I can kinda see them trying to revamp the Exeter to be a bit more in line with the current 25th Century style.
I am pretty sure they already did that with the Exeter Refit. It has non-typical nacelles but that is easily fixed by swapping them for the Sovereign style nacelles off the Excalibur. The saucer has a 25th century style bridge superstructure and other 25th century details and even the secondary hull does not look too out of place for that era. It even comes with the 25th century livery as standard.
Of course, the Exeter Refit is a legendary and therefore priced completely out of the range of most F2P players who do buy things and I am not sure if it qualifies for one of the campaign ship tickets (I suspect not), so something similar in the cstore (or maybe regular premium boxed) might not be a bad idea.
generative ai for npcs in new battle zones or missions. Maybe opened up deep space for Star Trek’s intended purpose of learning and exploration. Maybe they could implement generative ai to create a deep space sector block that is ever changing and manages its self and create its own unique events missions and dangers that traveling players could encounter and experience. With more interactive contacts, npcs and npcs ships.
Npcs ships that let you defeat them in other manners such as they retreat, they surrender or ram their ship into yours or self destruct.
Retired Rear Admiral-Jay Maverick-
Known simply as -Maverick-
Klingons should Beware of Maverick.
Maverick loves a fight and tends to be victorious even as the underdog.
He has an aptitude for tactics,guerrilla warfare and security.
"United Federation of Planets"
12th Fleet - Intelligence Division "Khalija" - Alpha Group
Not on Current Assignment.-On Retirement leave at Leach Lake in Minnesota
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,681Community Moderator
generative ai for npcs in new battle zones or missions. Maybe opened up deep space for Star Trek’s intended purpose of learning and exploration. Maybe they could implement generative ai to create a deep space sector block that is ever changing and manages its self and create its own unique events missions and dangers that traveling players could encounter and experience. With more interactive contacts, npcs and npcs ships.
Npcs ships that let you defeat them in other manners such as they retreat, they surrender or ram their ship into yours or self destruct.
A: Who is voicing these contacts?
B: As mentioned in another thread, STO isn't set up for Procedural Generation, and the old Genesis System had problems such as repetitive missions and even spawning enemy groups you NEED to kill in ground missions... under the map so you can't.
C: Certain missions already do this with disabling or driving off hostile ships instead of just destroying them. And some Mirror Borg Spheres try to do suicide attacks that you can try to evade.
I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite colored text = mod mode
generative ai for npcs in new battle zones or missions. Maybe opened up deep space for Star Trek’s intended purpose of learning and exploration. Maybe they could implement generative ai to create a deep space sector block that is ever changing and manages its self and create its own unique events missions and dangers that traveling players could encounter and experience. With more interactive contacts, npcs and npcs ships.
Npcs ships that let you defeat them in other manners such as they retreat, they surrender or ram their ship into yours or self destruct.
A: Who is voicing these contacts?
B: As mentioned in another thread, STO isn't set up for Procedural Generation, and the old Genesis System had problems such as repetitive missions and even spawning enemy groups you NEED to kill in ground missions... under the map so you can't.
C: Certain missions already do this with disabling or driving off hostile ships instead of just destroying them. And some Mirror Borg Spheres try to do suicide attacks that you can try to evade.
If they were to somehow code in AI they could use AI text to speech for the 'A' item with a few seed voices and an Auto-Tune-like pitch change function or whatever so the npcs (and even player-character voices) could be all different from each other. They could also use a more modern AI system to generate content with machine-side emergent behavior (like Defiance had in a limited way).
Unfortunately, such a system can be extremely tricky to create (or even adapt off-the-shelf versions) and requires specialized skills to pull off without it being an incredible mess, especially when trying to retrofit it into an old program never designed with it in mind, so it is unlikely to ever happen.
And even if they did decide to do it, it would probably take several years to set up, especially since the map building and other tools are so primitive and manual that they would have to sort out every graphic element in the game and put it into an organized structure (currently they are all scattered around in individual files on hard drives with no particular order to them) that the AI could understand.
There was a Ten Forward episode (sometime during the Year of the Klingon stuff iirc) dedicated to showing how the maps were done (though I do not have time to search for it again at the moment) and the tools the devs have to use are in some ways more primitive and static than the sim building tools in Second Life which is probably why the Genesis System failed so spectacularly and explains why content creation is so slow.
If they could get some more engine people in the team so they have the capacity to make more improvements to it and the content creation tools that go with it while still riding herd on the backlog of bugs it would be ideal and be a cost savings in the long run (especially if most or all of that backend stuff can be used in the other two games as well), but I seriously doubt that will happen either (though the tailor bug that somehow migrated from Neverwinter could be a sign that they are making some minor moves towards consolidating some parts of the engine versions between the games, which would in theory make maintenance easier).
Someone has clearly never read the results of generative "AI". It'd make the Third Borg Dynasty look like the height of Star Trek storytelling.
Don't know what I mean? The latest example is the script "written" for the disastrous Willy Wonka - pardon me, Willy "McDuff" - attraction in Glasgow recently. It can be read at Gizmodo, and contains such deathless lines as:
Willy McDuff: And let’s not forget our secret inventions—the soup-flavored jelly beans designed to keep the wee ones clean, hot and spicy beans that... (lowers his voice) attract the birds. (Winks) That’s a story for another day, or perhaps a question for your parents.
(The audience chuckles, appreciating the playful innuendo.)
Willy McDuff: Ah, and my favorite—the Boogerberry Bean, freshly made from Grandpa’s old crusty hanky. A taste that’s... well, let’s just say, uniquely exquisite.
Someone has clearly never read the results of generative "AI". It'd make the Third Borg Dynasty look like the height of Star Trek storytelling.
Don't know what I mean? The latest example is the script "written" for the disastrous Willy Wonka - pardon me, Willy "McDuff" - attraction in Glasgow recently. It can be read at Gizmodo, and contains such deathless lines as:
Willy McDuff: And let’s not forget our secret inventions—the soup-flavored jelly beans designed to keep the wee ones clean, hot and spicy beans that... (lowers his voice) attract the birds. (Winks) That’s a story for another day, or perhaps a question for your parents.
(The audience chuckles, appreciating the playful innuendo.)
Willy McDuff: Ah, and my favorite—the Boogerberry Bean, freshly made from Grandpa’s old crusty hanky. A taste that’s... well, let’s just say, uniquely exquisite.
(Yes, the audience responses are scripted too.)
True, generative AI of that sort tends to get very weird very quickly. IBM tested out a chatbot on Twitter that emulated a well-mannered teenage girl and at first it was doing fairly well but the team was shocked when they checked in on it the next day and it sounded like a rabble-rouser for the Third Reich. Appalling, if mildly amusing. And sure, they can be restrained to some degree, but to work at all they have to be a sort of echo chamber because they don't actually understand what they are saying.
AI is more useful on the back end in the form of tools that take care of the dull repetitive and painstaking parts of scenario creation and allow the creative people to concentrate on the actually creative part of the job more. Some engines (and no, I am not suggesting porting to a new engine, this is just for illustration), especially the newer Unreal versions, have those AI driven toolsets that will take placed items and a relatively sketchy map and generate a close-to-final look for it all for instance along with making tweaking the results by the dev easier.
Last time I looked there were open-source projects working on similar systems that can be dropped into other games (though as I said before, it is best if the game in question was designed in an organized way, something STO scenario assets are not so it may not be practical here).
The AI text reader technology available for games and whatnot does work (Microsoft Edge just shifted to a very lifelike-sounding system for instance), though I am not sure if the overhead would be too much for the game. On the downside though is the fact that text reading voice generation is badly hogtied by overly broad speculative patents and copyrights similar to the way VR was in the 1990s up until fairly recently so it is nearly impossible to do anything with it without paying often substantial royalties of some sort to one or more third parties, so the free versions tend to be flat and machinelike.
Gamplay adaptive AI has to be carefully thought out so it doesn't overwhelm the players or go off and do something really bizarre that is not helpful to playing the game.
For instance, the (mildly) adaptive AI in Defiance had a good balance and functioned surprisingly well for its time though there were still the occasional underground mob spawns and pathing errors that would sometimes keep some of the enemy trapped in the wrong part of the map. It had emergent behaviors such as units "knew" the faction they were in and it was not unusual to run across two mobs from factions hostile to each other fighting if they got too close to each other.
Players with lower-level characters could sometimes take advantage of the situation by luring one of the tankier mobs (the bigger Hellbugs were good for this since no one liked them, sometimes even other Hellbugs didn't get along), into a mission area to draw off some of the defenders making it easier to do the mission.
Something like that takes carefully planned out maps though, so that and other factors make it so that AI is not a magic wand, especially if you are trying to do unsupervised map creation with it.
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,681Community Moderator
The only example of AI generated content I can think of that was successful was the Procedural Generation used in Deep Rock Galactic for the Caves we dive into. No two caves are alike. While admittedly the narrative for DRG is simply "Space Dwarves fighting Space Bugs mining Space Ores", with some flavor on the side from the current season (currently the final stages of the Rock Pox Infection of Hoxxes IV and DRG's efforts to combat it), the fact that the caves all look unique does show it can work. On the other hand the missions in MechWarrior 5 Mercenaries that aren't story missions all tend to start looking very similar to each other after a while.
I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite colored text = mod mode
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,681Community Moderator
My favorite dialog option:
"There was an infestation of Tal Shiar Spies. I just fumigated."
I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite colored text = mod mode
My favorite dialog option:
"There was an infestation of Tal Shiar Spies. I just fumigated."
That was a good one.
On dialogue options, not all our captains are going to be the same personality type, some might be polite and professional while others may have a darker or roguish side to them so maybe polite for the professional type, darker for the renegade type or sarcastic on the roguish types.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
My favorite dialog option:
"There was an infestation of Tal Shiar Spies. I just fumigated."
That was a good one.
On dialogue options, not all our captains are going to be the same personality type, some might be polite and professional while others may have a darker or roguish side to them so maybe polite for the professional type, darker for the renegade type or sarcastic on the roguish types.
like that pesky ferengi in the gamma quadrant? did she really expect me to not fire?
My favorite dialog option:
"There was an infestation of Tal Shiar Spies. I just fumigated."
That was a good one.
On dialogue options, not all our captains are going to be the same personality type, some might be polite and professional while others may have a darker or roguish side to them so maybe polite for the professional type, darker for the renegade type or sarcastic on the roguish types.
like that pesky ferengi in the gamma quadrant? did she really expect me to not fire?
Can we just shoot Madran and that be the end of it?
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
I would like the Sphere of Influence color puzzle bug to be fixed as of yesterday. This is ridiculous how this has not been fixed. I bet it has something to do with the patch they just added last Thursday. Is this going to mean that I won't be able to finish this mission at least until next Thursday unless I decide to brute-force the puzzle?
GAME OVER
RETURN OF AZRAEL
HA HA HA HA
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rattler2Member, Star Trek Online ModeratorPosts: 58,681Community Moderator
Can we just shoot Madran and that be the end of it?
Nah... its more entertaining to hurt him in the worst possible way for a Ferengi. Hit is wallet.
I think by now we've cost him enough Latinum he could have bought a small moon if he didn't keep gunning for us.
I can't take it anymore! Could everyone just chill out for two seconds before something CRAZY happens again?!
The nut who actually ground out many packs. The resident forum voice of reason (I HAZ FORUM REP! YAY!)
normal text = me speaking as fellow formite colored text = mod mode
Can we just shoot Madran and that be the end of it?
Nah... its more entertaining to hurt him in the worst possible way for a Ferengi. Hit is wallet.
I think by now we've cost him enough Latinum he could have bought a small moon if he didn't keep gunning for us.
Yeah you'd think he would have learned to not try to antagonize us by this time, but it doesn't seem so.
Can we just shoot Madran and that be the end of it?
Nah... its more entertaining to hurt him in the worst possible way for a Ferengi. Hit is wallet.
I think by now we've cost him enough Latinum he could have bought a small moon if he didn't keep gunning for us.
My Jem Hadar does not see it that way
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Can we just shoot Madran and that be the end of it?
Nah... its more entertaining to hurt him in the worst possible way for a Ferengi. Hit is wallet.
I think by now we've cost him enough Latinum he could have bought a small moon if he didn't keep gunning for us.
Yeah you'd think he would have learned to not try to antagonize us by this time, but it doesn't seem so.
I'd kinda like a few species-specific dialogue options from time to time, like a Vulcan judging whether something is logical, or a Bajoran invoking the Prophets, that kind of thing.
Can we just shoot Madran and that be the end of it?
Nah... its more entertaining to hurt him in the worst possible way for a Ferengi. Hit is wallet.
I think by now we've cost him enough Latinum he could have bought a small moon if he didn't keep gunning for us.
Yeah you'd think he would have learned to not try to antagonize us by this time, but it doesn't seem so.
Rule of Acquisition #83: Revenge is profitless.
He doesn't seem to have read to that rule as half of the things he does is petty revenge against us.
1st off, this is a similar thread to the running "Where would you like..." thread, but that is going to another direction than I want this to go. I've been thinking on it for a few weeks, without posting, but realized, as an infrequent poster that I am, I might as well do this now, cause I don't know what chances I will get to communicate this info(I've been a Lifetimer since the option was added I think and been there to see the kick off party, though I didn't know what it was about at the time. But I don't post in these forums or any STO ones for that matter, much and chances are I will not check back the thread after I post either. So my only chances to see if the devs read it will be through in-game changes). Also people don't realize, maybe cause they don't test the limits of the tailor that some things asked are already in. Like in the Ferengi-Cardassian thread, "The Cage Bundle". I enclose a screenshot of a character I've created a few months back and trying to emulate things, I realised stuff can be emulated with the given tools. For instance the goggles - and most that searched know of the "Cage" tunic trick.
Beams could be emulated with one of the existing sets(though it would be best if we had an actual set). Not that we have everything. Obviously, the "Wah Chang/Cage Phase(?) Laser" pistols are not in game(and ironically, these have two versions, since the original design was furtherly modified, I guess they could go like beam and bolt sniper and normal version for them or something). I personally use the disco pistol which is closer but it lacks the laser beam of the actual thing. That could be added as a lobbi item. And Majel's version of "Number one" hair I think is not in, that could be added to the hair tailor. We could have the ground cannon as a hovering battle pet(I know it wasn't hovering, but if we wanted to include it). The ship of that era also exists as a Legendary one variant - though I'm not using that on this character, I will refrain of saying from which fan production it is, cause some activelly hate that. But I have 32 chars through the years(would be over 40 if I didn't restructured back in 2014-15. I'm thinking of making them 35 and I have plans and lore for each, including some new restructuring. I have like 4 of them to be about TOS era(6 if we count TMP and movies).
I'm familiar with the discussion about Dyson ships: I think it's valid, they should be T6 as most T5 ships that still aren't and could be. Galor for instance, D'Kyr. The Vulcans are a UFP founder yet don't have much in game about them. I gotten the Sh'vhal ship ofcourse(though my T5 D'Kyr is upgraded and works quite well, but that stands for all T-5's).But there are items missing there. The Vulcan beam pistol(that's also the Hirogen pistol when sawn off and repainted. Some think it's the Ferengi, but the Ferengi is multiply associated with the Ferengi. I'm also having a whip for the Captain). We don't have a uniform for Vulcans. The ENT Vulcan Captains one could be added. There is no Vulcan bridge(Could be the one in Sh'Vhal episodes one). It's an opportunity, now we can use all Bridges on any ship. I can tell you I went and bought nearly all available on ZEN store and several of the restricted ones to the extent I could. I can't buy a D'Kora for all my characters, cost would be prohibitive. I got it for the Ferengi. Btw, some are not even useful if there isn't a Captain in the roster. I mean, gotten the Kazon for the Bajoran, cause its a smaller ship and Bajorans don't have one. But it doesn't feel right after all. Especially with the Kazon marking all over the place. I mean good looking bridge, but maybe avoid too many markings of the race in future alien bridges. Incindentally, why Denorios a T6 ship doesn't have a bridge? Make one based on starship and Kazon and/or give us ENT's so I can replace it. And also the displays of ships, best to remove that, cause I use - for example - Prometheus Bridges for TMP & WoK era crews. Wrong ship on display there. I gotten the Arehbes. Better not display the Arehbes, I have it on another ship entirelly. Etc.
ENT doesn't have a bridge(NX-01's). I'm using the Starship generic one, but I'd rather it have its own bridge. ENT lacks alot of content btw, still. The ships we see in the titles part, NX project ones, Emmet and the like. The ENT Shuttle. One of the characters I wan't to create: it's before ENT era, when the XCV-330 was in service. This thing has a bridge too btw(Roddenberry archive for reference). I'd be using EM-33 as his ground weapon(and some lasery colored beam for space one). But it doesn't exist in game. I can emulate the pistol with compression bolt ones, though if it where to be added I wouldn't mind one bit. However could the XCV and Bridge be added so I can make that character? I know it's transition period so we don't know who will stay and/or leave(but with recent news, this is in part why I'm asking now since we sure have them around for at least a while), but would be great to see this by people like E.C Henry, Tobias Richter(believe he's a partial contructor though), Thomas Marrone; I would also like we get some clarity asap, on the status of the company that actually runs it and the game, since there have been increasing concerns and I think I already paid the equivalent of a Full price lifetime pack(if not more) this year and I want to know where this investment is headed.
I've been thinking about the foundry lately since many have brought it up? Though I wouldn't like that scenario ever to happen, if you ever think of setting the game to "Maintenance mode" as people like to bring up from time to time(not sure if they actual trekkies or people who work for rival companies or something), I think you'd better re-instate the Foundry before that. Now, Foundry while it existed, was a very problematic version of the game and lets be honest on it, people abused it the best they could. So when it gets resurrected, the best way for it to actually work without messing with STO is for the Foundry to be its own secondary app. So as I imagine it, whoever wants to run it then, has to make a copy of their files ala Tribble and run it with those assets. It would have no rewards like it used, people do claim they played for the experience not because they could hijack the results to get Dilithium and other stuff - but players CAN gain items dropped from enemies. At the end of the mission there is always a vendor that can buy those dropped items for a price. THIS credits price is the only thing that can be transfered to their main account(maybe achievement for playing a certain amount of missions that last more than a given amt of time for those after such a thing). This doesn't hurt the game in anything cause people can gain credits through the game in an equivalent time. This solves most Foundry issues I believe, so consider it. This also brings back the creativity element for the players plus Cryptic/Deca or any combo of them can experiment with it adding useful stuff if they want without messing with the base game.
Other things I'd want to see: Targeted tokens. We have our own shipyards right?(Drydocks and all). Why can't we modify the ships to our liking completelly? Well, I mean completelly but within limits. There are some ships that I'd want to add an Experimental weapon to and lore wise(STO lore mind you) they should have one too(size as well). A classic example that comes to mind is the Universe class and the Tox Utat. Now obviously can't be THE Tox Utat, for the known reasons. But come on, obviously Dano had research on the field made before creating it. It is probably good for some more controlable derivative of it! And why not more consoles? Some might like them? As long as they aren't more than 5 of any given type or 3 of Universal slot ones. Btw, how about a new Reputation? Or freshen up an existed? Maybe the Romulan on, making it "Unification" one, adding some Vulcan items to its stages?
And last but not least, the usual stuff. Cardassian ground weaponry and equipment using Galor and Keldon skins on the STO lore ships(I said skins, not parts as you see, since I know those 3 are different meshes) of Cardassia assuming ownage of them all, Special Cardassian Refugee descendants subrace(exiled after Damar's death?) and Renegade Changelings(ala Picard) for the Dominion, Cardassian uniform tailor option. Oh, nearly forgotten, can the TNG and beyond eras of Store Boffs be like Geordi(keeps face looks more or less but is fluid with uniforms)? Since they're holograms mostly, right? Who knows, as VOY Doctor's episodes clearly display, when a hologram will be called upon? And being holoboffs they would be able to change their "clothing" on the spot, right?
Notice I didn't touch recent treks seasons items, but I assume USS ELEOS, Jack's phaser, the Dark Earth Federation phaser, SNW's phaser(awesome job by showrunners design team btw), their uniform(SNW's, or be clear on this so I can give them the Alter/JJverse/Kelvin Timeline Universe one), the Vulcan ship of the 4th DIS season, the special serum they(Doc team) used in SNW season 1-2 etc. will be available one way or the other right?
My best wishes for the game! May it be around to see at least 14 years more!
This "The Cage-tunic trick" is better than nothing, but of course not enough, since you can't apply rank stripes when using the TWOK-shirts. I think, the mainstream (25th Century, SNW etc.) wouldn't suffer if the original Trekkies were served with little snacks (like a The Cage-pistol) every now and then...
Can we just shoot Madran and that be the end of it?
Nah... its more entertaining to hurt him in the worst possible way for a Ferengi. Hit is wallet.
I think by now we've cost him enough Latinum he could have bought a small moon if he didn't keep gunning for us.
Yeah you'd think he would have learned to not try to antagonize us by this time, but it doesn't seem so.
Rule of Acquisition #83: Revenge is profitless.
He doesn't seem to have read to that rule as half of the things he does is petty revenge against us.
I'd love to see Madran busted personally thrown into jail by our characters.
"The meaning of victory is not to merely defeat your enemy but to destroy him, to completely eradicate him from living memory, to leave no remnant of his endeavours, to crush utterly his achievement and remove from all record his every trace of existence. From that defeat no enemy can ever recover. That is the meaning of victory."
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
Preferably involving a nice beatdown upside the lobes, but...we can only dream.
On another note, I see a silver lining for the game's future considering there are now SIX campaign events, at least for this year, as well as a MUCH improved campaign prize upon completing progress. I wonder how the devs are going to handle the six events? Are the main holiday events (summer, winter) going to be counted on that list?
I'd kinda like a few species-specific dialogue options from time to time, like a Vulcan judging whether something is logical, or a Bajoran invoking the Prophets, that kind of thing.
There is some but it's rare and you have to look them, Vulcans have the most speices dialogue, I've seen some unique dialogue for Vulcans in the Pjem mission as well as the one where you rescue Sela from the mushrooms,
while other Speices like Starfleet Klingons and Cardassians have none, I feel like the Klingon Civil War was a missed opportunity for J'ula to call them out, they're Klingons in Starfleet uniforms, I feel like she would said something like you're not true Klingons because you're Federation Dogs or something close to that.
I'd like to see more species-specific dialogue options as well, but I can understand the difficulty of shoehorning it in, or retconning older dialogues to allow it. I do know that you occasionally get species-specific dialogues in other MMOs, such as Dragon Ball Xenoverse 2, but that game only had five races to choose from (Earthling, Saiyan, Frieza race, Majin, Namekian), so it was easier to build dialogues around those races.
Considering the sheer number of races you can play as in STO (not to mention the innumerable custom races you can create using the alien "space Barbie")...yeah. This would be quite tricky, and some races (especially "aliens") would have to be omitted from consideration.
I second the keeping Madran alive. I do agree with personally seeing to it that he's locked away in a Federation penitentiary for the rest of his natural life (which might exceed another 120 years, if my knowledge of Ferengi life expectency is on point). However, I could also see some interesting "Odd Couple" missions involving Madran being made to accompany the player character on various quests in order to obtain info "only Ferengi could access". Such missions would be amusing, in my opinion.
One crazy-sounding idea that would both make the Gamma Recruitment event more useful and throw a nice bone to the people who have been asking for a Cardassian faction, without actually making any new factions would be to make the c-store Cardassians eligible for the Gamma recruitment but keep them using the regular tutorials that they use now.
It would make it more like the Delta Recruitment flexibility-wise, the main difference from the usual Gamma Recruit would be that the player would have to make the choice of red/blue faction before starting the character and use that tutorial instead of the Gamma one.
That setup could represent something like the repatriation of Cardassians who's families collaborated with the Dominion and evacuated through the wormhole (or simply a tendency for such to volunteer for "exchange" positions at the other Alliance academies out of curiosity (the war was about thirty-five years ago from the point of view of the "present" game date) as part of the Alliance's inter-nation coordination efforts).
It would help encourage people to actually buy the Cardassian race unlock (and maybe even ships) who otherwise might not and would get more people who have no use for Jem'Hadar toons (and if chat is anything to go by there are a lot of those players) to actually participate in the Gamma Recruitment.
Comments
I am pretty sure they already did that with the Exeter Refit. It has non-typical nacelles but that is easily fixed by swapping them for the Sovereign style nacelles off the Excalibur. The saucer has a 25th century style bridge superstructure and other 25th century details and even the secondary hull does not look too out of place for that era. It even comes with the 25th century livery as standard.
Of course, the Exeter Refit is a legendary and therefore priced completely out of the range of most F2P players who do buy things and I am not sure if it qualifies for one of the campaign ship tickets (I suspect not), so something similar in the cstore (or maybe regular premium boxed) might not be a bad idea.
Npcs ships that let you defeat them in other manners such as they retreat, they surrender or ram their ship into yours or self destruct.
Known simply as -Maverick-
Klingons should Beware of Maverick.
Maverick loves a fight and tends to be victorious even as the underdog.
He has an aptitude for tactics,guerrilla warfare and security.
"United Federation of Planets"
12th Fleet - Intelligence Division "Khalija" - Alpha Group
Not on Current Assignment.-On Retirement leave at Leach Lake in Minnesota
A: Who is voicing these contacts?
B: As mentioned in another thread, STO isn't set up for Procedural Generation, and the old Genesis System had problems such as repetitive missions and even spawning enemy groups you NEED to kill in ground missions... under the map so you can't.
C: Certain missions already do this with disabling or driving off hostile ships instead of just destroying them. And some Mirror Borg Spheres try to do suicide attacks that you can try to evade.
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If they were to somehow code in AI they could use AI text to speech for the 'A' item with a few seed voices and an Auto-Tune-like pitch change function or whatever so the npcs (and even player-character voices) could be all different from each other. They could also use a more modern AI system to generate content with machine-side emergent behavior (like Defiance had in a limited way).
Unfortunately, such a system can be extremely tricky to create (or even adapt off-the-shelf versions) and requires specialized skills to pull off without it being an incredible mess, especially when trying to retrofit it into an old program never designed with it in mind, so it is unlikely to ever happen.
And even if they did decide to do it, it would probably take several years to set up, especially since the map building and other tools are so primitive and manual that they would have to sort out every graphic element in the game and put it into an organized structure (currently they are all scattered around in individual files on hard drives with no particular order to them) that the AI could understand.
There was a Ten Forward episode (sometime during the Year of the Klingon stuff iirc) dedicated to showing how the maps were done (though I do not have time to search for it again at the moment) and the tools the devs have to use are in some ways more primitive and static than the sim building tools in Second Life which is probably why the Genesis System failed so spectacularly and explains why content creation is so slow.
If they could get some more engine people in the team so they have the capacity to make more improvements to it and the content creation tools that go with it while still riding herd on the backlog of bugs it would be ideal and be a cost savings in the long run (especially if most or all of that backend stuff can be used in the other two games as well), but I seriously doubt that will happen either (though the tailor bug that somehow migrated from Neverwinter could be a sign that they are making some minor moves towards consolidating some parts of the engine versions between the games, which would in theory make maintenance easier).
Don't know what I mean? The latest example is the script "written" for the disastrous Willy Wonka - pardon me, Willy "McDuff" - attraction in Glasgow recently. It can be read at Gizmodo, and contains such deathless lines as:
(Yes, the audience responses are scripted too.)
True, generative AI of that sort tends to get very weird very quickly. IBM tested out a chatbot on Twitter that emulated a well-mannered teenage girl and at first it was doing fairly well but the team was shocked when they checked in on it the next day and it sounded like a rabble-rouser for the Third Reich. Appalling, if mildly amusing. And sure, they can be restrained to some degree, but to work at all they have to be a sort of echo chamber because they don't actually understand what they are saying.
AI is more useful on the back end in the form of tools that take care of the dull repetitive and painstaking parts of scenario creation and allow the creative people to concentrate on the actually creative part of the job more. Some engines (and no, I am not suggesting porting to a new engine, this is just for illustration), especially the newer Unreal versions, have those AI driven toolsets that will take placed items and a relatively sketchy map and generate a close-to-final look for it all for instance along with making tweaking the results by the dev easier.
Last time I looked there were open-source projects working on similar systems that can be dropped into other games (though as I said before, it is best if the game in question was designed in an organized way, something STO scenario assets are not so it may not be practical here).
The AI text reader technology available for games and whatnot does work (Microsoft Edge just shifted to a very lifelike-sounding system for instance), though I am not sure if the overhead would be too much for the game. On the downside though is the fact that text reading voice generation is badly hogtied by overly broad speculative patents and copyrights similar to the way VR was in the 1990s up until fairly recently so it is nearly impossible to do anything with it without paying often substantial royalties of some sort to one or more third parties, so the free versions tend to be flat and machinelike.
Gamplay adaptive AI has to be carefully thought out so it doesn't overwhelm the players or go off and do something really bizarre that is not helpful to playing the game.
For instance, the (mildly) adaptive AI in Defiance had a good balance and functioned surprisingly well for its time though there were still the occasional underground mob spawns and pathing errors that would sometimes keep some of the enemy trapped in the wrong part of the map. It had emergent behaviors such as units "knew" the faction they were in and it was not unusual to run across two mobs from factions hostile to each other fighting if they got too close to each other.
Players with lower-level characters could sometimes take advantage of the situation by luring one of the tankier mobs (the bigger Hellbugs were good for this since no one liked them, sometimes even other Hellbugs didn't get along), into a mission area to draw off some of the defenders making it easier to do the mission.
Something like that takes carefully planned out maps though, so that and other factors make it so that AI is not a magic wand, especially if you are trying to do unsupervised map creation with it.
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-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
"There was an infestation of Tal Shiar Spies. I just fumigated."
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I like that one too. My favorite is I don't like the angle of your deflector dish.
That was a good one.
On dialogue options, not all our captains are going to be the same personality type, some might be polite and professional while others may have a darker or roguish side to them so maybe polite for the professional type, darker for the renegade type or sarcastic on the roguish types.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
like that pesky ferengi in the gamma quadrant? did she really expect me to not fire?
Can we just shoot Madran and that be the end of it?
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
RETURN OF AZRAEL
HA HA HA HA
Nah... its more entertaining to hurt him in the worst possible way for a Ferengi. Hit is wallet.
I think by now we've cost him enough Latinum he could have bought a small moon if he didn't keep gunning for us.
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Yeah you'd think he would have learned to not try to antagonize us by this time, but it doesn't seem so.
My Jem Hadar does not see it that way
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
He doesn't seem to have read to that rule as half of the things he does is petty revenge against us.
This "The Cage-tunic trick" is better than nothing, but of course not enough, since you can't apply rank stripes when using the TWOK-shirts. I think, the mainstream (25th Century, SNW etc.) wouldn't suffer if the original Trekkies were served with little snacks (like a The Cage-pistol) every now and then...
I'd love to see Madran busted personally thrown into jail by our characters.
-Lord Commander Solar Macharius
On another note, I see a silver lining for the game's future considering there are now SIX campaign events, at least for this year, as well as a MUCH improved campaign prize upon completing progress. I wonder how the devs are going to handle the six events? Are the main holiday events (summer, winter) going to be counted on that list?
RETURN OF AZRAEL
HA HA HA HA
It's possible that one of these will now be included.
There is some but it's rare and you have to look them, Vulcans have the most speices dialogue, I've seen some unique dialogue for Vulcans in the Pjem mission as well as the one where you rescue Sela from the mushrooms,
while other Speices like Starfleet Klingons and Cardassians have none, I feel like the Klingon Civil War was a missed opportunity for J'ula to call them out, they're Klingons in Starfleet uniforms, I feel like she would said something like you're not true Klingons because you're Federation Dogs or something close to that.
Considering the sheer number of races you can play as in STO (not to mention the innumerable custom races you can create using the alien "space Barbie")...yeah. This would be quite tricky, and some races (especially "aliens") would have to be omitted from consideration.
RETURN OF AZRAEL
HA HA HA HA
I have forgotten the origin of the deflector dish quote. Is it still in the game?
RETURN OF AZRAEL
HA HA HA HA
It would make it more like the Delta Recruitment flexibility-wise, the main difference from the usual Gamma Recruit would be that the player would have to make the choice of red/blue faction before starting the character and use that tutorial instead of the Gamma one.
That setup could represent something like the repatriation of Cardassians who's families collaborated with the Dominion and evacuated through the wormhole (or simply a tendency for such to volunteer for "exchange" positions at the other Alliance academies out of curiosity (the war was about thirty-five years ago from the point of view of the "present" game date) as part of the Alliance's inter-nation coordination efforts).
It would help encourage people to actually buy the Cardassian race unlock (and maybe even ships) who otherwise might not and would get more people who have no use for Jem'Hadar toons (and if chat is anything to go by there are a lot of those players) to actually participate in the Gamma Recruitment.