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Season 6 Foundry Heads-up
pwebranflakes
Member Posts: 7,741
Hi Foundry Authors!
As we move closer to the launch of Season 6, the team and I wanted to give you all a heads up on some Foundry-related items. Please take note of these items and determine if any of your missions will be affected when Season 6 launches (there aren't many):
Cheers,
Brandon =/\=
As we move closer to the launch of Season 6, the team and I wanted to give you all a heads up on some Foundry-related items. Please take note of these items and determine if any of your missions will be affected when Season 6 launches (there aren't many):
1) At the time Season 6 launches, the editing tool for the Foundry will be disabled as previous missions are republished -- we expect this editing downtime to last only a short while. Republishing will be an automatic process for almost all missions, but there are a few that will need to be manually updated before they can be republished. More on that in the following points.
2) It is no longer possible to use multiple maps inside a "Complete All". Note: Projects with this will go through the auto-republish, but the associated Unfinished Tasks must be resolved before an author can manually republish.*
3) We resolved an issue that incorrectly allowed "Whole Map" to be used as a valid "Leave From" selection on Cryptic maps. Note that it's still a valid selection for custom maps.*
4) A few projects have NPC Groups associated with "Kill" objectives that are not "Enemy" allegiance -- this is not working as intended and will now correctly result in an Unfinished Task.*
* The few authors who had these in one of their missions will need to update their projects and remove this before they can republish their mission.
Thanks for your understanding and we look forward to seeing all of your amazing missions built during Season 6 and beyond.2) It is no longer possible to use multiple maps inside a "Complete All". Note: Projects with this will go through the auto-republish, but the associated Unfinished Tasks must be resolved before an author can manually republish.*
3) We resolved an issue that incorrectly allowed "Whole Map" to be used as a valid "Leave From" selection on Cryptic maps. Note that it's still a valid selection for custom maps.*
4) A few projects have NPC Groups associated with "Kill" objectives that are not "Enemy" allegiance -- this is not working as intended and will now correctly result in an Unfinished Task.*
* The few authors who had these in one of their missions will need to update their projects and remove this before they can republish their mission.
Cheers,
Brandon =/\=
Post edited by pwebranflakes on
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Comments
When Emani (my Tribble Foundry char, see avatar) tries to access contacts that would normally give missions to a KDF char, she typically gets a blank message window. Also the UI button for "Hail KDF" is usually greyed out. When using the hotkey (J) to pull up the window, I don't see any contacts listed to hail. Also Emani's "Beam out"/"Warp Out" button is permanently disabled for all maps, even Cryptic maps.
Tetin (my Holodeck Foundry char) can do all of the above, although the game tends to hang whenever a mission with a cutscene gets to the cut scene. The Cutscene never starts, and sometimes the mission can't be completed.
Anyways, I LOVE the UI improvements in Tribble Foundry. It'll be nice to see those in Holodeck Foundry.
My character Tsin'xing
Click here for my Foundry tutorial on Creating A Custom Interior Map.
TRIBBLE, whelp, that breaks "One Too Many"... Gonna need to think up a creative reason to fix that.
I just hope things will run smoother than after Season 4. Can't wait to play with the new assets and interface, though.
"Sometimes you have to do things that you hate, so you can survive to fight another day."
Anyway, I'll be taking my missions down tonight, just in case S6 launches Thursday. I would rather not put my missions in the hands of Cryptic's autopublish. Mine were some of the ones affected by the season 4 autopublish bug - which was fixed, thanks - so I feel more comfortable if I do the publishing manually.
I'm going to be redoing all the dialogue to add titles and maybe even swap out for some of the new maps, so they'll all need republishing anyway.
p.s. This new forums doesn't recognize the m dash. What's up with that?
I assume you mean withdraw?
So far I don't know what effect (if any) this will have on my missions. But I am just using the old fashion /ugcEditorExportProject C:\script.txt to save everything.
At least my dialog and placement information should be safe that way. It really is too bad we can save the costumes...
Keeping my fingers crossed.
But one thing I wish they listended to us regarding the new Editor with those small (or should I say tiny?) text boxes. And still wish they added that feature to allow you to prioritize objects so you can move them above one another. So a floor can stay a floor and walls isn't hidden by that newly placed floor.
We have already done several full auto-republishes of all the Holodeck Foundry missions, as part of our validation to find issues like the ones uncovered by Season 4. That's how we're able to tell all of the authors the issues they're going to have when the auto-republishes occur with the Season 6 launch.
The main problem we ran into with Season 4 was that authors were in and editing stuff so we couldn't safely fix and roll back their projects; it was not because of the republishing. We're side-stepping that issue by not allowing access to the editor until the republishes are complete. This will allow authors to report any problems with their missions after they're republished, so that we are aware there is an issue we weren't expecting.
By withdrawing your projects, you're ensuring that if there is a problem with them, it won't be found until after our team thinks the coast is clear for editing, so to speak.
I admit in Season 4 I was one of those authors who was in and editing as soon as I could (not knowing that bad things were going on). Though mostly I was just super excited to be able to set a custom height on an NPC, so I went through and adjusted the heights throughout all my missions and republished quickly.
Anyway, you're saying what we should do is instead of withdrawing and republishing we need to wait out the Foundry downtime then go through and examine very closely all of our missions and report if there are problems. Can we assume that you will be watching the Foundry bug report forum very closely on patch day? I know I speak for most of the authors that we all hope very much that there are no issues... but in that unhappy event we hope you are watching for reports so you can respond quickly.
We will be watching the Foundry forums VERY closely. Nobody wants a repeat of what happened when we launched Season 4.
Your allowing your mission to auto-republish and then reporting any issues to us would be very helpful, and we'd definitely appreciate your taking that tack.
I'm sure they could but then nobody in STO would ever get to take advantage of any of the Neverwinter advancements and frankly some of the stuff like designing our own floor plan in interiors is sounding really nice.
Nope. The tech required to add new stuff was changed.
I hope this is painless.
Join Date: Sep 2008
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: CHANGE THE FORUMS BACK !!!
Yes, as I understand it these changes are bringing us closer to a point where they can do a full code merge with Neverwinter once it is released.
Ok Zero, putting my trust in you and leaving my missions up.
then don't TRIBBLE it up please :P
Dont want to lose my stuff :O
Are we going to be able to test Foundry missions with chars that aren't NewBs? Trying to write a mission for VA level play when using a level 1 char doesn't work very well.
My character Tsin'xing
That would be an awesome feature and I totally support it.
That said, it is possible to rank up a Foundry character relatively fast. Just go to one of the True Way/Terran Empire DSEs and "Kill Target" your way up to VA. It's tedious, but it works.
"Critics who say that the optimistic utopia Star Trek depicted is now outmoded forget the cultural context that gave birth to it: Star Trek was not a manifestation of optimism when optimism was easy. Star Trek declared a hope for a future that nobody stuck in the present could believe in. For all our struggles today, we haven’t outgrown the need for stories like Star Trek. We need tales of optimism, of heroes, of courage and goodness now as much as we’ve ever needed them."
-Thomas Marrone
I've also done that "kill target" trick in Borg space. (you get better loot)
One proposal I've been pondering is to allow players to use "real" characters when previewing missions. Not copies of real chars, but their ACTUAL Holodeck characters. To prevent abuse you could make it so that "Preview mode" prevents item drops and keeps characters from gaining XP.
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
Bran, test through whatever mission you plan on spotlighting post release to make sure it works at intended after launch. Giving PR to a mission that is broke, would be a tragedy.
If it does launch tomorrow I will post here in the Discussion Forums a post about the changes that pop up to pre-S6 Published Missions.
I suspect that the devs are worried that people will "play" the game with foundry characters as some sort of "hack", rather than playing normally. I guess that concern is valid if there are people out there who don't want to play PWE's regular content, but other than that, the concern is completely misplaced.
We need more control over our foundry characters in order to properly create content.
Join Date: Sep 2008
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: CHANGE THE FORUMS BACK !!!