One simple little button needed to help the foundry greatly.

voporak · April 2014

Okay okay we all know the foundry interface is a terrible mess. Poor horsey died long ago. But what if we got just a 'Random missions' button to bring up a page of unknown mission into the light? (Yes, I'm talking to you dev guys... just one little button.)

Maybe it's not much, but if we can band together and beg frost or whoever works on the foundry to add this one little thing, I think it'll help authors a lot. It doesn't have to be much, just a single button.

zorbane · April 2014

It's not just a simple button.

They'll have to write the logic to bring up a random list of missions (which should be simple-ish) and create a UI for the missions (not so simple).

kirksplat · April 2014

I would prefer a simple "next" button, so that the lists works like any and every search engine. Imagine if the internet worked like the Foundry UI.

paxfederatica · April 2014

As I've pointed out in several different "random mission button" threads, this would only work as intended once we get (1) campaign support and (2) separation of campaign missions from standalone missions in searches. Otherwise when players hit the randomizer button they have a small but not insignificant chance of getting a mission in the middle of a series they haven't played the first mission(s) of yet.

intrinsical · April 2014

Just a couple of slight tweaks to your suggestion. The "randomness" should be a weighted with (multiplied by) the average rating of the mission, and possibly inversely proportional to the number of plays. In otherwords, the formula should be something like: random() * avg_ratings / log(num_plays + 1)

And being a computer systems designer, I'll suggest that the randomness should be done on a daily (or periodic) basis. Compute a weighted random value for every mission once a day, store it in a database field and have the UI retrieve the top 20. It cuts down on a huge amount of processing power that would otherwise be required and still achieves the goal of providing players with hopefully new and mostly highly rated missions to play every day.

blargskull · April 2014

Simple button yes, but it sounds like you are trying to reinvent the IMDB here.

How many missions in the database? Let's pull a random number from that value;

Rand_mission == Int(Rnd*value)+1

That works and not a lot of math. But you could end up playing this or this!

Now I actually "picked" those as an example but in the url just for fun type seven random numbers after the tt and see what you find. But I am not responsible for the results. My first attempt was a bad TV show titled "Dead on Acting"? After that it got embarrassing.

So my point is that is a another HUGE database with lots of garbage in there how would a random search help?

lincolninspace · April 2014

voporak wrote: »

Okay okay we all know the foundry interface is a terrible mess. Poor horsey died long ago. But what if we got just a 'Random missions' button to bring up a page of unknown mission into the light? (Yes, I'm talking to you dev guys... just one little button.)

Maybe it's not much, but if we can band together and beg frost or whoever works on the foundry to add this one little thing, I think it'll help authors a lot. It doesn't have to be much, just a single button.

Oh I thought you meant a metaphysical button that would turn all gamers into foundry addicts when pressed....

One simple little button needed to help the foundry greatly.

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