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Ten Forward Weekly 8/18/21
somtaawkhar
Member Posts: 10,222 Arc User
- New infinity locbox ship: Mars class
- Red alert was not intended to have the X upgrade token
- Kael copy pasted the full event blog
- Thomas implemented the wrong load screen because they have only been doing the longer version recently
- Will look into it
- Thomas likes the updates version of the Cerritos from S2 of Lower Decks
- Mars class is a pilot escort
- Has custom pilot maneuver animations like Book's ship does
- STO lore from Jeremy Randall for the ship was that they tested non dilithium based FTL methods on the ship, which is what the fins on the nacelles are for
- Comes with the 32nd century weapons
- Experimental weapon: subspace pocket projector.
- Has a left/right firing cadence. Was tricky to implement, but now that they have it, it might be used on future ships
- Ties into Jeremy's lore about using subspace bubbles to move around using less dilthium.
- Uses this tech to fire them out at enemies. Deals damage and slows enemies
- Console: Subspace cavitation matrix. Creates subspace pocket in front of the ship allowing it to fly more swiftly/move better. Pops bubble into shockwave when a valid foe is in front of you.
- Nacelles move forward to pop the bubble like a crab pinch(crab comparisons were made frequently in this video)
- Weston put extra work into the ship to allow it to use pilot maneuvers when in bubble mode
- Normally this sort of thing is turned off with various consoles, but they want to do it more in the future
- Starship trait: Improved Lock Trajectory
- Recharge time of lock trajectory set to zero. Once per 5 sec, when damaging foe with energy weapons in forward arc reduce recharge time of rapid fire and scatter volley by 20%. Reduce recharge time of BOFF abilities by 5%
- Have not stopped putting out zen store ships. New Zen store ships are coming sooner then we think.
- Temporal Recruit update coming sooner then we think.
- Andre Emerson was the one who brought the recruit events back. Thought it odd they spent so much time on them only to not keep using them
- Experimental weapon does kinetic weapon
- Experimental weapons were designed not to use any of the cardinal weapon types so people couldn't massively power them up via consoles, and to make them not perfectly synergize so they could make them weird/cool in their own right
- Discovery characters are not being integrated into temporal recruits. STO is a theme park so they want TOS land and DSC land to stay separate until you get to the modern day. Would make it harder to run Temporal Recruit as they would have to find places to put all the recruit objects from the TOS missions into the DSC missions
- Might make a DSC recruit event in the future.
- Thomas wants to do a "TMP land"
- Thomas wants a "view your ship in drydock" cutscene ala TMP. Would require more software support for the game to be more aware of the size of the ships
- Kael mentions he cant talk about, and may not to for literal years, what he was tweeting about in regards to the thing Thomas was getting so excited about. Kael, Al, and Bill jumped abut how excited Thomas would be about it when someone brought it up to the point Thomas went "maybe if you could just let me f*** talk!"
- The removed Klingon War missions are near the top of the list of things they want to remaster and bring back
- The thing Thomas wants still may not happen, but they are talking about it
- Kael really wanted to reply to the "Cryptic has forgotten about dil sinks" meme on Reddit about how he wishes they could implement things as fast as we think they could
- More news on dil sinks coming very soon. Jeremy writing a blog on it.
- Dil sinks take a bit more time because they are sensitive economic features, and more people need to review them to ensure they aren't making stupid decisions.
- Unlikely they will redo disliked shield visuals. More likely to just make a new shield visuals so that people who do like the old ones can keep them. Same thing they did with hairs
- A complex solution is being developed for dil sinks, as are short term dil sinks.
- Upcoming sink is a long term sink, since it doesn't go away, but isn't expected to be a major sink.
- Vanity shield sink came out so fast because Jeremy had been working on it beforehand, unrelated to the dil crash.
- Repeat of unlikely to get ship bridges
- There is some under the hood issues regarding opening more bridges to other factions. Bridges are designed with the NPCs set to what they think your faction should be, so if a KDF officer goes onto a Fed bridge all the NPCs, including BOFFs, will attack you
- Other issue is that bridge sets were set up to be assigned on a per ship basis, and there are 700ish playable ships in the game
- Recently did under the hood changes to registries. The way that system was originally set up made it hard to add any non default registries to ships. Bridges would need a similar udpate to fix the issue
- T2-T5 ship consoles are unlikely to be updated to have passive bonuses, since that is something that to be a focus on T6 ship consoles. Will udpate them in other ways if the console has a reason to be re-released, like with legendary ships.
- Bridges are considered "arcane knowledge", and weren't set up to be a focus of gameplay. Hard to justify making them because people don't use them much for gameplay. Bridges in the past have sold poorly. Years ago when they did an udpate to the BOFF system to give ship interiors unique BOFF assignments, the overwhelming feedback was negative, and people didn't want to go into their ships to do them. So they changed those assignments to be available anywhere
- They do admit that the modern STO audience may be more into ship bridges then what the data they usually rely on may indicate
- State that if they were building STO from the ground up right now they would do player housing on your ship. be it personal quarters, or more customizable ready room. Doing it now would require months of work that would take away from other things
- The more customization you have in this sort of setting makes it harder to do compelling cutscenes/content. Even the wide range on the height slider can make it difficult for cutscenes since they can't always guarantee that it will be focused on your character in the right way. Having customizable bridges would make doing cutscenes on bridges difficult without a whole other camera system
- This is also why they have no way of doing content inside people's ship outside of the ready room. There is no "library" of data for all the different bridges/interiors in the game to build the interactive content around
- Infinity lockbox update coming next week. No other updates besides the ship
- USS Lantree variant of the Miranda class(a Miranda without the roll bar) would require making a whole new blank mission pod(since the mission pod has needed hard point like deflector/weapons) and then have those hardpoints moved to other parts of the ship to get working. Which is why they haven't done it yet.
- Part of the problem of these simple projects being harder then they seem stems from is that when a dev goes into a simple project they see it as simple, and solve it as a simple problem, not seeing how this could cause future issues down the line because it doesn't seem like that would be a problem later.
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Post edited by baddmoonrizin on
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It would be great if the process had the abstraction that some of the newer engines have for constructing scenes (which an interior is) so that they could take something like the standard old full interior map skeletons and automatically reskin them in a different style (like say taking the Federation interior and clicking a button and it switch to the same map framework but with Dyson set dressings instead), but that is not possible from what was shown.
It does not even look like their libraries are set up in a way that would make player-rezable, player-moveable furniture possible without a lot of reworking, the fixed position trophy stuff is probably as close as it gets. Whoever designed the system in the first place apparently ignored a lot of the software design patterns that are used more often than not nowadays (which is again not that surprising, especially for a game where player building was not a central focus).
Could be interesting.
Meh, they should have done this already. Lots of ships have very uninteresting consoles, even when they have a legendary version already. Think of ships like the Intrepid with its single-torpedo shockwave thing or the Galaxy's confusion console, or the Galaxy's and Odyssey's separation consoles.
These posts you apear to be stealing takes hours to create and if your not the original person then that person deserves credit.
Not sure what this means.
Or what this refers to?
We don't really have that many cutscenes that involves our characters and their ship's bridges. The only one that quickly comes to mind is the one with Sela in one of the Iconian War episodes.
Would be fun if we had more of those. Besides great speeches and conversations, the memorable moments from Trek movies and series are things like when Worf appears in First Contact on the burning bridge of the Defiant, Picard laying down his pips in Insurrection or him ordering Deanna to ram the Scimitar. Small scenes with a lot of drama centred around a person or two. That's what could be interesting, not so much blowing up another ten flying, abstract objects again, cause we do that all the time.
Such cinematic content could be a great - and perhaps also relatively easy and cheap - way of adding some dramatic scenes, thereby making the content more lively, our characters more real and giving the player character a greater role in content besides shooting stuff, reading and pressing F. Voices could be a problem though as stated previously by the devs, I must admit.
> To be honest, the "housing" thing could be done as the captain's quarters or the holodeck... some space that is never used for a cutscene, not the bridge.
Actually they addressed that specifically and said they only use the briefing room for cutscenes or missions because it is kind of a permanent non-customizable space. And yes therefore if they would have made or revisited “housing” It would only be like the ready room because of that reason.
They also cited the unpopularity of doff assignments only accessible from the ship as a big reason for abandoning the bridge system. I do remember gripping about that—but I do not remember it being as vehement as they made it out to have been. I think part of the real problem with bridges at the time is that they were as expensive as getting a ship—and the ship was just more useful. Of course now, I sort of get the reason for pricing them so high is they take as much if not more work than making the ship.
For some reason the Reddit thread showed 14 hours before this thread which made me think it was a different person.
The ones we do have mostly use existing empty sets (like the last mission in the TOS arc using the TOS bridge or talking to Kurland in Boldly They Rode using the Belfast bridge) or tailor edited for that particular cutscene if it is a battle damaged version. The reason they could use them was because they weren't customized. They were pure stock sets with no changes whatsoever. But those are also hardcoded to be selected for use. The game can't see that you're flying the Kelvin Connie and plug in the Kelvin Connie bridge because the cutscenes are basically pre-recorded scenes. They aren't dynamic and able to identify what bridge you have on a ship.
> How many cutscenes do we have on our bridges though?
> The ones we do have mostly use existing empty sets (like the last mission in the TOS arc using the TOS bridge or talking to Kurland in Boldly They Rode using the Belfast bridge) or tailor edited for that particular cutscene if it is a battle damaged version. The reason they could use them was because they weren't customized. They were pure stock sets with no changes whatsoever. But those are also hardcoded to be selected for use. The game can't see that you're flying the Kelvin Connie and plug in the Kelvin Connie bridge because the cutscenes are basically pre-recorded scenes. They aren't dynamic and able to identify what bridge you have on a ship.
No cutscenes are on your bridge (only on NPC bridges) except in the tutorials where they know what bridge you have.
What part of that refers to is that apparently, every cutscene they do is likely done with a certain character height in mind. With aliens though, they can be taller than the default humanoid height, so, cutscenes may look weird when they get played.
They don't typically do cutscenes with a starship bridge of the player character's ship, mostly because said cutscenes would have to be set for EACH bridge that they have, and visually, there are some ships that use a stock alien bridge, and that would look Horrible compared to the rest of the game because it's an older bridge.
I lol'd because I'm reminded of a series of videos being done by an FF14 player called "Mad because Small", and he purposefully picked Lalafel, the shortest available race, and made said Lalafel as short as possible.
So they were short-tempered?
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
True, the particular "button" system I was talking about was only available on the newest engine(s) (in fact it uses some technology and libraries that Pixar released under Creative Commons only about four years ago) and is almost certainly something the STO devs would not be able to implement on the current Cryptic engine. I was not suggesting that it would be, I mentioned it for contrast to illustrate how far game tech has advanced so expecting STO to do the latest, greatest things because some newer game does is unrealistic.
Also, reading back through what I wrote I can see where you might think I meant it as a button accessible by the player, but it is something for environment and story devs, not players so if there turned out to be a problem they could tweak it much quicker and easier than recreating the same map with different dressings by hand.
The demo I saw of the system took a little while to redress the scene and they talked about how it was also implementable to dynamically generate the different versions while spinning up the scene behind the loading screen as long as care was taken to have the character first appear in a smaller simpler area of the map while it finishes the process outside of that landing room while the character goes through dialog or whatever. Also, with the precise, efficient library structure multiple pre-built-and-tweaked versions are easier and more compact to store for scenes that do not fit the dynamic generation criteria well.
Such a system, if it was usable by STO (again, not something I expect to be possible) it would have allowed standard scene skeletons (like ship interiors) to be made once and dressed in numerous styles dynamically.
As for the player-rezable, player-movable furniture and other usual player housing stuff we are actually saying the same thing more or less, the system has to be designed with it in mind from the start or the results of shoehorning it in are likely to be disappointing. Craft-oriented and building games (like Second Life, ArcheAge and BDO) and most survival games such as Life is Feudal and Conan are built with that in mind from the beginning, so it works for them but would not work as well, if at all, in STO.
STO probably uses blind animation where all the characters are animated independently (the game is about the right age for that). Most modern moviemaking engines and a few newer game engines have more intelligent animation action scripting, like the ability to sense and track the eyes of dialog participants and adjust the animations so they actually look at each other instead of just pontificating in the general direction of where they are supposed to be.
#LegalizeAwoo
A normie goes "Oh, what's this?"
An otaku goes "UwU, what's this?"
A furry goes "OwO, what's this?"
A werewolf goes "Awoo, what's this?"
"It's nothing personal, I just don't feel like I've gotten to know a person until I've sniffed their crotch."
"We said 'no' to Mr. Curiosity. We're not home. Curiosity is not welcome, it is not to be invited in. Curiosity...is bad. It gets you in trouble, it gets you killed, and more importantly...it makes you poor!"
And you're not in different instances based on phased elements either. While I'm not a programmer, I think the Phasing is client side. You're on the same map as everyone else, but the client recognizes player progression and checks off who should be where on the map for said player character.
That's interesting, the left-right alternating fire. Maybe that'll also allow them to let our ships fire phasers the way Galaxy's and Sovereigns did. Like when the Enterprise E fired on the Borg Cube.
I'd be fine with them just making the cutscene for one standard Federation bridge, one Klingon one and one Romulan one.
Like, pick the Galaxy bridge for Feds and make a cutscene with our characters featuring in it. If the scene is interesting, I wouldn't mind that it's not really my bridge when I'm flying an aquatic carrier for example. It would actually improve my immersion as I've long wished for special ships to use standard faction-bridges. Having a cutscene with my character on such a standard bridge (like, again, the Galaxy one) would help in that regard.
Agreed.
I hope they'll still get around doing that sometime for the ships that have been made legendary already. Cause apparently they do think the legendary treatment is a valid reason for updating such consoles.
I actually almost skipped reading the majority of this thread just to say something similar. When have they ever included our bridge in a cut scene? I'm reminded of a Game Designer who once said that people who make games never actually play their own games.
Those words have never felt more true than in recent years. STO is not the only culprit in this, you see it everywhere. Design decisions made by people who have no idea what it's like to play the game they're working on, or even what's in it.