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Bringing Back both the Foundry AND the old exploration system.
sirsitsalot
Member Posts: 2,803 Arc User
I'd like to talk about Bringing Back both the Foundry AND the old exploration system, but not in the way most would think.
There is no way that any of us can honestly say that Foundry and the old exploration system were without problems. Foundry kept breaking, and exploration was a smelly mess, and fixing the Foundry was too hard due to lack of available human resources to stay on top of it, and fixing exploration amounted to just removing buggy maps out of the random rotation. The game is arguably better or worse without these mechanics, depending on who you ask.
Recently, I posted a topic entitled "What would YOU add to STO?" The purpose was to get as many answers to that question in one discussion, rather than dredging up a whole bunch of existing threads, many of which would result in necro-posting if referenced. I felt it was important to consolidate as many responses into a current active thread. The return of the Foundry and the addition of exploration have been recurring elements. So I wanted to address them.
Those who are familiar with my posting history know that I am a strong proponent for exploration, and that I was a strong opponent for the removal of the Foundry, which after exploration was removed became the unofficial alternative.
The biggest problem with the foundry was its design. It relied on a database that was isolated from the core game's database. But there was only one game client. When the core game was updated, both the core database and the client were updated accordingly, but the Foundry database was not. That's why it kept breaking. The more the core game was updated, the more incompatible the Foundry database became with the client, making it a bigger and bigger mess for a team that did not have the extra manpower to spare to fix and maintain. Had STO been designed around the notion of user generated content being a core component, A shared database might have been possible, so everything could have gotten updated accordingly. And that is the answer to Foundry's return. As a shard of its own, like Redshirt or Tribble. It would have its own client, synced with the database. And if launched in a functional state, could be left alone to run independently of the core game, not breaking when the core game gets updated.
Nothing done on the Foundry shard would impact Holodeck, Tribble or Redshirt in any way. It would have its own ruleset, and could deliver an entirely interactive storytelling experience that could never be used to game the core system. It would exist to service those interested in the narrative aspect of the STO universe.
Playing on Foundry would be a different experience from the other shards. You won't create a character like normal. The Foundry Author will be required to create a primary protagonist character and his/her ship and that ship's interior map and bridge. When a player on Foundry first starts, the oldest Foundry mission loads and the player experiences it in the role the author created. when the story ends, the layer may react to the author accordingly:
Upvote
Remain Neutral
Downvote
If the player upvotes the author, then the next mission to load will be that author's next mission, if available. The system would always attempt to pull missions from authors the player has upvoted first, then neutral missions, and then downvoted missions. The upvoting or downvoting would only reflect individual players mission load priority and give the author a upvote to downvote ratio for his/her missions. Just because one person may not enjoy a mission does not mean someone else won't, so there should be nothing that impacts priority weighting for anyone other than the voter.
Under a mechanic like this, Foundry would be like experiencing fan fiction in the context of storytelling only.
The old exploration mechanic could be applied by an author to put the player into a random loop, with a potential encounter or plot-centric discovery in the process. Having the travel points being randomized adds a layer of unpredictability to the sequencing of events.
Under this approach, Foundry would be able to run as-is without mandatory updates, and will not need a dedicated coder to monkey with it every time the core game gets updated. And when new elements get added, the Foundry client and database would be updated and should continue to work.
I know that it is unlikely for Foundry to return in any form. This is just an idea of how it COULD return without the issues thst made it so problematic before...
Agree or disagree. No skin off my nose. I'm just an idea guy here.
There is no way that any of us can honestly say that Foundry and the old exploration system were without problems. Foundry kept breaking, and exploration was a smelly mess, and fixing the Foundry was too hard due to lack of available human resources to stay on top of it, and fixing exploration amounted to just removing buggy maps out of the random rotation. The game is arguably better or worse without these mechanics, depending on who you ask.
Recently, I posted a topic entitled "What would YOU add to STO?" The purpose was to get as many answers to that question in one discussion, rather than dredging up a whole bunch of existing threads, many of which would result in necro-posting if referenced. I felt it was important to consolidate as many responses into a current active thread. The return of the Foundry and the addition of exploration have been recurring elements. So I wanted to address them.
Those who are familiar with my posting history know that I am a strong proponent for exploration, and that I was a strong opponent for the removal of the Foundry, which after exploration was removed became the unofficial alternative.
The biggest problem with the foundry was its design. It relied on a database that was isolated from the core game's database. But there was only one game client. When the core game was updated, both the core database and the client were updated accordingly, but the Foundry database was not. That's why it kept breaking. The more the core game was updated, the more incompatible the Foundry database became with the client, making it a bigger and bigger mess for a team that did not have the extra manpower to spare to fix and maintain. Had STO been designed around the notion of user generated content being a core component, A shared database might have been possible, so everything could have gotten updated accordingly. And that is the answer to Foundry's return. As a shard of its own, like Redshirt or Tribble. It would have its own client, synced with the database. And if launched in a functional state, could be left alone to run independently of the core game, not breaking when the core game gets updated.
Nothing done on the Foundry shard would impact Holodeck, Tribble or Redshirt in any way. It would have its own ruleset, and could deliver an entirely interactive storytelling experience that could never be used to game the core system. It would exist to service those interested in the narrative aspect of the STO universe.
Playing on Foundry would be a different experience from the other shards. You won't create a character like normal. The Foundry Author will be required to create a primary protagonist character and his/her ship and that ship's interior map and bridge. When a player on Foundry first starts, the oldest Foundry mission loads and the player experiences it in the role the author created. when the story ends, the layer may react to the author accordingly:
Upvote
Remain Neutral
Downvote
If the player upvotes the author, then the next mission to load will be that author's next mission, if available. The system would always attempt to pull missions from authors the player has upvoted first, then neutral missions, and then downvoted missions. The upvoting or downvoting would only reflect individual players mission load priority and give the author a upvote to downvote ratio for his/her missions. Just because one person may not enjoy a mission does not mean someone else won't, so there should be nothing that impacts priority weighting for anyone other than the voter.
Under a mechanic like this, Foundry would be like experiencing fan fiction in the context of storytelling only.
The old exploration mechanic could be applied by an author to put the player into a random loop, with a potential encounter or plot-centric discovery in the process. Having the travel points being randomized adds a layer of unpredictability to the sequencing of events.
Under this approach, Foundry would be able to run as-is without mandatory updates, and will not need a dedicated coder to monkey with it every time the core game gets updated. And when new elements get added, the Foundry client and database would be updated and should continue to work.
I know that it is unlikely for Foundry to return in any form. This is just an idea of how it COULD return without the issues thst made it so problematic before...
Agree or disagree. No skin off my nose. I'm just an idea guy here.
"There can be no meeting of the minds between two parties
if both parties are not willing to meet in the middle."
-Ambassador Samuel J. Stone
if both parties are not willing to meet in the middle."
-Ambassador Samuel J. Stone
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This discussion has been closed.
Comments
Also isn't this technically an FCT topic?
The Foundry asset Database was pretty much never the issue and it was always the case of the foundry making STO do things it wasn't suppose to be able to do.
Anyone who thinks they have come up with an idea for a system that can't break is extremely, extremely, extremely naive.
Here is how it would actually play out: games break in many unexpected ways. Your proposed system, despite your thinking otherwise, would also break.
The question is, what happens next? I'll tell you: the people who play mainly for the foundry would DEMAND it be fixed. On every livestream they would ask when it's going to be fixed, and keep asking, and keep asking. And understandably so, because they love it.
The problem is Cryptic simply doesn't have the manpower to fix both their normal content (episodes, TFOs, various other things) AND this whole other system. Heck, they don't even have the manpower to fix their normal content now.
The simple fact of the matter is Cryptic decided to remove the foundry not just from STO but ALSO from Neverwinter because they decided they no longer wanted to or simply couldn't support that system. As much as that sucks, it also isn't going to change because someone posted their idea for an unbreakable system on the forums.
Lastly, while I don't mind people spitballing their ideas, the foundry is a sore spot for many folks. And every time someone has some 'brilliant' idea for how to bring it back, which reasonable people realize is NOT going to happen for all of the reasons mentioned above, it's like picking the scab off.
Tl;DR; no, your system would not be unbreakable. It would break. And no, the foundry is not coming back. It's sad, but it's true.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
One of the best things about STO was the Foundry - it provided not only a creative outlet for Star Trek fans, but also a FREE source of massive amounts of content for the game.
Granted the implementation was jinky but the core idea was/is fantastic. If it were completely integrated into the regular game it would be an amazing basis for a content rich exploration system. This is where I differ in opinion from the OP. I don't think we can have a 'separate but equal' Foundry/exploration system. It needs to be part/hard coded into regular game (so that everytime the core coding is updated, the Foundry would be updated as well). However, that would be a monumental feat to accomplish at this point, basically requiring recoding the whole game to weave the Foundry system in as an integral part.
STO definitely needs a good exploration system - and the Foundry, or a Foundry-like UGC system is really the only way to provide enough volume of content to satisfy the requirements for such a concept. Procedurally generated content, such as that in No Man's Sky, can't really do the job and becomes boing quickly.
STO has a unique opportunity to use tools it has already developed such as the Foundry, a galaxy wide map system, and so forth and turn them into an exploration system that would be the envy of other RPG platforms. The trick is getting the whole mess to work - and without ideas being presented and bounced around like Sirsitsalot is doing, it is absolutely guaranteed to NEVER happen.
arcgames.com/en/forums/startrekonline/#/discussion/1203368/pve-content-a-list-of-gamewide-polishing-pass-suggestions
So the question that matters the most is who is going to hire these new employees that are going to have to A: figure out how all of this stuff works, B: get all of his up and running and C: fix it when things do break?
All the cool ideas in the world don't mean anything unless you can address that main issue.
The-Grand-Nagus
Join Date: Sep 2008
Exploration system: This was intended to be a stopgap feature and was not intended to be a permanent thing. This was created in the game's infancy and was not meant to always be a permanent thing. The system behind the exploration mechanic would pull bits and pieces from a pre-defined set of possibilities to give the illusion of a randomly generated encounter. After playing through said system enough you would start to notice certain repeat scenarios and pieces, but with slightly different alien-gen toons or similar. This is much similar to how some seeding systems worked in older games to generate a random encounter. It would pull pre-defined bits of map, along with the other needed resources to generate a random mission. Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds is one example of this. If you ever strolled into the map editor of that game and looked at the various seed codes for certain maps, you would notice several are nearly identical but with maybe small bits interchanged. A river might be on the left side of the map vs the right side or down the line. Given enough potential puzzle pieces to mix and match like Legos, if you have 1000 Legos of different sizes, colors, shapes, etc you can put them together in quite a few different combinations. However if you play with them enough, you will eventually exhaust all of those combinations and have to either add more Legos to the mix if you don't want repeats. The thing that makes adding more pieces hard is you have to define what those pieces are, and take into account how those pieces could potentially be used to avoid issues with previous pieces. The old game Spore is another example of this that becomes blatantly obvious the moment you hit the space stage and fly to enough planets, you will notice how many of the planets are similar or even outright carbon copies of another with slightly different names. The Exploration System in STO could be fun, but was extremely limited in what it could do. Another issue with this feature was that folks frequently got lost in the Star Clusters looking for various duty officer assignments or similar. The doff assignments in these clusters were left because they provided value that could be carried over once the system was removed. Overall it was never meant to be permanent.
Foundry: The problem with the foundry was that the way it was coded, it was essentially a mod tacked onto the code after the fact, even if it was an official mod per say. Like any mod it must be maintained by the creator(s) if it's to stay functional. The game itself continued to evolve and old code was replaced with new as time went on. However the code for the foundry was largely still based on the same code from 2011. As games get updates and old code is replaced with new, eventually mods can break. I have had that happen with several of my mods that I created for older games. In fact my experience with modding was one of the reasons why I was picked up as a Bug Hunter when that was rolling around the first time. With certain mods, sometimes they can become more trouble than they're worth to fix depending on the break, especially with older code involved. As time went on, more and more of the original foundry creators left the company. So now the new folks were essentially being read into a mod created by another person and trying to make something that complex stay functional. I basically took over development for a mod for another game and it took me nearly 2 years to get it working the way I wanted it to. The thing needed to be largely rewritten in a ton of ways. I say that to give an idea that it's not always a seamless transition. The first year was basically learning the mod. Second year was revamping. Depending on how a game gets revamped, certain mods are no longer possible without extreme alterations and similar to keep it rolling. At those points its often easier to scrap and rebuild from scratch. It's not that they wanted to retire the thing, but that it became too cumbersome. Just like an old car motor with too many miles on it, eventually it gives out.
While it sucked, this also opens up the possibility they could do a larger better foundry down the road.
Star Trek Online volunteer Community Moderator