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The Foundry Roundtable Episode 38: Roguish Charm (Or Lack Thereof)
drogyn1701
Member Posts: 3,606 Media Corps
Welcome to the Foundry Roundtable, a weekly podcast dedicated to Foundry missions, mission building and other UGC issues starring Foundry authors Drogyn1701, Markhawkman, Hippiejohn and Greendragoon with guest RogueEnterprise.
We're on iTunes! Subscribe to our podcast by going to https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/foundry-roundtable/id666311364?mt=2
Listen to it here, here and here:
Subjects:
News: Tribble Update, Challenge Winners, Geko Interview
Tech Topic: Limitation
Purity
Please submit tech topics! We want to hear from you.
Missions:
Survival Must Be Earned by Malize
Uncharted by kiloace (aka aceman97)
Cold Winds by drogyn1701
Other Notes:
If you have a topic you?d like to see us cover or would like to be a guest-host, e-mail us at FoundryRoundtable@live.com or follow us on Twitter: @FoundryRoundtab
We're on iTunes! Subscribe to our podcast by going to https://itunes.apple.com/gb/podcast/foundry-roundtable/id666311364?mt=2
Listen to it here, here and here:
Subjects:
News: Tribble Update, Challenge Winners, Geko Interview
Tech Topic: Limitation
Purity
Please submit tech topics! We want to hear from you.
Missions:
Survival Must Be Earned by Malize
Uncharted by kiloace (aka aceman97)
Cold Winds by drogyn1701
Other Notes:
If you have a topic you?d like to see us cover or would like to be a guest-host, e-mail us at FoundryRoundtable@live.com or follow us on Twitter: @FoundryRoundtab
The Foundry Roundtable live Saturdays at 7:30PM EST/4:30PM PST on twitch.tv/thefoundryroundtable
Post edited by drogyn1701 on
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Comments
At least get an export file before the Foundry goes down if you aren't comfortable sending a mission to me. I should be releasing the tool next week and you'll be able to format the mission yourself during the Foundry down time.
That would be me. Sure, I might take you up on that as I still have a lot of dialog and not a lot of time. Stand by. I assume the tool is nearing a ready state?
Yes. I'm still doing it as a "service" for folks rather than releasing the tool so that I can get better confidence in the parsing engine. I want to get about four more authors' missions run through before I release the tool itself for beta testing. The reason for this is that we all have different habits when using the Foundry and the resultant export files reflect those habits.
The good news is that the last few missions I've received from people (most recently from zorbane, pendra, nagorak and erei) have run cleanly, so I think I'm close to having something I can hand off.
PM sent. If anything is going to break your parser, it's probably this.
I have recently been working on having a ground mob defeat the player in combat. I use a kill objective on a group of targs in the background and have another group kill the targs. Meanwhile your toon is surrounded by 2 captain level Klingon mobs which disappear when the targ group is defeated. A friendly group skinned like the captain mobs appears and a pop up dialog mocks you for losing. It needs some play testing.
I wonder when you compare apples to oranges, if you compared the resouces and limitations Roddenberry had creating TOS or even TNG. Does a foundry author have more at their disposal?
Positive feedback for Purity is positive for the foundry in general. It is a triumph for story based foundry authors. Lets hope Cryptic takes more notice of the foundry.
I have been a deviantart user since 2007 and sadly I have to say that site tends to be buggy. You cannot count on it working properly when you need it most.
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
The blue LCARS has dated back to the beginning of STO. For a while in development it didn't even look like LCARS. Later, the blue LCARS came in.
I have a similar scenario where the player looses after being ambushed. What I did was set it up so the player moves into range of a new spawn point just before the attack. When the player respawns, he/she triggers a reach marker which progresses the story.
Creativity isn't about what you can come up with without limitations, it's about what you can do despite limitations. Just ask McGyver.
I don't think the devs that need to notice the Foundry, they're already well aware of it. It's the silent majority that is the player base that is unaware. Where the player base goes, the devs will follow.
I think the problem is the clunky interface. Before I got into the foundry I was turned off by it.
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
Oh and Divide ut Regnus is awesome.
I did notice an anomaly that seems to be part of the base map. there's a "door" in the other side of the wall leading to the transporter room.
My character Tsin'xing
Thanks! And thanks guys for doing the Roundtable - it always has great information!
As for that door - - I'm assuming it's the one on the ramp headed up to the second level on SB39 - that's the dimensional door to the Captain's Table. :P
(Honestly, I just overlooked it since the SB39 map in the Foundry is the old version of the starbase - hence the 'Transporter Room 2' reference in the story since there is no signage on the wall and no door to T'nae's office on the map making it not fit with the current 'official' in-game layout. I did however fix the 'floating' lamp boxes on the upper level when I originally worked on it.
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
One suggestion i offer if you want to disable a Starfeet Vessel, is the Photonic Displacer Module Since its Game Canon i think its a good dialogue technobable excuse
Hmm.... maybe make the map a different level of SB39 than the social zone? It felt a bit off evacuating the Starbase just so you could have a conversation.
My character Tsin'xing
My character Tsin'xing
As I've mentioned several times before, I'm having to deal with a doozy of a limitation in developing "Valley of the Shadow II". The final three maps of the mission - including probably the single most crucial conversation in the entire trilogy - are supposed to take place in New Romulus space and inside the Romulan Command Center. There's just a tiny little problem: We don't have those maps yet.
So, just to be able to finish the mission I had to do some temporary workarounds, which I will call out in the Author's Notes with a heads-up that I intend to remake those sequences once we get the proper maps in the Foundry. First, I made a crude custom mock-up of the New Romulus space map for use in my mission (I actually use it twice, and will need it a third time in Part III unless/until the real map becomes available first). Then, I temporarily moved the Command Center scene to an Odyssey bridge (there is an Odyssey in orbit of New Romulus when you arrive).
Re: Purity
As I mentioned in my recent campaign support thread, if/when the STO Foundry ever gets campaign support, there should be a monthly Featured Campaign in addition to the weekly Featured Episode, and Purity would be the obvious choice for the inaugural one.
Re: Style guide
This is something I'm considering writing for myself. Part of my remastering efforts for GoW has been reformatting the dialogue and other text into a uniform style that's the same across all missions. (For the most part it already is quite similar, but while writing VotS2 I've come up with a few formatting improvements which I want to incorporate into my other missions.)
Re: Cross-faction collaborative series
This is one of the new ideas I've been kicking around, but if a team wants to take it and run with it, be my guest.
Re: Tech topic suggestion
Making the most of 3-dimensional space - particularly the Y-axis - on space maps. For the most part, space gameplay in STO (Cryptic and Foundry missions alike) is like Spock's assessment of Khan's thinking in TWOK: It tends to be fairly two-dimensional, not only because of the 2D Foundry editor, but because of a limitation of the game mechanics themselves: namely, that Y-axis steering in STO isn't what it should be.
It's very difficult and awkward to try to turn your ship straight "up" or "down" toward an objective location at different Y-coordinates. For this reason, it's not a good idea to place mission objectives close together, or even one on top of the other, in terms of X and Z coordinates, but far apart in Y coordinates. (In other words, it's necessary to leave a gradual "slope" between the two, so the player can navigate between them with a minimal amount of fuss.) What are some good ways to compensate for this, and to otherwise make good use of the Y-axis on space maps?
My Foundry missions | My STO Wiki page | My Twitter home page
In my old mission Hijacked! (ST 25th Anniv remaster) you had the following possibilities:
- Abort the mission
- Take down the guards and
++leave the hostages,
++blow up the hostages,
++free the hostages
- Transport to the captured bridge
- Transport a bomb to the captured bridge
- Take down the forcefield and enter via door.
- Kill the pirates
- Presuade the pirates to give up
Some or all hostages could be killed if you pick bad dialog options.
If you jump the pirates without taking down the guards
If you damaged the ship beyond repair during the mission.
And at the end, the admiral's dialog went through the mission checkpoints and gave you the proper evaluation.
Some planning was required, but if you do the whole thing on one map, it is quite simple after you get a hang of the method. The whole thing was based on map dialogs and dialog prompt reached with the usual type conversion. http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=545001
The Long Sleep was the challenge entry mission with the alternate map possibility. And the transporter trick. And completely branched ending. It didn't even get a honorary mention
That's a very good topic. Should have CaptPFDennis on for that as I recall he made a very good space map that you did a lot of things on that required you to go up and down. My own philosophy is to vary the Y coordinates of objects (makes it look more natural), but have any objectives all on one flat plane.
I'll definitely give your mission a play Pendra. I'm always looking to learn how other authors solve things that I'm facing in my own missions.
I suddenly have a great idea for a PVP map.
So if you make Y-axis changes that are going to be beyond the radius of a reach, better plop a flasher.
My caveat to you caveat would be, if you're goint to use space reach markers, you need some kind of a visual indicator to the player, viewable at a distance, of where they should go (planet, nav beacon, station, etc.)
That`s just good advice in general.:o
Seriously though I think it is easier on the player when you make objectives in space maps have only one reach objective instead of having the player scan 7 asteroids as one objective for example make each asteroid its own objective so they show up on the map individually.
Parallels: my second mission for Fed aligned Romulans.
My character Tsin'xing
I thought it was great. Makes it feel like flying a spaceship instead of trundling a car around a track, and also makes the whole thing into so much more of a game of skill, instead of everything being automatic except the fighting. Yet there were about a dozen reviews lambasting the author about that very thing! (Speaking entirely from self-interest, I'd say ignore those people and build your space maps in 3d if you want to, so long as there is something visible to aim at, because I like to play them!)