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Suggestions for truly massive events
psiflare
Member Posts: 0 Arc User
A big thing I think we're missing from STO is the "massively" in MMORPG: while social areas get pretty large we're ultimately bound by instance caps in any real missions. (Credit goes to an old Priority One Podcast I was listening to.) For most missions I think this is OK, but STO could get a real boost (and press) from massive in-game events.
Where is our B-R5RB? or perhaps more appropriately our Wolf 359? I want to participate in major battles that "matter". As a software engineer I understand there are almost certainly years-old architecture limitations that prevent a multi-thousand player instance in STO, but I don't think that's necessary.
Instead, what about weekend-long events with persistent shard-wide state that affects other PvE instances in real time? The successes or failures in each instance make it easier or harder for other instances in other queues.
For example: Iconians are attacking the heart of the Federation! (I don't really care who the bad guys are)
Earth:
* ESD has red alert lighting, environmental effects (rumbling? explosions outside windows?), different NPC chatter, and additional security officers
* An instanced (10-15 player) PvE space queue around ESD must defeat Iconian ships. As instances succeed (or if enough succeed per hour), it will become easier in real time for the ground queue below. If they fail, ESD could even shut down vendors/consoles.
* An instanced (20 player) PvE ground queue on Earth or ESD is tasked with defending / maintaining orbital defenses. If they succeed, in the space queues ESD gets added phasers, torps, etc.
Red alerts:
* Iconians sometimes send an ultra-dreadnought to Earth, generating a sector Red Alert to intercept it in sector space.
* Rather than a very large instance, the success/failure of each red alert instance affects the HP/healing of the dreadnought or presence of support ships in all the other instances.
At the end
* Accolades for participation
* If the Iconians were defeated all participants get a special title and bonus marks package
Extra credit: Intercept Iconians in sector space
* Completing sector space encounters reduce the number/difficulty of ships attacking planets
Extra credit: Other planets
* If they're losing, the Iconians will move ships to another less-defended planet.
* At the end of the weekend, minor systems like Andoria could be "lost" until the next event, e.g. you can't on Andoria anymore; entering the system gives you space combat w/ the bad guys.
What do folks think?
I am sure the devs are already booked for X2, and I know implementing this would not be easy, but maybe season 10?
Where is our B-R5RB? or perhaps more appropriately our Wolf 359? I want to participate in major battles that "matter". As a software engineer I understand there are almost certainly years-old architecture limitations that prevent a multi-thousand player instance in STO, but I don't think that's necessary.
Instead, what about weekend-long events with persistent shard-wide state that affects other PvE instances in real time? The successes or failures in each instance make it easier or harder for other instances in other queues.
For example: Iconians are attacking the heart of the Federation! (I don't really care who the bad guys are)
Earth:
* ESD has red alert lighting, environmental effects (rumbling? explosions outside windows?), different NPC chatter, and additional security officers
* An instanced (10-15 player) PvE space queue around ESD must defeat Iconian ships. As instances succeed (or if enough succeed per hour), it will become easier in real time for the ground queue below. If they fail, ESD could even shut down vendors/consoles.
* An instanced (20 player) PvE ground queue on Earth or ESD is tasked with defending / maintaining orbital defenses. If they succeed, in the space queues ESD gets added phasers, torps, etc.
Red alerts:
* Iconians sometimes send an ultra-dreadnought to Earth, generating a sector Red Alert to intercept it in sector space.
* Rather than a very large instance, the success/failure of each red alert instance affects the HP/healing of the dreadnought or presence of support ships in all the other instances.
At the end
* Accolades for participation
* If the Iconians were defeated all participants get a special title and bonus marks package
Extra credit: Intercept Iconians in sector space
* Completing sector space encounters reduce the number/difficulty of ships attacking planets
Extra credit: Other planets
* If they're losing, the Iconians will move ships to another less-defended planet.
* At the end of the weekend, minor systems like Andoria could be "lost" until the next event, e.g. you can't on Andoria anymore; entering the system gives you space combat w/ the bad guys.
What do folks think?
I am sure the devs are already booked for X2, and I know implementing this would not be easy, but maybe season 10?
Post edited by psiflare on
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Comments
Generations Force
"Not your every day hero."
This is all part of the Cryptic QA checklist.
I looked around and couldn't find it. I did find something close that is very cool though!
Rayzee
excellentawesome#4589
torgaddon101
raeat
how will you even things out for my LCDR in the T2 Constitution and My Boyfriend's Vice Admiral in the Jem Hadar Carrier? just balancing gameplay would be a nightmare, programming the gates would be a nightmare and effecting gameply for everyone everywhere... welll I'f I only had a couple of hours a week to play, and this TRIBBLE prevented me from my roleplay/exchange interaction/clearing my invetory... I'd be ROYALLY PISSED.
(I couldn't resist.)
Seriously, I'd like to play Star TREK, not Star W.rs I don't mind various STFs and events within STO. (In fact, I enjoy many of them.) But there's got to be a way to showcase new missions which aren't solely pew-pew.
Even if cryptic really dont care about this, i dont think players like to play in those conditions.
^ This ... +1000!
The Dyson Ground Battle Zone is usually not to crowded to cause issues, though sometimes if you get a few to many players on one Dino, it can slow things a bit ... BUT ...
The Undine 'Space" BZ is already a total Chug Fest, on all but the Highest end systems! Even with only a few ships, most of the time your weapons are invisible, and the game goes into "skipping mode" but if you have to many BFAW spamming cruisers and Undine Space Snot Balls, the game almost stops altogether!
It just would not work!
The advantage of multiple instanced queued events is that they can be tiered by level, in the way that there are different Starbase 24 queues for levels 10-19, 20-29, etc. I don't think there's a reasonable way to balance a Lt. Cmdr and VA when there's such a wide power band just at VA.
Part of the intended appeal here is that could affect gameplay for many people by blocking parts of ESD -- going back to the "taking part in [stuff] that matters]" -- but the other side of this is that if you don't want to participate there are other stations you can go to, like DS9. Of course ESD was just an example too; it could just as easily be Starbase 24.
I agree that STO completely abandons many of the things that make Star Trek uniquely Trek, and I am sad for it, however:
1. I'm aiming for something that could have wide player appeal, which even for the STO crowd sounds like combat.
2. Realtime shard-wide persistent state need not be used for just combat -- but combat is a way to get the technical foundation in the door. It could just as easily be used to add multiplayer elements to a diplomatic arc, hilarious subspace anomaly episode, etc.
"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
Now I don't know the game's internals so I can't say for sure, but my suggestion is explicitly designed to work within a system that can only handle small-scale instances.
We already have battlezone maps that support 15 ships. It's true that they have client performance issues, but I'd bet those are primarily related to the complex Dyson environments and the 8472 space mucus -- I doubt we'd have those same issues with a sparse space map and 15 Borg ships.
All I'm asking for is a separate layer that keeps track of a miniscule number of variables, (e.g. ESD ground queue success rate, ESD space queue success rate) and then for the server-side instance engine to query 1-2 of those when deciding what NPCs do.
I'd buy this if not for the fact that the client performance issues aren't limited to the "complex Dyson environments and the 8472 space mucus" but are reported in other places as well.
It doesnt matter if you split the event in instances of 15 people. Right now, you have fleet alerts, that sometimes are a hell to play for the same reason. And i am talking about the normal ones, the ones that are splited in instances of just 5 players.
Its not only about the ammount of player ships in the screen, it is about the ammount of graphics in the screen. This includes the non player ships and all the effects around.
Even the ESD or static instances have fps issues... as far as i know -> CE, fleet alerts, tau dewa, undine battlezone, voth battlezone (yes people forgets there are issues there as well), some stfs in minor grade but still, and more places i cant remember, even Risa when the sun rises becomes a bit struggling.. i mean, at least the sector-space travel is still holding on.. but i dunno for how much time lol.
This game is almost 5 years old, and its incredible that we need to play eating these issues.. its jut not right lol.
Point taken.
However I realized what I'm actually trying to get at is that all of the added work would be on the server side, and should be trivial from a performance standpoint.
For clients it's just more of the same; the server says what NPCs are doing just like right now without affecting perf either way, but players get new gameplay potential.
Also since I'm suggesting primarily reusing existing assets there shouldn't be a massive file size change.
And therein lies the idea's fatal flaw.
Players in Champions Online liked the Blood Moon events. Cryptic COULD do something along those lines for this game, I wish they would.
And bring back exploration and Terradome.
It would go a long way to improve immersion if in-game events actually changed things semi-permanently. If you could go to New Romulus to check on the Exchange, and find it overrun with enemy forces. If we had a galaxy-wide Battlezone mechanic in the future when the Iconian War reaches its full potential, and all STO players helped to take planets and defend our own.
Would it be inconvenient? Oh yeah. But that's kind of the point. Convenience does not equal fun. Putting a bit of risk into it would make things a lot more interesting. Also, it would help a lot if rewards were focused on less. Seriously, we should be running STFs because they're fun, not to get dilithium. That way, the inconvenience wouldn't matter as much, because there wouldn't be dents in your grind, and you'd be able to participate in an actual one-time event that would play out in real-time.
An orthogonal problem does not constitute a flaw in the idea.
Client perf is probably a bigger issue, sure, and should probably be higher on Cryptic's priorities, but that doesn't mean that other things can't happen later -- or even sooner. It's plausible that this is a "systems" and "environment art" proposal versus the "client" perf issue with separate humans working in each of those areas; there's no reason why the artists should be doing nothing while the client programmers are working on perf.
Exactly.
I'd also like to see our in-game actions affect the STO lore, like if a war was won that would change the next Featured Episode, or if enough exploration missions (RIP...) were done in an area then they'd actually build out content for that area.
Right. Yes. Precisely. It'd be tricky, to be sure -- they'd have to keep an eye on major player events and be ready to adapt their stories on the fly -- but I think the devs are up to the task. Although...lead times on episodes seem to be much longer than what one would think, so that could cause issues...
I don't mind grinding, but with the current STF it feels like that movie groundhog day , doing the same over and over from begining to end
I honestly wouldn't mind as much grinding if I felt that my contribution was counting to something longer term.
Communal goals could be a thing too, If the event lasts for a week, then whatever conditions for success would could to build up over that week, My efforts on Monday still count on friday
I know its a very different game, But not too long ago Battlefield 4 ran a few community goals ( Achieve X number of Y action in game, collectively Could not something similar be devised here?
Say, If the community plays a lot and works together, everyone gets an EXP bonus, or something
15 Borg Cubes
15 Players
except...
those 15 players are all carriers.. so now you have 12 fighters per carrier+195 things to plot
now the carriers all fire the Romulan hyper torpedo... another 45 elements to plot
oh, and those fighters are all elite scorpions, so thats another 180 elements to plot.
thats 435 objects all moving, we are not yet talking beam arrays, cannons tractor beams ect.. if I were the server i'd say TRIBBLE it and kick all connections
In the blood moon events you fought basically in close combat. There were no extra effects or things that could lead to the limits of the engine. And there were only a bounch of wolfes around in every spot. In STO you have space ships firing a lot of weapons with their own effects, explosions here and there, a lot of enemy players shoting at you, the instances are far bigger than CO.. i dunno i think the graphic load is bigger in STO than in CO. And for some reason, im not sure, but i played CO for about 3 years and the game engine was far better than the one STO is using.. and even then, you had effects dissapearing in some instances as well..
Something likethat in STO would be fun.
Fortunately, you are not a server.
With the caveat that I am not a game programmer...here's some more quick math:
Given that even inexpensive 5-year old computers can do multiple billion floating point operations per second, any halfway decent modern computer should be able to simulate thousands (if not tens of thousands) of simple physics objects, and while things get trickier on the rendering side clients should at least render hundreds on screen at a time. Note this also means STO servers can run many instances per physical computer.
If you're worried about bandwidth, don't. Say an object event takes an extremely generous 12 bytes of location (4-byte floating point numbers for each of 3 axes), 12 bytes of rotation, and 4 bytes for identification. Dumb objects like torpedoes, beams, etc. follow a straight path and therefore only need data sent twice, once on construction and once on destruction. Say active objects need an update 10x/second since the rest is interpolated on the client and note that even Scorpions are only simulated as single physics objects so you probably realistically have < 250 active objects to track. So 250 active objects * (12 + 12 + 4) * 10/sec * 8 bits/byte is 560kbps. Adding in 250 dumb objects created+destroyed/sec is 48kbps. In grand total we have 608kbps, which is less than you need to watch a YouTube video and a fraction of the pitiful definition of broadband in America, before any fancy tricks or compression that probably shave off more than half of that.
Lastly, the numbers I suggested are just illustrative. If 15 is too many, knock it down to 5. They're not the point.
Here's an observation based on what actually happens in-game: Y'all can debate object counts all you want, but we already know the limits and how things work when close to those limits. (Limits being "pretty low," and performance near them being "abysmal.")
You can spew "should be able to" from now until DOOOOOOOOOOMsday and it won't change the fact that we've already got all the evidence we need to know how it works outside the "ought to be able to" Fantasyland. Sure, maybe it could work- with enough engine tweaking to have built a new game.