Ten Forward Weekly 9/12/23

protoneous

From: https://reddit.com/r/sto/comments/16i59s2/ten_forward_weekly_91223/ Credit to: https://reddit.com/user/TheSajuukKhar/

• Kael has already sent Cryptic the message that players are asking for a moopsy pet
  
  
• Mauricio is responsible for the recent quality pass on the Klingon flagship. He talked to Thomas about what he did with the Oddy remaster in terms of what fidelity, and how far, they would take the Bortasqu remaster.
• An earlier version of the remaster was considered too smooth by the art team, and they asked Mauricio make it more angular.
• The Bortasqu remaster has so many details that Mauricio had to get a different importer tool to get it into the engine.
• This new importer was developed for the new Borg stuff, which likewise had so many details they couldn't import it into the engine normally. The tool is temporary until they nail down larger changes to the engine since they are currently limited on how many vertices they can import in a single file.
• There's a small reference to Jabba the Hut's temple on the top of the Bortasqu.
  
  
• Into the Hive has been disabled on PC temporarily due to an issue caused by changes made by Nick Duguid(he admits to it on the stream)
• Part of the basis behind the Borg updates they did for this release was that they wanted it all to be able to be applied to all past Borg stuff, since the Borg assets were some of the oldest assets in the game currently. They didn't want there to be this new Borg environment in the new mission, and old Borg environment in the old missions/TFOs. This meant however Nick had to work within nearly 15 years worth of artists adding to the Borg environment kit, including different file names, skill levels, etc.
• Nick has made 1,000 pieces for this new Borg kit, which he started working on in February.
• Issues he ran into included the new Borg Alcove being made of several different pieces, while the old one was a single model. He had to combine all the pieces, export it as a single object(which is where the new importer came into play) and save it down in a combined form, and save it using the old filenames, to get it to auto propagate replace the old Borg alcove. This is where several things broke, leading to into the Hive being disabled.
• All the mirror Borg stuff was lighting and material changes, which didn't get done until the last month. Nick spent most of his time working on "Prime" Borg stuff.
• Into the Hive was the map he used to show what he wanted from the lighting and environment changes they would apply to older Borg maps, since many of them needed lighting passes.
• Mirror Borg map didn't have proper lighting for most of its development. The devs just used a big overhead light in the map too see what they were doing.
• Most people think of Borg interiors as green and black, but Nick points out they have a lot more colors then that, and he wanted to add those, as well as replicate the hot, grimy, gross looking interiors they had in Voyager. Borg Cubes are supposed to have an interior temp of nearly 100F, and he wanted it to make it feel like you want to open a window in a Borg interior.
• In the Into the Hive update they showed off on stream thy mention they didn't touch any of the geometry of the map. Its all lighting, atmosphere, skyfile, changes.
• Into the Hive, Infected Ground, the Borg section in "Mindscape" and Khitomer Ground, have all gotten some lighting/atmosphere updates. Nick hopes to do more in the future. Nick spent two days doing minor prop/lighting/skyfile changes on Infected ground.
• Scot Boyd mentions that they don't really check how things look in lighting 1.0 anymore. Saying its basically "gone". They would rather put all their effort into making their stuff look the best it can be, in the new lighting system, then spend time trying to make it work with an old lighting system which can take like a week's worth of work to light in.
• When doing lighting for the mirror Borg map they used cool white spotlights to draw the player around. Nick felt the sickly yellow color in normal Borg was their thing, so wanted this cool white to contrast the red in Mirror Borg interiors.
• Scot wanted to remove one of the old Borg consoles and replace it with something new, but Nick instead revamped it to something Scot likes. The "bubble" interface seem on the consoles comes from what was seen in Voyager.
• Some of the Borg changes will propagate to Defera if its an object used in both Interior and exterior maps. Nick hopes they will get the time to redo Borg exterior map pieces at some point, which he describes as a whole different beast than interior stuff.
  
  
• Ryan, one of the designers, is the one who pushed for all the phaser blasts and dying crewmen you can hear in the Jefferies tube section, as well as many of the other environmental designs in that section.
• Environment artists typically ask for tighter/more confined spaces, but its usually design that pushes for larger areas since they need those for fights. So having a designer propose this was something of a reversal.
• Gianna is the artist who did the Jefferies Tube section. She took the wide selection of greeble assets the game had, and some bought online, and laid them out in various ways that could be used in a variety of different spaces, in a number of different combinations, to create these panels that were combined with the Fed kit Thomas built in the last few years.
• Gianna and Scot mention there's going to be something about the door labels in the tubes section that's worth replaying to see in a future update.
• The Cardassian officer who gets pulled by the Borg in the tube section is part of something Cryptic is trying to do more of, where they create more story beats without using a cutscene, like the hologram moments in V'ger with Wesley's past.
• The grating used in the tubes section is the same kind of freezer spacer grating using in TNG onward.
• Amelia, one of the character artists, did the new Borg body costumes, while Ian did stuff with the new hand attachment prosthetics.

fleetcaptain5

It's nice to know that the older content is going to get some visual updates as well. (Though there are some issues - on the Khitomer ground map, enemies and loot drops tend to become invisible until you drag around your screen.)

I like those older missions. They required teamwork and the larger size of the maps made them more enjoyable than some of the newer missions, which are usually finished much quicker and whose objectives generally result in your captain standing around and waiting for enemies to come in endless - and, therefore, rather meaningless - waves. Instead of being on the move, being focussed on the next objective and charging into the next room where enemies are waiting for you instead.

In those older missions, it really felt like you were trying to accomplish something, constantly moving towards a certain goal and breaking through enemy defences to get there - instead of just being reduced to a security escort, who is only there to protect a NPC or wait until some crystal has done its job.

postagepaid

The jefferies tube dangler would have been better triggered off the player rather than relying on a slow walking NPC eventually arriving. They're already in sight so should have had a voice over asking for help then as you get close they get pulled down or even have them pulled down midway as you hit a prompt to rescue.

Bigger dramatic impact than stand about, have a cup of tea and some chitchat while waiting for harry to trigger their demise.

saurializard

Kael has already sent Cryptic the message that players are asking for a moopsy pet

LD watchers now want:
RL Moopsy plushie.
STO moopsy pet.

The moopsy is free ( and unleashed on the Internet)!