Ten Forward Weekly 05.05.2021

somtaawkhar · May 2021

From our friends on Reddit
https://www.reddit.com/r/sto/comments/n5ykev/ten_forward_weekly_05052021_tholian_trouble/

Topic: Tholian Trouble
Guests: senior content designer Jesse Heinig and systems designer Jonathan Herlache
Klingon tutorial bridge was made into regular bridge and is the new default.
It's coming soon, along with new story update.
Azure nebula rework:
First thing Jesse did was to make trapped ships' spawns no longer truly random, as it was before, and with each "small" ship rescued you receive increased chance of getting high-value target.
Another was contacts that tell you about tholians' abilities.
They thought about what would reward be. Options explored were: webs, tetryon, hatred for time travel, tholian's rivalries.
Console's supposed to synergise with other tholian stuff.
Reasons for implementation of new things could be anything, from gameplay need to a random want to implement specific desire.
Crystal Prisms were confirmed to being inspired by Prism towers from C&C Red Alert 2.
For console, initial inspiration was a visual they wanted to get, and they built abilities around it.
Some talk about some things from shows and how it translates into the game, how it could bring something new, but also how new shiny thing could be something that was already done several times.
The big problem with temporal recruit was because they had concerns that TOS episodes aged poorly, both in art and it mechanics, and wanted to rework them before unleashing players unto it.
The Vault ensnared rework:
Several streamlining efforts, f.e. in first part you can speed things up by completing the task before time limit, while before there was a hard time limit.
Tholian Vault Weavers now travel in packs and move in such pattern, so that players would get the feeling of more target-rich environment, while getting the same thing.
Warning contact for the nebula.
Dreadnought fight was moved to the nebula to present relatively new experience of totally shieldless fight.
One of things they do during the reworks is improve navigation, by adding markers on both map and screen, as they felt that lot of earlier content is problematic to navigate around.
Jonathan would like to work on and improve the melee system, especially since in old Star Treks it was fairly common.
The problem with storage of character data is not about space itself, that part is relatively minor, but rather about tracking all the character data, and this is when system becomes fragile.
Jesse would like to make more mystery episodes. Also, only half-jokingly, he mentioned lack of musical episodes.
Something else he wants to get done is to have Borg ground environments redone, but that would be huge team-wide effort.

fleetcaptain5 · May 2021

Thanks for sharing.

I have an opinion about three things:

Several streamlining efforts, f.e. in first part you can speed things up by completing the task before time limit, while before there was a hard time limit.

This is a very good change. It should be made to more missions. If players get better at doing things, they deserve to be done faster.

Jonathan would like to work on and improve the melee system, especially since in old Star Treks it was fairly common.

I hope they can make this happen. Melee still feels very clumsy, although some weapons have made it more enjoyable (Voth fangs especially).

Lastly:

One of things they do during the reworks is improve navigation, by adding markers on both map and screen, as they felt that lot of earlier content is problematic to navigate around.

I'm not a big fan of this. I've seen it in the Dyson sphere zone, and it breaks immersion. We don't need big floating pointers everywhere. I've never had much trouble navigating any mission as far as I can remember. I doubt it is a serious issue - and even if it is, I hope it can be solved through other means.

smokebailey · May 2021

The big problem with temporal recruit was because they had concerns that TOS episodes aged poorly, both in art and it mechanics, and wanted to rework them before unleashing players unto it.

Don't make any 'visual reboots', though, please.

crypticarmsman · May 2021

smokebailey wrote: »

The big problem with temporal recruit was because they had concerns that TOS episodes aged poorly, both in art and it mechanics, and wanted to rework them before unleashing players unto it.

Don't make any 'visual reboots', though, please.

I would just like them to get rid of the baked in effect (championed by Al Rivera) that made the graphics look more TRIBBLE because Al wanted it to feel like you were IN the 60s and WANTED the stuff to look lie you were watching it on a 60s era monitor 'over the air.' (Yeah, great logic when it 2004 they did TOS-R on Blu-Ray and all the actual filmed elements look crystal sharp to the point you could see coffee stains on Leonard Nimoy's 'uniform'.)

smokebailey · May 2021

crypticarmsman wrote: »

smokebailey wrote: »

The big problem with temporal recruit was because they had concerns that TOS episodes aged poorly, both in art and it mechanics, and wanted to rework them before unleashing players unto it.

Don't make any 'visual reboots', though, please.

I would just like them to get rid of the baked in effect (championed by Al Rivera) that made the graphics look more TRIBBLE because Al wanted it to feel like you were IN the 60s and WANTED the stuff to look lie you were watching it on a 60s era monitor 'over the air.' (Yeah, great logic when it 2004 they did TOS-R on Blu-Ray and all the actual filmed elements look crystal sharp to the point you could see coffee stains on Leonard Nimoy's 'uniform'.)

Baked in effect?

pottsey5g · May 2021

smokebailey wrote: »

The big problem with temporal recruit was because they had concerns that TOS episodes aged poorly, both in art and it mechanics, and wanted to rework them before unleashing players unto it.

Don't make any 'visual reboots', though, please.

Well they could get rid of that horrible pointless visual static that has no purposed other then to cause headaches and causes the graphic's to look worse then they should. Apart from some poor graphical choices I don't recall there being anything really wrong with those missions. Unless I forgot something the mechanics where pretty good in those missions and so was the story.

chastity1337 · May 2021

somtaawkhar wrote: »

fleetcaptain5#1134 wrote: »

I've never had much trouble navigating any mission as far as I can remember. I doubt it is a serious issue - and even if it is, I hope it can be solved through other means.

You would be surprised how big of an issue it is in games in general.

In Half Life 2 Episode 2, there is a part of the game where you are being chased by a rather large creature called an antlion guard through some tunnels. According to the in-game devloper commentary for this section, play testers spent hours in that section because originally the tunnels let you loop around, and they didn't realize they were just endlessly looping. So the devs had to close the loop off to prevent that from happening.

People are really bad at understanding even simple directions, or map design.

Ugh, yeah, that part can be bad. There used to be a site called Visual Walkthroughs that was a huge help, it had actual screenshots and all. Sadly, that site is now gone, and I'm dreading playing HL2 without it...

But yeah, that part of the game is really tense. Ayx is badly wounded and dying. You have to get past the Antlion to harvest the nectar from the eggs so that Alyx can be saved. It's hard to express, (to someone who never played HL2), just how attached you get to Alyx.

Ahh, Half Life. Arguably the best video game series ever made. The horror, the angst, the hopelessness, the fear, the sadness, the rage, and the savage hammering glee of revenge. And then it all ended, and they left us hanging, waiting on a sequel that is never going to happen.

Life.

rattler2 · May 2021

smokebailey wrote: »

Baked in effect?

The fuzzy screen effect, looks a bit like some static coming through the image, but not enough to hamper vision. There was a toggle for it on the old Connie interior. Don't think its there now.

smokebailey wrote: »

The big problem with temporal recruit was because they had concerns that TOS episodes aged poorly, both in art and it mechanics, and wanted to rework them before unleashing players unto it.

Don't make any 'visual reboots', though, please.

Odds are they'd just improve the quality of the stuff while maintaining the TOS asthetics. So probably better textures and detail work.

legendarylycan · May 2021

somtaawkhar wrote: »

fleetcaptain5#1134 wrote: »

I've never had much trouble navigating any mission as far as I can remember. I doubt it is a serious issue - and even if it is, I hope it can be solved through other means.

You would be surprised how big of an issue it is in games in general.

In Half Life 2 Episode 2, there is a part of the game where you are being chased by a rather large creature called an antlion guard through some tunnels. According to the in-game devloper commentary for this section, play testers spent hours in that section because originally the tunnels let you loop around, and they didn't realize they were just endlessly looping. So the devs had to close the loop off to prevent that from happening.

People are really bad at understanding even simple directions, or map design.

Of course it doesn't help when games use map design like this:

or this:

darknovasc01 · May 2021

Those wouldn't be Doom level maps, by any chance?

legendarylycan · May 2021

No, those would be Might and Magic 6 maps - specifically, two of the most notorious dungeons of that game: The Halls of the Fire Lord and the Tomb of VARN, the latter of which is also the largest in that game and in fact the largest in MANY games, even modern ones - not the only notoriously confusing and labyrinthine levels in the game, of course, but it wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list.

eladonwarps · May 2021

Just a few months ago, when I was rolling a new TOS character for fun, the tutorial clearly had some polish on it already. And in it the film grain was completely gone.

To me that's kinda sad because I thought that added some flavor, and there wasn't even a toggle on or off. But from what I'm seeing, perhaps I'm in the minority.

crypticarmsman · May 2021

smokebailey wrote: »

crypticarmsman wrote: »

smokebailey wrote: »

The big problem with temporal recruit was because they had concerns that TOS episodes aged poorly, both in art and it mechanics, and wanted to rework them before unleashing players unto it.

Don't make any 'visual reboots', though, please.

I would just like them to get rid of the baked in effect (championed by Al Rivera) that made the graphics look more TRIBBLE because Al wanted it to feel like you were IN the 60s and WANTED the stuff to look lie you were watching it on a 60s era monitor 'over the air.' (Yeah, great logic when it 2004 they did TOS-R on Blu-Ray and all the actual filmed elements look crystal sharp to the point you could see coffee stains on Leonard Nimoy's 'uniform'.)

Baked in effect?

It was 'baked' into the texture maps used for the majority of the "Agents Of Yesterday" content when it was released back in 2016. (They mentioned that because some players, myself included, asked for a display option to have the AoY TOS era stuff look just like the rest of the game - and they couldn't because aspects were baked in via the graphics software they used to create the textures and texture maps.)

phoenixc · May 2021

I did a new TOS character a few months back, all of the mechanics worked fine though a few were refreshingly different from the way they do things now (really, variety can be good). I didn't notice the static itself (though the NPC models and textures were a bit crude compared to newer material), however it is possible that I had it toggled off from years ago already if it is an account level setting rather than a per-character one.

Where static is annoying is in the Vault TFO in the current event, and worse yet whenever it is present in it maximum impulse is locked out which makes the scenario drag like the Klingon moon one from the J'Ula stuff, and the tow-the-freighter thing from an old TFO I don't remember the name of offhand.

As for the character data thing, that is definitely true. Storage space itself is cheap and has been for quite a while, it is the complexity and other overhead of the table lookups that can slow things to a crawl.

pottsey5g · May 2021

eladonwarps#6040 wrote: »

Just a few months ago, when I was rolling a new TOS character for fun, the tutorial clearly had some polish on it already. And in it the film grain was completely gone.

To me that's kinda sad because I thought that added some flavor, and there wasn't even a toggle on or off. But from what I'm seeing, perhaps I'm in the minority.

A toggle on and off is ok its the forced on I do not like. The problem is these days most people who watch TOS never had film grain as they watched the remastered versions via streaming or bluray so for them its not added flavor. Its just a distortion that doesn't represent how they watched TOS and makes everything look worse.

phoenixc · May 2021

There really wasn't film much if any film grain back then, the 35mm film they used far exceeded the ability of the film-to-broadcast camera to rasterize it. And static was not a problem for local stations unless they were using an old coat hanger for an antenna or something equally bad.

Seriously, by the 1960s they had even stopped using clay tablets to write on despite what some of the younger generation seem to think nowadays.

foxrockssocks · May 2021

I'd definitely like to see the silly effect gone from AOY episodes. It was very overdone. While I got what they were trying to do, the fact is the show never looked that bad, like they were storing the film in an old bathroom on a toilet paper dispenser.

rattler2 · May 2021

eladonwarps#6040 wrote: »

And in it the film grain was completely gone.

THAT WAS THE TERM I WAS TRYING TO THINK OF! THANK YOU!

legendarylycan · May 2021

corinthalas wrote: »

shadowfang240 wrote: »

No, those would be Might and Magic 6 maps - specifically, two of the most notorious dungeons of that game: The Halls of the Fire Lord and the Tomb of VARN, the latter of which is also the largest in that game and in fact the largest in MANY games, even modern ones - not the only notoriously confusing and labyrinthine levels in the game, of course, but it wasn't meant to be an exhaustive list.

Me, looking at those maps: "Why do I recognize these? I know I've seen these maps somewhere before." So, yeah, thanks for the flashbacks of wandering around semi-aimlessly.

It's flashbacks for you - I'm going to be suffering that in a few days/weeks, since I started playing MM6 again via the World of Enroth mod.

jennycolvin · May 2021

foxrockssocks wrote: »

I'd definitely like to see the silly effect gone from AOY episodes. It was very overdone. While I got what they were trying to do, the fact is the show never looked that bad, like they were storing the film in an old bathroom on a toilet paper dispenser.

Or rather, add an on/off switch - with off being the default - so that people that actually like the "silly effect" might still enjoy it while those that don't will not see it.
It's that easy.

nixie50 · May 2021

the film effect needs to be gone. I half expected the not quite matching space that was around the ship to move in the darker background space.

Ten Forward Weekly 05.05.2021

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