STO Environment lead for you

swalldev · March 2014

I wanted to stop by in the art forum and say hello!

As the title says I'm the lead environment artist on star trek. I am here to help with environment related issues. If you have any, comments, concerns, issues, or things that need to be fixed that are related to environments please include screenshots with descriptions.

I will try to tackle what I can and divvy it out to my team.

Swallrus

centersolace · March 2014

Let Taco get his saucy paws on Spacedock and DS9. They need some of his spicy lovin'.

thegreendragoon1 · March 2014

Greetings and welcome.

My only comment would be to keep a thought for the Foundry. It's been quite some time since we've seen any new maps or environmental assets added. Things we can use to build interiors such as walls, doors, connectors and such would be very much appreciated.

artan42 · March 2014

centersolace wrote: »

Let Taco get his saucy paws on Spacedock and DS9. They need some of his spicy lovin'.

I second this

.

And new bridges.

Sorry if this sounds a bit repetitive, but we all like bridges

.

Infuse some of that Dyson and Origen magic into the rest :P.

xigbarg · March 2014

Any chance of random easter eggs to be generated on random planets?

castsbugc · March 2014

Would it be possible to get a 'blank' map created for the foundry? By blank I basically mean a featureless box that we could use for the creation of custom interiors on. perhaps one capable of displaying a starscape in the backdrop layer or planetary atmosphere. I will not pretend to know off hand how complex this is, but as far as baked in terrain all that would be requested would be a solid floor that is flat.

Over on your hey all thread I mentioned a foundry map that needed looking at for pathing. That map is the Argelius II map, and it needs a pathing check, but there is also an issue with it as well.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=237419763
this picture is from the map editor, note the character when it spawn is pointing 'south' towards where the ramp downwards is

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=237419988
This is what the actual view is. Those doors block ingress to the rest of the map. Now you can set a spawn point elsewhere on the map to use either one part or the other, but if you wanted the whole map, you are out of luck.

are lighting objects your provenance? if yes then there might be questions/requests later but

umaeko · March 2014

I've felt for quite some time that the Romulan shipyard really doesn't live up to its analogs in the other two factions.

We really need someplace space-based that would show up Romulan ships in all their sweeping grandeur similar to the ESD or Qo'nos shipyards. Good inspiration that could be taken from is the character creation environment for Romulans, and the large viewports of the Flotilla interior map (which us able to see ships outside).

kirksplat · March 2014

Repost: Welcome. These are some long-standing requests from foundry authors:

1. A big empty map (just black space) that we could use to make custom interiors and sets, instead of building in the sky of a ground map. Or some of us have built in the black space of an interior only to see the maps destroyed when an artist edits the map down.

2. Someone, anyone, to apply a few seamless textures to flat primitives so that we'd have better floors and ceilings. Here is the long-standing request.

3. A map of shallow water (that we'd build on top of.

New:

There was also a list of our top ten asset requests that we made after lots of Foundry authors voted on it. I believe Taco has that list. It mostly includes a lot of simple things.

jauhn82 · March 2014

Welcome!

thegreendragoon1 wrote: »

My only comment would be to keep a thought for the Foundry. It's been quite some time since we've seen any new maps or environmental assets added. Things we can use to build interiors such as walls, doors, connectors and such would be very much appreciated.

kirksplat wrote: »

1. A big empty map (just black space) that we could use to make custom interiors and sets, instead of building in the sky of a ground map. Or some of us have built in the black space of an interior only to see the maps destroyed when an artist edits the map down.

Really anything that allows us to better create better environments within the Foundry; which includes but not limited to Control of lighting on any/all maps, and/or the ability to put in hazard zones that can effect player. (EX: have a map wide effect that makes it like space so player will need space suite to survive). I am not sure if this counts as an "STO Environment" but it kinda of does seem like an "Environment effect" of sorts.

nikkojt · March 2014

I wouldn't mind a few more starship interiors, and interior pieces (most notably faction-specific tech gubbins such as warp cores), for the Foundry, as well as the ability to add a Red Alert effect to starship interiors.

More generally, I have a question: why are maps, especially starship interior maps, scaled so as to be the right size for taller characters but too big for normal-sized ones? I get the whole "accommodating everyone" thing, but really, it's the wrong way round. Really tall characters should look too big for a chair, because the in-universe guy who designed that chair would design it to fit the most common size.

lordhavelock · March 2014

swalldev wrote: »

I wanted to stop by in the art forum and say hello...

Welcome aboard!

drogyn1701 · March 2014

Welcome to the forums!

I'd like to join my colleagues in putting forward some Foundry issues. My take on your post is you were looking for environmental related bugs to squash. We have a great Foundry bug thread here: http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=839541

It includes some environmental issues such as custom space lighting not functioning and on the old Qonos Great Hall maps, which are also still used in Cryptic missions I think, there are parts of the map geometry that seem to be tagged as "high detail objects" so that people using lower graphics settings with that option turned off will see that geometry disappear. Here's a picture.

Again, welcome to the forums. We're glad to hear from you.

eazzie · March 2014

Hi and welcome to the forum swalldev. I just hope you know what your letting yourself in for here on the forum. Good luck

captz1pp · March 2014

Shouldn't the iconian gate on New Romulus look different from the purple ones, seeing as its millennia older.

Also will we see some new home worlds like Teller prime, or Gornar. Or are you just gonna improve existing ones?

oldkhemaraa · March 2014

Welcome Swalldev!

Ok.. let me run this by..

Yesterday in game we had a little dance party going at Drozana station... untill the troll got so intense with the abuse and exploiting the bug with the party amps we decided to retire from the field and take to social event to a private bridge instance.

We had something like 30-40 folk hanging out before the gathering was so obscured by apparently smoke grenades, excessive use of party amps including what is apparently a further exploit work around that some folks have discovered that allows them to be placed well with in the supposed distance limits.. I'm really hating those stupid toys, and party popper toys. We moved onto a private ship instance(s) I hosted up on my Korath Temporal bridge, and the over flow was picked up by another player.

We ran right up against the 20 person limit in ship instances. It was really frustrating.
Here we had a fairly massive in game social gathering happening. People actually participating!
The DJ hosting the show was in favor of moving the party, so the party got moved. BUt we did have to break the party up in to seperate groups... when it was done, we'd lost some participants. My ship was full up, and the over flow was a mear 5 folk on another ship.. it is difficult to achive that group rapport when you group cant be together in the virtual setting.

Can we please see private ship instance limits raised to say.. 50 player pop cap? Now, we would all love to be able to do our socializing dancing parties in the games existing social zones.. but we don't have bouncers so, we are going to have to make do. In a private instance where if someone is being disruptive, they can be removed by the host of the instance. In public instances.. we are stuck with them.

Um,,,,, enviorment... do social toys ie: party poppers, subspace party amp fall in your dept?
If the Party amps do.. jump in game and observe the effects of the party amp... and then read the tool tip. Those things are BROKEN! Be nice to have the number one troll toy fixed..

organicmanfred · March 2014

Gruess Gott and welcome in the madhouse

Ahm... What happened to the former lead EVO Artist?

nagrom7 · March 2014

Good, fresh meat.... I mean welcome.

tacofangs · March 2014

Swallrus isn't so fresh. He's one of the few people on STO who has been here the longest.

organicmanfred · March 2014

So we talked to the henchmen the whole time?

Good to see that Swallrus passed the P.R. test and is allowed now to speak directly to us

psiameese · March 2014

SWall made the TOS interior for STO. Glad to see you are still on the team!

centersolace · March 2014

tacofangs wrote: »

Swallrus isn't so fresh. He's one of the few people on STO who has been here the longest.

You guys need to visit more.

mightybobcnc · March 2014

If we're going to talk about environment art, there is a bug with the giant borg probe mesh(es) in the Defera Invasion Zone. The collision detection changed on it some weeks or months ago and it has created a bunch of invisible walls underneath it that make it impossible to finish some of the zone-wide missions without doing an instance hop because some of the objectives spawn behind said invisible walls.

centersolace · March 2014

psiameese wrote: »

SWall made the TOS interior for STO. Glad to see you are still on the team!

We need more of that stuff.

adverbero · March 2014

Nice to see devs on the forum

And if you had anything to do with the Earthspacedock stuff I've been seing video clips of on tribble, then thanks a bunch because that is a great map for the Spacedock

I'd also chip in on the foundry, would it be possible to get access to the Origin Bridge, and maybe the new interior styles?

rhakathered · March 2014

Greetings and thanks for the thread.

There's a long-standing graphical issue with the use of the old Qo'Nos map (it is currently used in the mission "Blood of the Empire" and available in the foundry), namely that the middle part is a giant gaping hole of nothingness. Some mesh seems to have disappeared (the colission still works fine, though).

Picture:
http://s802.photobucket.com/user/Mewmaster101/media/screenshot_2014-03-07-20-14-32_zps9dc3b7ea.jpg.html?t=1394241923

Relevant thread (the latest one I could find):
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1045091

I hope you can do something about this, because it's seriously annoying and near impossible to navigate.

markhawkman · March 2014

rhakathered wrote: »

Greetings and thanks for the thread.

There's a long-standing graphical issue with the use of the old Qo'Nos map (it is currently used in the mission "Blood of the Empire" and available in the foundry), namely that the middle part is a giant gaping hole of nothingness. Some mesh seems to have disappeared (the colission still works fine, though).

Picture:
http://s802.photobucket.com/user/Mewmaster101/media/screenshot_2014-03-07-20-14-32_zps9dc3b7ea.jpg.html?t=1394241923

Relevant thread (the latest one I could find):
http://sto-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=1045091

I hope you can do something about this, because it's seriously annoying and near impossible to navigate.

I think the problem there is actually not the texture. It' show objects disappear with distance. For some reason this part is glitched to act like it's in the distance out of sight.

drogyn1701 · March 2014

I tested that a while back. There are parts of the map geometry that seem to be tagged as "high detail objects" so that people using lower graphics settings with that option turned off will see that geometry disappear.

captz1pp · March 2014

Could we have a bridge made for the Vulcan sci ship?

mightybobcnc · March 2014

This is just my opinion but I think that the 2 giant banners we can add to the Fleet Starbase with one of the special projects (museum quality?) are too long. I can stand under them and my character's head clips through them which is very immersion breaking. Slice 10 feet off of them so that they aren't nearly dragging on the floor.

STO Environment lead for you

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