The Foundry as it stands today, is really a whole separate entity. There is no way (to my knowledge) that I can take what someone has built in the foundry, and convert it into a normal map that I can edit with dev tools. There's also no way currently to replace a map like your ship's interior, with a foundry map. I'm not a programmer, so I can only guess that that is theoretically possible, but it's not something that has ever been done, and I don't know if it's doable where we stand today..
It's entirely doable. It's essentially just a problem of data format conversion. Cryptic would need a utility that would take the map format data in the Foundry DB and convert it into the format that that their development tools use. The problem is that it's probably a non-trivial conversion. Not that is would be a hard thing do do, it's a very tedious and iterative process. You have to account for every bit of data, every possible conversion issue, every corner case that could possible arise. And even then it's probably not perfect.
Imagine having to make square pegs fit into round holes, taking the shaving of the square peg and fitting them into a semi-circular depression, and everything having to weight exactly the same as what you started with (they don't). As you change, test, reconvert, balance, change again, reconvert, balance.... And then wondering how in Gre'thor their accounting ledgers balanced in the first place???!!!! ( Why yes, I made a career of that sort of thing for 10 years. How did your guess?).
Or perhaps put it this way, images rendered on a computer screen has a given data structure. Images are stored in many different types of formats JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, etc. Say the dev maps tools work with GIFs. And the Foundry map tools work with PNGs. You'd have to write a program to convert the Foundary PNG maps into the GIF maps for the dev tools.
And I could help with drawing up some of those Ship Decks too. Send them to me and I'll see what I can do.
Any help would be greatly appreciated
I'll start by doing the Intrepid, so that you would have an idea of what sort of art style I'll be using to block out the explorable regions. And just so you know, I'll be using the free vector art software Inkscape.
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
On the topic of using the Foundry to make starship interior maps, I'd like to see the "Lego assembly" feature from Neverwinter taken one step further; custom built rooms. Not just prebuilt rooms, but the ability to snap together room building blocks (which I know STO has) as inevitably someone will run into a situation where they need a room built a certain way that doesn't exist. This could even be used to make several floor high rooms, like in missions such as Khitomer Accord (Ground), or The Cure (Ground) with all of its elevated walkways in the canyon above the players.
This would allow players to make even more accurate starship interiors, especially if the ability to place rooms at angles other than 90 degrees - like in the KDF mission "Second Star to the Right, Straight on 'til Morning" - was given to players. (It IS actually possible, since the person who made that mission and "Keep Your Enemies Closer" was able to pull off off-angle rooms somehow.) Said mission also includes curved hallways, like in the large starship interiors. These halls can be used to create small curved corridors, although it would help if they were broken down into smaller pieces so that longer curved corridors can be built.
With all due honesty, I'm not sure that "lego feature" of room connections could really make a good starship interior.
Why? Because when creating hallways for the saucer would be awfully complicated. So the map maker would have to have access to various degress of corridors ranging from circular (Consitution), Triangular (Prometheus), Hemispherical (K'T'inga Pod, Saber), Oval (Odyssey, Sovereign), and Arched (Intrepid). So IMHO, someone on the Art Team would have to premodel the saucer section.
Trust me, right now with my Foundry mission, I actually created a TOS D7 Interior and I honestly don't feel like such a thing can be created from the NW Interior map creator. So it's better if the art team premade the maps or we unleashed our imagination in doing it ourselves.
Yes, please! It makes me sad when I customize the appearance of all of my officers, and half of them never appear on my bridge.
Mott's barbershop and the theatre are "major set locations?" I don't know about that...
To me, the most important locations would be the "standing sets," most of which are in-game already: bridge, ready room, engineering, sickbay, the lounge, the transporter room and the captain's quarters are the places where most of the action takes place. And we've already got some science labs, which suits me just fine.
I suppose it couldn't hurt to add another, empty crew quarters, and a few of the more notable ship-specific sets - the Intrepid's mess hall and Astrometrics, the Galaxy Astrometrics as seen in Generations, and (most importantly to me), a shuttle bay. Maybe a cargo bay as well, for good measure.
Even that's a pretty big list, and I think that on the whole, anything else would be a waste of time and resources.
They were featured in 6 or so episodes each, all pretty memorable. The theater got as much or more screentime than most of the Defiant interior and played a big role in a lot of fan musing on TNG, including TNG Recut on Youtube.
My preference would be that they take the extra effort on a Galaxy interior and have a deck with the theater, the barbershop, a holodeck, an art studio, and the classroom. It'd give Thomas some fun work like the Barbershop logo, paintings in the art studio, and the kid-ified LCARS in the classroom. It reinforces the Galaxy interior as a light, fun, safe space for civilians.
If you do the Galaxy interior without pushing the "civilian cruise ship" aesthetic, you lose the heart of it.
And I can see that all fitting well with extra development DOff assignments and an onboard tailor... And maybe make it extra social by having offduty clothes vendors who sell things like Picard hotpants and civilian wear for dilithium. Or make the interior part of a pack along with Skants, the dress dress uniforms, and all the questionable but frilly, soft, quirky things from TNG that scream "This is not a warship."
If it is premium priced and extra love is put into it, might be fun to have Hide and Seek with Q as a feature on the ship, maybe as a mission that pays out latinum and encourages teaming.
I based the room/deck locations from Sternbach & Okuda's Voyager Tech Manual (never published) and the actual layout from the fanon Strategic Designs / Cydonia 6 Voyager deck plans - I simply got rid of the hundreds of crew quarters, M/AM storage tanks and utilities, as well as trimming down most of the corridors and adding dummy doors to seal off unexplorable regions.
This is intended as a proof-of-concept for potential canon ship interior maps. I'll try sticking this in my proposal doc as well...
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
The Foundry as it stands today, is really a whole separate entity. There is no way (to my knowledge) that I can take what someone has built in the foundry, and convert it into a normal map that I can edit with dev tools. There's also no way currently to replace a map like your ship's interior, with a foundry map. I'm not a programmer, so I can only guess that that is theoretically possible, but it's not something that has ever been done, and I don't know if it's doable where we stand today.
Based on the admittedly-flimsy evidence of what we see if we use the not-really-documented feature to export Foundry missions to text, which appears to indicate your missions are effectively in a custom scripting language, I suspect it's one medium-hairy perl script away from happening.
But I'm pretty sure your best perl coder left.
Former moderator of these forums. Lifetime sub since before launch. Been here since before public betas. Foundry author of "Franklin Drake Must Die".
I think the idea of using foundry tools to build our own ship interiors is a great idea.
Look how popular a lot of "building" type games are. Take the Sims for example. They have a cash store where you can buy all sorts of furniture etc. Think of the possibilities for the C-Store with this. Say we get a base set of building blocks, for example, a couple 2409 hallways, small, medium and large crew quarters, a med bay, holodeck, turbolift, ten forward etc etc. The turbolifts have a property box that allows you to pic a deck that you have already built or it can go to your bridge. Or maybe it just automatically lists all the decks your have made when you use it.
As for curved hallways. I can't imagine why, with a lot of coding, there can't be a way to make curved blocks of "hallway style X" with a series of "door connection points". Those "door connection points" tell the foundry where and at what angle you can connect a room.
So now I use, say, the "medical room style Y" and drag it near a "door connection point" on the curved hallway and it snaps into place at the right angle. Then I can add a couple unique furniture items that I bought in the C-Store and dress it up a bit from the base look.
For example, don't the NPCs know how to face us when they fight us? Isn't that sort of the same thing. They have a "front" that points to our character. I'm sure there is some math that can do this for connecting rooms to a curved hallway. If it's worth the development time is the question. But ship interiors are a big big part of the Star Trek shows and movies. So far, outside of the 2 C-Store interiors, what we have is pretty basic and not really as good as it could be.
At the very least it would be nice if this was something that could be added down the road, even if we have to start with a more block-based layout system. And if it's not doable, then I'd love to see more custom-built, high quality, interiors on the C-Store like we have already.
I think it's clear from taco's posts that having the Foundry build the actual layout of the ship interior is impractical - I myself would also add that there would be the potential for immersion-breaking by minmaxing players i.e. somebody may simply plonk all the rooms on the same deck.
My proposal opts for fixed canon-accurate layouts for each class with limited decor choices, and the Foundry being reserved for positioning additional props within said maps.
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
I based the room/deck locations from Sternbach & Okuda's Voyager Tech Manual (never published) and the actual layout from the fanon Strategic Designs / Cydonia 6 Voyager deck plans - I simply got rid of the hundreds of crew quarters, M/AM storage tanks and utilities, as well as trimming down most of the corridors and adding dummy doors to seal off unexplorable regions.
This is intended as a proof-of-concept for potential canon ship interior maps. I'll try sticking this in my proposal doc as well...
Well that's good and all, but remember Voyager was almost fully modeled in Elite Force, and most of the Enterprise-E in Elite Force 2. Those on the Cryptic team that has that game can easily use them as reference. Especially since those maps were far superior than what Cryptic currently has.
remember Voyager was almost fully modeled in Elite Force, and most of the Enterprise-E in Elite Force 2. Those on the Cryptic team that has that game can easily use them as reference. Especially since those maps were far superior than what Cryptic currently has.
Indeed. I'd imagine CBS would provide the original blueprints, too.
The sole purpose of my doodle was to show how to optimize map size whilst keeping room / deck locations canonical. I'm assuming Cryptic can fill in the details anyway.
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
I'm not saying you can't use the Foundry to make your own ship interiors if you want to, Go for it! I'm just saying that it's not likely that we'd require people to do so, or hook that up as the main ship interior.
I also think that if we (Cryptic) were going to be spending time on this, I (personally) would prefer that we made proper layouts that weren't all built at right angles etc.
I think Sumghai's layouts are reasonable, if still a bit overambitious. I would start with a very few, very key, locations, and once we had the basics for each ship type, then we can talk about adding more. As long as the new stuff is on different decks, or can be reasonably separated from the others, it'd be reasonable to add them later.
While the Galaxy was a "civilian cruise ship" I really don't think we lose a ton if things like the barber shop, and a theatre weren't included. You, as the Captain are unlikely to visit all of those places anyway, and as I said above, I'd rather get the basics in everywhere first.
But. . . it's all hypothetical BS at this point anyway. :P
Indeed. I'd imagine CBS would provide the original blueprints, too.
The sole purpose of my doodle was to show how to optimize map size whilst keeping room / deck locations canonical. I'm assuming Cryptic can fill in the details anyway.
You know, I wonder if CBS would have real blueprints to their ships, outside of the set blueprints. Only official interior maps I've seen are the MSDs, and the most accurate of them was the NX's, which Doug Drexler did of the top-down, which shown all the decks with hallways and turbolifts.
I'm not saying you can't use the Foundry to make your own ship interiors if you want to, Go for it! I'm just saying that it's not likely that we'd require people to do so, or hook that up as the main ship interior.
I also think that if we (Cryptic) were going to be spending time on this, I (personally) would prefer that we made proper layouts that weren't all built at right angles etc.
I think Sumghai's layouts are reasonable, if still a bit overambitious. I would start with a very few, very key, locations, and once we had the basics for each ship type, then we can talk about adding more. As long as the new stuff is on different decks, or can be reasonably separated from the others, it'd be reasonable to add them later.
While the Galaxy was a "civilian cruise ship" I really don't think we lose a ton if things like the barber shop, and a theatre weren't included. You, as the Captain are unlikely to visit all of those places anyway, and as I said above, I'd rather get the basics in everywhere first.
But. . . it's all hypothetical BS at this point anyway. :P
Well hypothetical with a highly fleshed interior, but you could easily do smaller ships as a starting point like you did with the Belfast. Larger ships like the Galaxy, well you might have to keep it to the essentials and have turbolift to those locations nearby. That way when time allows, you could add a little at a time.
Anyhow, I like you to check out my D7 Interior on my Foundry mission. Since it's not published yet, perhaps you can ask Zero to pull the file and take a look at it. It's the Battle of Klach D'Kel Brakt.
I think Sumghai's layouts are reasonable, if still a bit overambitious. I would start with a very few, very key, locations, and once we had the basics for each ship type, then we can talk about adding more. As long as the new stuff is on different decks, or can be reasonably separated from the others, it'd be reasonable to add them later.
While the Galaxy was a "civilian cruise ship" I really don't think we lose a ton if things like the barber shop, and a theatre weren't included. You, as the Captain are unlikely to visit all of those places anyway, and as I said above, I'd rather get the basics in everywhere first.
But. . . it's all hypothetical BS at this point anyway. :P
Agreed with all of the above - a phased release schedule would be best.
You know, I wonder if CBS would have real blueprints to their ships, outside of the set blueprints. Only official interior maps I've seen are the MSDs, and the most accurate of them was the NX's, which Doug Drexler did of the top-down, which shown all the decks with hallways and turbolifts.
I'm working mainly from fanon-ish deck plans, which in turn were based on canon listings for which decks particular rooms are on.
I do, however, have a digital copy of the Ed Whitefire deck plans for the Ent-D, from when he was asked by the TNG art department to draw up some official plans.
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
I'm not saying you can't use the Foundry to make your own ship interiors if you want to, Go for it! I'm just saying that it's not likely that we'd require people to do so, or hook that up as the main ship interior.
I also think that if we (Cryptic) were going to be spending time on this, I (personally) would prefer that we made proper layouts that weren't all built at right angles etc.
I think Sumghai's layouts are reasonable, if still a bit overambitious. I would start with a very few, very key, locations, and once we had the basics for each ship type, then we can talk about adding more. As long as the new stuff is on different decks, or can be reasonably separated from the others, it'd be reasonable to add them later.
While the Galaxy was a "civilian cruise ship" I really don't think we lose a ton if things like the barber shop, and a theatre weren't included. You, as the Captain are unlikely to visit all of those places anyway, and as I said above, I'd rather get the basics in everywhere first.
But. . . it's all hypothetical BS at this point anyway. :P
I don't think it's overambitious in the slightest. After all, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using those interiors in story missions. They visited other ships all the time in the series. Hell, you could even have a fairly simple 5 man Klingon mission entirely based on boarding a random Federation ship. (Actually, that would be badass, do it now!)
Ideally though, how I would introduce them is say, here you have your big main interior with all the important stuff purchasable for $10-$15 depending on the complexity of it, and then the other fluff interior rooms are attached to the C-Store ships.
For example, the main interior of the Galaxy Glass would have; Ten Forward, Engineering, Med Bay, all the Doff Contacts, etc. But if you bought the Galaxy-R it would give you the Barbershop, the theater, a Counselors Office (At which point she would be moved into it), Buying the Venture could give you an armory, buying a Galaxy-X could give you Lance Control. Hee hee hee... :P
It would give you guys an excuse to revisit some of the under performing C-Store ships (Like the Galaxy-R) as well as boost the sales of underselling C-Store items (Again, the Galaxy-R) as well as proving to the fans you aren't going to lockbox everything. :P
I do, however, have a digital copy of the Ed Whitefire deck plans for the Ent-D, from when he was asked by the TNG art department to draw up some official plans.
Oo.... I would love to play around with those... (The Galaxy is my favorite after all)
I think the idea of using foundry tools to build our own ship interiors is a great idea.
Look how popular a lot of "building" type games are. Take the Sims for example. They have a cash store where you can buy all sorts of furniture etc. Think of the possibilities for the C-Store with this. Say we get a base set of building blocks, for example, a couple 2409 hallways, small, medium and large crew quarters, a med bay, holodeck, turbolift, ten forward etc etc. The turbolifts have a property box that allows you to pic a deck that you have already built or it can go to your bridge. Or maybe it just automatically lists all the decks your have made when you use it.
As for curved hallways. I can't imagine why, with a lot of coding, there can't be a way to make curved blocks of "hallway style X" with a series of "door connection points". Those "door connection points" tell the foundry where and at what angle you can connect a room.
So now I use, say, the "medical room style Y" and drag it near a "door connection point" on the curved hallway and it snaps into place at the right angle. Then I can add a couple unique furniture items that I bought in the C-Store and dress it up a bit from the base look.
For example, don't the NPCs know how to face us when they fight us? Isn't that sort of the same thing. They have a "front" that points to our character. I'm sure there is some math that can do this for connecting rooms to a curved hallway. If it's worth the development time is the question. But ship interiors are a big big part of the Star Trek shows and movies. So far, outside of the 2 C-Store interiors, what we have is pretty basic and not really as good as it could be.
At the very least it would be nice if this was something that could be added down the road, even if we have to start with a more block-based layout system. And if it's not doable, then I'd love to see more custom-built, high quality, interiors on the C-Store like we have already.
This, plus my idea for rooms and hallways to be broken up into "Lego" pieces so that players can assemble custom rooms and corridors would vastly improve the ability of Foundry authors to make missions, and even starship interior maps.
I'm not saying you can't use the Foundry to make your own ship interiors if you want to, Go for it! I'm just saying that it's not likely that we'd require people to do so, or hook that up as the main ship interior.
I also think that if we (Cryptic) were going to be spending time on this, I (personally) would prefer that we made proper layouts that weren't all built at right angles etc.
I think Sumghai's layouts are reasonable, if still a bit overambitious. I would start with a very few, very key, locations, and once we had the basics for each ship type, then we can talk about adding more. As long as the new stuff is on different decks, or can be reasonably separated from the others, it'd be reasonable to add them later.
While the Galaxy was a "civilian cruise ship" I really don't think we lose a ton if things like the barber shop, and a theatre weren't included. You, as the Captain are unlikely to visit all of those places anyway, and as I said above, I'd rather get the basics in everywhere first.
But. . . it's all hypothetical BS at this point anyway. :P
Well, you (Cryptic) definitely can make rooms that are connected/oriented at angles other than ninety degrees, as evidenced by the KDF missions "Second Star to the Right, Straight On 'til Morning" and "Keep Your Enemies Closer". If Neverwinter's Foundry team could add the ability to make room connections at angles other than 90 degrees - like in the aforementioned missions here in Star Trek Online - it would mean that you (Cryptic) wouldn't have to spend as much time building custom, non-ninety-degree-only interior maps for starships should you ever port Neverwinter's room-building tech here to STO's Foundry.
It would also help if authors had the option to use a more complex version of the room-building system in Neverwinter's Foundry: using the components of rooms, which I know was how you guys made most (if not all) of the interior maps in STO and CO. Since I started playing both games, I noticed that each room in an interior map (including hallways) was made up of square blocks, at least when viewed from the top. There were different corner blocks, wall blocks, and open space blocks. I would love to be able to use those to create my own rooms and corridors should the room-building tech from Neverwinter's Foundry ever be ported here. Especially if I can stack rooms to make extra-high areas with platforms and walkways, like the puzzle room in Khitomer Accord (Ground).
I'm working mainly from fanon-ish deck plans, which in turn were based on canon listings for which decks particular rooms are on.
I do, however, have a digital copy of the Ed Whitefire deck plans for the Ent-D, from when he was asked by the TNG art department to draw up some official plans.
I seen them, and they are much better than those made by FASA, which didn't show their understanding of Trek.
If I had access to accurate measurements, I could make deck plans per ship. Because I really want Cryptic to redo the KDF interiors to make it feel like a Klingon ship or feel like you're in a BoP.
If I had access to accurate measurements, I could make deck plans per ship. Because I really want Cryptic to redo the KDF interiors to make it feel like a Klingon ship or feel like you're in a BoP.
Whilst I might not have accurate measurements, I do have the deck plans for BoPs. I can email them to you if you wish.
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
For instance, the B'Rel is so small it doesn't have a Turbolift.
Properly scaled canon interiors are a must, too, for this improved ship interior proposal I am pushing.
It's interesting that the B'Rel deck plans features a ladder from a bridge corridor to the captain's quarters. I'd be fine with a KDF toon walking towards a ladder and then being "teleported" turbolift style to the upper area, but it'd be way cool if the Klingon captain could actually climb up said ladder.
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
Properly scaled canon interiors are a must, too, for this improved ship interior proposal I am pushing.
It's interesting that the B'Rel deck plans features a ladder from a bridge corridor to the captain's quarters. I'd be fine with a KDF toon walking towards a ladder and then being "teleported" turbolift style to the upper area, but it'd be way cool if the Klingon captain could actually climb up said ladder.
The TOS interior has a "functional" Jeffries Tube in it, which allows you to move between decks.
No reason a BoP interior couldn't do the same.
"You shoot him, I shoot you, I leave both your bodies here and go out for a late night snack.
I'm thinking maybe pancakes." ~ John Casey
It's interesting that the B'Rel deck plans features a ladder from a bridge corridor to the captain's quarters. I'd be fine with a KDF toon walking towards a ladder and then being "teleported" turbolift style to the upper area, but it'd be way cool if the Klingon captain could actually climb up said ladder.
Context sensitive climbing would be glorious!
Of all the things that STO could steal mechanics from, I think that Arkham Asylum would benefit it the most. Not that we should all become Batman mind you, but mechanics like sneaking, non-lethal manners to take enemies out, and true fist fighting would would be very welcome additions to this game.
But for the one related to this thread; Context Sensitive Climbing!
How this would work, you would have climbable objects work like chairs. I.E. you would click on the ledge/ladder/whatever, your captain would run over and Velcro to it, and instead of the sitting animation, you would get a little animation of your captain climbing until you reached the top.
I like this idea for several reasons, this would allow more organic maps, greater range of strategies for combat, and together with crouch-walk/sneaking, we could have true Jeffries-Tubes! I also see no reason this could not benefit Neverwinter, and I don't think it would be that hard to do as well. The most difficult thing I see is new animations for ladders/ledges.
Oh yes, context sensitive climbing would be awesome, for gameplay as a whole!
In terms of ship interiors, the only use for climbing would be in Jefferies tubes or access ladders as mentioned - this might require tying decks together to allow the the tubes to reach various places.
I do wonder, though, how often Jefferies tubes would be used in personal ship interiors in order to warrant dev time to develop this feature.
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
So not only is Cryptic to do a massive amount of work, but it's work that can't even be used as mission assets...
After making a mission that uses the Defiant interior, I prefer missions in tight spaces by a wide margin. It's more kinetic, less planning based. Difficulty actually matters.
Are you kidding? If there were missions that took place on a canonically accuarate ship, it would be a fan favorite in no time!
I presume a staggered release schedule would be implemented anyway.
Besides, the whole point of the proposal is to have ship interiors that players can use as "housing", but also mission maps for PvE/PvP and episode missions.
Imagine how much more authentic "State of Q" would be if the player actually got to fight the time-displaced Borg inside a proper Miranda-class interior for the USS Saratoga!
Laws of thermodynamics as applied to life: 0 - You must play the game. 1 - You can't win. 2 - You can't break even. 3 - You can't quit.
Comments
It's entirely doable. It's essentially just a problem of data format conversion. Cryptic would need a utility that would take the map format data in the Foundry DB and convert it into the format that that their development tools use. The problem is that it's probably a non-trivial conversion. Not that is would be a hard thing do do, it's a very tedious and iterative process. You have to account for every bit of data, every possible conversion issue, every corner case that could possible arise. And even then it's probably not perfect.
Imagine having to make square pegs fit into round holes, taking the shaving of the square peg and fitting them into a semi-circular depression, and everything having to weight exactly the same as what you started with (they don't). As you change, test, reconvert, balance, change again, reconvert, balance.... And then wondering how in Gre'thor their accounting ledgers balanced in the first place???!!!! ( Why yes, I made a career of that sort of thing for 10 years. How did your guess?).
Or perhaps put it this way, images rendered on a computer screen has a given data structure. Images are stored in many different types of formats JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, etc. Say the dev maps tools work with GIFs. And the Foundry map tools work with PNGs. You'd have to write a program to convert the Foundary PNG maps into the GIF maps for the dev tools.
I'll start by doing the Intrepid, so that you would have an idea of what sort of art style I'll be using to block out the explorable regions. And just so you know, I'll be using the free vector art software Inkscape.
This would allow players to make even more accurate starship interiors, especially if the ability to place rooms at angles other than 90 degrees - like in the KDF mission "Second Star to the Right, Straight on 'til Morning" - was given to players. (It IS actually possible, since the person who made that mission and "Keep Your Enemies Closer" was able to pull off off-angle rooms somehow.) Said mission also includes curved hallways, like in the large starship interiors. These halls can be used to create small curved corridors, although it would help if they were broken down into smaller pieces so that longer curved corridors can be built.
Why? Because when creating hallways for the saucer would be awfully complicated. So the map maker would have to have access to various degress of corridors ranging from circular (Consitution), Triangular (Prometheus), Hemispherical (K'T'inga Pod, Saber), Oval (Odyssey, Sovereign), and Arched (Intrepid). So IMHO, someone on the Art Team would have to premodel the saucer section.
Trust me, right now with my Foundry mission, I actually created a TOS D7 Interior and I honestly don't feel like such a thing can be created from the NW Interior map creator. So it's better if the art team premade the maps or we unleashed our imagination in doing it ourselves.
They were featured in 6 or so episodes each, all pretty memorable. The theater got as much or more screentime than most of the Defiant interior and played a big role in a lot of fan musing on TNG, including TNG Recut on Youtube.
My preference would be that they take the extra effort on a Galaxy interior and have a deck with the theater, the barbershop, a holodeck, an art studio, and the classroom. It'd give Thomas some fun work like the Barbershop logo, paintings in the art studio, and the kid-ified LCARS in the classroom. It reinforces the Galaxy interior as a light, fun, safe space for civilians.
If you do the Galaxy interior without pushing the "civilian cruise ship" aesthetic, you lose the heart of it.
And I can see that all fitting well with extra development DOff assignments and an onboard tailor... And maybe make it extra social by having offduty clothes vendors who sell things like Picard hotpants and civilian wear for dilithium. Or make the interior part of a pack along with Skants, the dress dress uniforms, and all the questionable but frilly, soft, quirky things from TNG that scream "This is not a warship."
If it is premium priced and extra love is put into it, might be fun to have Hide and Seek with Q as a feature on the ship, maybe as a mission that pays out latinum and encourages teaming.
http://fc07.deviantart.net/fs70/i/2012/286/d/a/sto_ship_interior_doodle___intrepid_class_by_sumghai-d5hpuh2.png
I based the room/deck locations from Sternbach & Okuda's Voyager Tech Manual (never published) and the actual layout from the fanon Strategic Designs / Cydonia 6 Voyager deck plans - I simply got rid of the hundreds of crew quarters, M/AM storage tanks and utilities, as well as trimming down most of the corridors and adding dummy doors to seal off unexplorable regions.
This is intended as a proof-of-concept for potential canon ship interior maps. I'll try sticking this in my proposal doc as well...
Based on the admittedly-flimsy evidence of what we see if we use the not-really-documented feature to export Foundry missions to text, which appears to indicate your missions are effectively in a custom scripting language, I suspect it's one medium-hairy perl script away from happening.
But I'm pretty sure your best perl coder left.
Look how popular a lot of "building" type games are. Take the Sims for example. They have a cash store where you can buy all sorts of furniture etc. Think of the possibilities for the C-Store with this. Say we get a base set of building blocks, for example, a couple 2409 hallways, small, medium and large crew quarters, a med bay, holodeck, turbolift, ten forward etc etc. The turbolifts have a property box that allows you to pic a deck that you have already built or it can go to your bridge. Or maybe it just automatically lists all the decks your have made when you use it.
As for curved hallways. I can't imagine why, with a lot of coding, there can't be a way to make curved blocks of "hallway style X" with a series of "door connection points". Those "door connection points" tell the foundry where and at what angle you can connect a room.
So now I use, say, the "medical room style Y" and drag it near a "door connection point" on the curved hallway and it snaps into place at the right angle. Then I can add a couple unique furniture items that I bought in the C-Store and dress it up a bit from the base look.
For example, don't the NPCs know how to face us when they fight us? Isn't that sort of the same thing. They have a "front" that points to our character. I'm sure there is some math that can do this for connecting rooms to a curved hallway. If it's worth the development time is the question. But ship interiors are a big big part of the Star Trek shows and movies. So far, outside of the 2 C-Store interiors, what we have is pretty basic and not really as good as it could be.
At the very least it would be nice if this was something that could be added down the road, even if we have to start with a more block-based layout system. And if it's not doable, then I'd love to see more custom-built, high quality, interiors on the C-Store like we have already.
My proposal opts for fixed canon-accurate layouts for each class with limited decor choices, and the Foundry being reserved for positioning additional props within said maps.
Well that's good and all, but remember Voyager was almost fully modeled in Elite Force, and most of the Enterprise-E in Elite Force 2. Those on the Cryptic team that has that game can easily use them as reference. Especially since those maps were far superior than what Cryptic currently has.
Indeed. I'd imagine CBS would provide the original blueprints, too.
The sole purpose of my doodle was to show how to optimize map size whilst keeping room / deck locations canonical. I'm assuming Cryptic can fill in the details anyway.
I also think that if we (Cryptic) were going to be spending time on this, I (personally) would prefer that we made proper layouts that weren't all built at right angles etc.
I think Sumghai's layouts are reasonable, if still a bit overambitious. I would start with a very few, very key, locations, and once we had the basics for each ship type, then we can talk about adding more. As long as the new stuff is on different decks, or can be reasonably separated from the others, it'd be reasonable to add them later.
While the Galaxy was a "civilian cruise ship" I really don't think we lose a ton if things like the barber shop, and a theatre weren't included. You, as the Captain are unlikely to visit all of those places anyway, and as I said above, I'd rather get the basics in everywhere first.
But. . . it's all hypothetical BS at this point anyway. :P
You know, I wonder if CBS would have real blueprints to their ships, outside of the set blueprints. Only official interior maps I've seen are the MSDs, and the most accurate of them was the NX's, which Doug Drexler did of the top-down, which shown all the decks with hallways and turbolifts.
Well hypothetical with a highly fleshed interior, but you could easily do smaller ships as a starting point like you did with the Belfast. Larger ships like the Galaxy, well you might have to keep it to the essentials and have turbolift to those locations nearby. That way when time allows, you could add a little at a time.
Anyhow, I like you to check out my D7 Interior on my Foundry mission. Since it's not published yet, perhaps you can ask Zero to pull the file and take a look at it. It's the Battle of Klach D'Kel Brakt.
If you can't let me know, I'll make screenshots.
Agreed with all of the above - a phased release schedule would be best.
I'm working mainly from fanon-ish deck plans, which in turn were based on canon listings for which decks particular rooms are on.
I do, however, have a digital copy of the Ed Whitefire deck plans for the Ent-D, from when he was asked by the TNG art department to draw up some official plans.
I don't think it's overambitious in the slightest. After all, there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using those interiors in story missions. They visited other ships all the time in the series. Hell, you could even have a fairly simple 5 man Klingon mission entirely based on boarding a random Federation ship. (Actually, that would be badass, do it now!)
Ideally though, how I would introduce them is say, here you have your big main interior with all the important stuff purchasable for $10-$15 depending on the complexity of it, and then the other fluff interior rooms are attached to the C-Store ships.
For example, the main interior of the Galaxy Glass would have; Ten Forward, Engineering, Med Bay, all the Doff Contacts, etc. But if you bought the Galaxy-R it would give you the Barbershop, the theater, a Counselors Office (At which point she would be moved into it), Buying the Venture could give you an armory, buying a Galaxy-X could give you Lance Control. Hee hee hee... :P
It would give you guys an excuse to revisit some of the under performing C-Store ships (Like the Galaxy-R) as well as boost the sales of underselling C-Store items (Again, the Galaxy-R) as well as proving to the fans you aren't going to lockbox everything. :P
Oo.... I would love to play around with those... (The Galaxy is my favorite after all)
This, plus my idea for rooms and hallways to be broken up into "Lego" pieces so that players can assemble custom rooms and corridors would vastly improve the ability of Foundry authors to make missions, and even starship interior maps.
Well, you (Cryptic) definitely can make rooms that are connected/oriented at angles other than ninety degrees, as evidenced by the KDF missions "Second Star to the Right, Straight On 'til Morning" and "Keep Your Enemies Closer". If Neverwinter's Foundry team could add the ability to make room connections at angles other than 90 degrees - like in the aforementioned missions here in Star Trek Online - it would mean that you (Cryptic) wouldn't have to spend as much time building custom, non-ninety-degree-only interior maps for starships should you ever port Neverwinter's room-building tech here to STO's Foundry.
It would also help if authors had the option to use a more complex version of the room-building system in Neverwinter's Foundry: using the components of rooms, which I know was how you guys made most (if not all) of the interior maps in STO and CO. Since I started playing both games, I noticed that each room in an interior map (including hallways) was made up of square blocks, at least when viewed from the top. There were different corner blocks, wall blocks, and open space blocks. I would love to be able to use those to create my own rooms and corridors should the room-building tech from Neverwinter's Foundry ever be ported here. Especially if I can stack rooms to make extra-high areas with platforms and walkways, like the puzzle room in Khitomer Accord (Ground).
I seen them, and they are much better than those made by FASA, which didn't show their understanding of Trek.
If I had access to accurate measurements, I could make deck plans per ship. Because I really want Cryptic to redo the KDF interiors to make it feel like a Klingon ship or feel like you're in a BoP.
Whilst I might not have accurate measurements, I do have the deck plans for BoPs. I can email them to you if you wish.
I'll have to make a BoP Interior inside the foundry as a demonstrator, because their interiors are too spacious and not something you see in a BoP.
In-game.
For instance, the B'Rel is so small it doesn't have a Turbolift.
It's interesting that the B'Rel deck plans features a ladder from a bridge corridor to the captain's quarters. I'd be fine with a KDF toon walking towards a ladder and then being "teleported" turbolift style to the upper area, but it'd be way cool if the Klingon captain could actually climb up said ladder.
The TOS interior has a "functional" Jeffries Tube in it, which allows you to move between decks.
No reason a BoP interior couldn't do the same.
"You shoot him, I shoot you, I leave both your bodies here and go out for a late night snack.
I'm thinking maybe pancakes." ~ John Casey
Context sensitive climbing would be glorious!
Of all the things that STO could steal mechanics from, I think that Arkham Asylum would benefit it the most. Not that we should all become Batman mind you, but mechanics like sneaking, non-lethal manners to take enemies out, and true fist fighting would would be very welcome additions to this game.
But for the one related to this thread; Context Sensitive Climbing!
How this would work, you would have climbable objects work like chairs. I.E. you would click on the ledge/ladder/whatever, your captain would run over and Velcro to it, and instead of the sitting animation, you would get a little animation of your captain climbing until you reached the top.
I like this idea for several reasons, this would allow more organic maps, greater range of strategies for combat, and together with crouch-walk/sneaking, we could have true Jeffries-Tubes! I also see no reason this could not benefit Neverwinter, and I don't think it would be that hard to do as well. The most difficult thing I see is new animations for ladders/ledges.
And could benefit for episodes as well. For Example, like in First Contact when they were discovering something was wrong with enviromental.
In terms of ship interiors, the only use for climbing would be in Jefferies tubes or access ladders as mentioned - this might require tying decks together to allow the the tubes to reach various places.
I do wonder, though, how often Jefferies tubes would be used in personal ship interiors in order to warrant dev time to develop this feature.
So not only is Cryptic to do a massive amount of work, but it's work that can't even be used as mission assets...
Are you kidding? If there were missions that took place on a canonically accuarate ship, it would be a fan favorite in no time!
After making a mission that uses the Defiant interior, I prefer missions in tight spaces by a wide margin. It's more kinetic, less planning based. Difficulty actually matters.
I presume a staggered release schedule would be implemented anyway.
Besides, the whole point of the proposal is to have ship interiors that players can use as "housing", but also mission maps for PvE/PvP and episode missions.
Imagine how much more authentic "State of Q" would be if the player actually got to fight the time-displaced Borg inside a proper Miranda-class interior for the USS Saratoga!