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When will our main characters be able to either be or use TOS effects, screens and such?
wraithxii
Member Posts: 30 Arc User
Hi. Being a long time player, I always longed for what is now the TOS faction. Also, being a lifetime member, I think that it would be great to be able to switch to or be able to use all of the TOS stuff. The communicator and tricorder. The beam up effects and the scan graphics in space. I also like the TOS bridge viewer being used for the cutscenes and the ability to have the NPCs say landing party instead of away team.
My question is, when will this be an option for us?
My question is, when will this be an option for us?
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The effects are tied to whichever Federation "faction" the character was create in. Only characters created in the TOS era will have the TOS effects.
As far as I know "never" is accurate. I think one of the devs (taco or joejing) said at one point that the transporter emote is hard-coded and tied to the faction and it is basically impossible to change it. That's the whole reason "factions" still exist. The game was in it's base written with faction PvP in mind, two entirely separate and non-interactable factions (outside of PvP). But along the way that idea was scrapped and STO became a single faction PvE MMO but the hard coded limits of the two faction system are still in place. That's why inter-faction fleets, teaming and animations and such are such an issue. For instance, if you are a Rom Klingon, your KDF crew will have the Klingon trnasporter emote and the Romulans will have the Romulan one even if they are in one away team.
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There have been too many cases of a dev saying something is impossible for whatever reason and it is implemented a few years later despite previous objections. So it is a matter of is it actually impossible or is the projected sales less than the projected cost of developing it? There are very few things that are actually impossible with enough resources and time. Procedurally generated quests at the quality of a decent STO mission is impossible. The OP's suggestion likely requires some creative programming and the devs wanting to implement it.
Everything can be changed.
P.S. "Hard-coded" doesn't mean something can't be changed, it means you need a programmer to change it rather than an artist.
Seeing as they have access to and (presumably) understand the engine's source code, it really shouldn't be impossible or even particularly challenging. (At worst, it might be a fairly time-consuming process as you have to alter a lot of references to the old code, but there would have to be something very wrong with the engine in order to make it a real problem.)
The thing is, their programmers (and everyone else, really) have bigger fish to fry, and they're extremely unlikely to hire/allow someone else to deal with this. Not a particularly uncommon situation, I'm afraid.
Mind you, some of the other things you mentioned - most notably, inter-faction fleets - are a little harder to figure out. For instance, how do you decide which starbase/embassy style to use if you don't have the distinction between Starfleet and KDF fleets?
Infinite possibilities have implications that could not be completely understood if you turned this entire universe into a giant supercomputer.
Okay. How about it is extremely improbable that Cryptic will bother making such a change between this year and 2117.
Need I bring up once again the introduction of vehicles into Champions Online, and how it somehow killed global chat across all Cryptic games for weeks? Or the "zero-zero" glitch in nuclear weapon targeting back in the early '80s?
When you're messing with legacy code, especially code that's as spaghetti as Cryptic's engine evidently is, any change can have far-reaching repercussions you'd never expect. A change as fundamental as how animations work? You could easily wind up with nothing working. At all.
Please stop. You are perpetuating the negative stereotype that programming is 'too hard' to get right.
And your example(s) actually dis-prove your point because the problems introduced (eventually) got fixed.
In any corporation, there are two factors that affect the concept of "possibility":
1) Can it be done at all?
2) Will it cost less to do this than it's likely to produce in income?
Programming costs money - professionals don't work for the love of the game, they do it for cash. (Everything a company does costs money. It's how corporations work.) Each hour a programmer spends on a given project must be justified in terms of the money the company just spent on that hour. And I just can't see how the hours needed to redo all those animations, and then fix everything that broke when you redid the animations, can possibly pencil out to a "yes" for Cryptic. Not enough people give a tinker's dam about what it looks like when they beam up or use a tricorder. If you put that out as, say, a 500-Zen appearance pack, it'd just sit there, being purchased by only a few fanatics (probably mostly those who have subs, have already bought all the ships they want, and have Zen just piling up anyway). Five bucks a pop is simply not enough. And at higher prices? Would you lay out a twenty just so you can use your preferred transporter? 'Cause I sure wouldn't.
Sure, in the most technical sense, it's "possible" to do this. It's also "possible" to run EvE Online on a smartphone - it's been done - but why would you? Bragging rights just don't matter here.
I like Pie.
P.S. @sophlogimo gets it
Not entirely true. Some STO developers have introduced features that they worked on in their spare time. If I recall correctly, Android Bridge Officer Customization was one such instance. We were originally stuck with Male Engineer Androids and now we can choose the gender and class.
How much so, though? How many people would enjoy playing how much more if this were possible?
And how much of an effort would it be to change something that was ingrained from the beginning?
And would Cryptic have the spare money to invest and later reap profits, or would they have to scale down other projects, thus creating opportunity costs? How big would they be (i. e. what is the customer satisfaction trade off between, say, one less episode and adjustable beam style)?
Nothing is "impossible", true, and maybe some day they'll get around and change it. However, even if it were easy to do (easy as in "not challenging"), it may still take some time. And that's not a given.
Lastly: even if it were possible and viable from a financial perspective - would Cryptic want to? After all, what difference between TOS and FedClassic would there be, apart from the introductory missions?
If I am understanding this part correctly... you are talking about when you're on your ship and someone, lets say Admiral T'nae, talks to you to tell you about your mission or the aftermath. It IS actually possible to change the viewscreen in those windows to reflect your currently selected bridge via the ship tailor. However the only way to get the TOS viewscreen is to have the old Constitution bridge/interior as an option from the old TOS bundle, available for 2000 Zen.
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Actually, entirely true. There aren't any--so far as we know--purely volunteer devs. The Cryptic devs (assuming that the company hires the same way as other companies--and there's no reason to think otherwise) are exempt employees, so they don't have any possibility of overtime; they're not giving up cash in order to add a feature they think should be in the game.
Which, I'm compelled to point out (as a software developer these last 36 years) that none of that extra feature code would end up in the game without company permission, and in general, developers can't cowboy around like that too much without eventual repercussions. Any feature addition costs money--unless you're going to assert that the QA testing happened off the clock as well, and I'd argue that it didn't. The code review costs money--and it didn't happen off the clock, either.
I've been in charge of maintaining a legacy code base for 10 years, and on the whole, I leave it alone. Any changes I make usually involve adding new interfaces to certain classes to modernize them, or very carefully considered changes to peripheral functionality to deal with a feature request from a single customer that all the customers can use. I don't agree 100% with @jonsills that some changes are literally impossible--but there are a lot of changes you could make that would later make you wish you hadn't.
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My character Tsin'xing