).
The rumors back in the day were that Cryptic's STO team was essentially a skeleton crew who had to spend all their combined time on new monetizable official content, to the extent that even major bug fixes for the main game were relegated to occasional lunch break work. This does not appear to have changed either. Even if a non-trivial number of that crew were very interested in the foundry, they didn't/don't have the time to spare for it without preexisting numbers showing it to be more profitable than the main content. And the main content is a story wrapper around a power-creep and collectible treadmill designed to sell zen store stuff, so that's big ask even if the foundry was tied into that economy, which it isn't.
The foundry adds content that keeps people playing.,. but foundry content is outside the base game's balance ecosystem, and thus does not even indirectly contribute to the cash shop economy. On a business level it's superfluous, especially if you barely have the staff/man hours to cover the stuff that actually does make money. The foundry could be monetized or integrated into the game economy, but with an understaffed team doing so would require a potentially suicidal diversion of resources.
Views and Opinions May Not Reflect the Views and Opinions of Gearbox/Cryptic
Moderation Problems/Issues? Please contact the Community Manager
Terms of Service / Community Rules and Policies / FCT
Facebook / Twitter / Twitch
Well said.
Are you listening PWE?
This is another customer lost due to lack of even basic maintenance for the Foundry - how many more does he represent?
PWE just posted that 2018 was the second best year they had for STO. Probably could have been the best if more customers had stayed because the Foundry was keeping the game fresh for them...
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions