Please make all ship bridges universal ❤

angrytarg · July 2022

I fully accept that new bridges and interiors are off the table. I understand the reasoning behind it. But please please PLEASE just make every already existing bridge universally available.

Ship bridges and interiors are a dead concept, but to some players they still are enjoyable, even though nothing of actual gameplay takes place on those maps. And it is a big disappointment that premium ships or ships like the Cnidarian Defender are stuck with the very ugly default bridge. Since there is no gain or work involved in that part of the game any more, just let us choose any of the already existing ones. I'd love that.

davefenestrator · July 2022

Yes, please do.

Logically if a Tholian ship has been re-worked to have humanoid life support, some chairs and carpeting could have been added at the same time, and if a federation crew is flying a KDF ship, they could have changed the light bulbs and chairs.

This would have been a good one for that "quick development wins" thread awhile back, and might have been mentioned there.

The bridge is not tied to the ship model in any way, it's a separate map. The only link between the ship and the allowed bridges is a list of bridge IDs and a database field to show which ID is currently selected.

Even if right now what is stored is an index into a per-ship list of bridge IDs it's not a huge change to switch that to the actual bridge ID.

davefenestrator · July 2022

corinthalas wrote: »

They can do it, but it requires going back through the database and manually flagging every bridge for every ship. It's a lot of mindless busy work, which is why it hasn't happened. The people who'd be doing it have higher-priority tasks to deal with first.

Exception: bridges that are faction-specific. They don't have the spawns for faction-appropriate crew, so you'd spawn into crew who are hostile to you.

That could make visiting your bridge more exciting, as you battle your way to the captain's chair

It might be a little awkward that you've killed your doff mission contacts though.

evilmark444 · July 2022

corinthalas wrote: »

They can do it, but it requires going back through the database and manually flagging every bridge for every ship. It's a lot of mindless busy work, which is why it hasn't happened.

They would also need to set it up to unlock certain ship-specific bridges when the appropriate ship is owned, such as the JJprise and Vengeance bridges.

angrytarg · July 2022

> @evilmark444 said:
> They would also need to set it up to unlock certain ship-specific bridges when the appropriate ship is owned, such as the JJprise and Vengeance bridges.

In theory, yes. In practice, non of those assets have practical value and are basically wasted anyway, because they're locked behind a premium ship. So there would be little harm in just making them available to anyone - this way, maybe more people would see them, like them and use them.

qultuq · July 2022

> @corinthalas said:
> They can do it, but it requires going back through the database and manually flagging every bridge for every ship. It's a lot of mindless busy work, which is why it hasn't happened. The people who'd be doing it have higher-priority tasks to deal with first.
>
> Exception: bridges that are faction-specific. They don't have the spawns for faction-appropriate crew, so you'd spawn into crew who are hostile to you.

As they have said in livestreams, they can write scripts that automatically update database changes—like a big find and replace script. But it is still a big project that they would feel is unmonitizable—and therefore extremely unlikely to happen.

As you also point out, it would be cool if they made the NPCs faction neutral. If they changed the NPCs at ESD and Qu’nos too we could eventually get to have a “true” alliance. It might give them a chance to fix all the NPCs they lost on Qu’nos in the “Year of Klingon!” 😭🖖

angrytarg · July 2022

keepcalmchiveon wrote: »

as it is, myself and others have paid for interiors in the past. so in the past it was (and still is) monetized.

people should stop making excuses for cryptic.

I would actually take full interiors (the few that exist) out of the equation. They sell those for 20$ after all. The other ship bridges without full interiors though, since the bridge is the insignificant thing about them, should just as well be freely available - unless Cryptic thinks they'll pull in 300$ Mudd bundles...

EDIT: This is only my suggestion to counter the "they have to keep track of which ships are owned" thing. If they unlock owned bridges that's also find.

avoozuul · July 2022

If not at least update the generic alien bridge since it looks very dated now, I know that creating new bridges is too much but a change to a single existing one shouldn't be too bad right.

angrytarg · July 2022

avoozuul wrote: »

If not at least update the generic alien bridge since it looks very dated now, I know that creating new bridges is too much but a change to a single existing one shouldn't be too bad right.

That's why I suggest just unlocking all the existing ones for all ships - virtually no work involved, at least not creating a whole new bridge map.

spiritborn · July 2022

valoreah wrote: »

For the life of me I still cannot understand why Cryptic is unable to make story content that takes place exclusively aboard the ship. There were many, many episodes of the various Star Trek series where the story was within the ships themselves. This would give Cryptic a reason to build more interiors and then sell them in the store. It seems to be nothing more than a lack of imagination to be honest. Very sad because the artists Cryptic has doing interiors are top notch and among the best in the industry in my opinion. Truly a shame they cannot be given more to do with their obvious talent.

By "The ship" I assume the player's ship and they have explained it very clearly and it boils down to they can't currently tell what interior the player is using at any given time and then match the battle maps to said interiors and there's currently interiors that are just the bridge so those would to extended to full ship interiors.

solidshark214 · July 2022

corinthalas wrote: »

They can do it, but it requires going back through the database and manually flagging every bridge for every ship. It's a lot of mindless busy work, which is why it hasn't happened. The people who'd be doing it have higher-priority tasks to deal with first.

Exception: bridges that are faction-specific. They don't have the spawns for faction-appropriate crew, so you'd spawn into crew who are hostile to you.

I have reason to believe that is not, in fact, true. The T6 Risian Luxury Cruiser had all standard bridges available--briefly--at launch. I got the Origin bridge for mine. Either they went to a lot of work for no reason--since I believe it was subsequently restricted to the usual generic bridge--or their usual excuse is... inaccurate.

spiritborn · July 2022

valoreah wrote: »

spiritborn wrote: »

By "The ship" I assume the player's ship and they have explained it very clearly and it boils down to they can't currently tell what interior the player is using at any given time and then match the battle maps to said interiors and there's currently interiors that are just the bridge so those would to extended to full ship interiors.

Not really a big problem if you ask me. Even if a players is using one of the interiors from the Defiant, Voyager or TOS Enterprise, this is a non-issue.

What about those interiors that are just a bridge? It wouldn't be very fair for Cryptic to say "Well you aren't using one those bridges we made interiors for so this content isn't for you then", especially since the "generic" bridge most recent ships have been using doesn't have a connected interior to it. It also wouldn't be good use of resources as there's only limited set of missions that could be done in the interiors as is and most of those are better as Duty Officer Assignments anyway, so specific battle maps would have to built anyway (even if they re used the Geo from the Player interiors).

phoenixc · July 2022

From what they have shown in Ten Forward episodes the scenario design toolchain is very primitive and manual (about what one would expect back in the aughts when the earliest parts of the system were being put together) which means there is no way to easily adapt maps to the particular ship aesthetics. Pretty much everything has to be totally static, from the basic floorplan, the placements, the textures, and probably even the lighting shell.

Any bottle scenario (one happening on the ship) would either have to use some totally generic map that would not change to adapt to the various faction styles, or they would have to make the same mission four times at the very least, (once for each faction style) pretty much from scratch as far as the environmental part is concerned, which would not be very cost effective.

They could develop or buy some new tools to make maps less static and more automatable, but then again, they probably don't think the ROI would be worth it. Also, they would have to clean up their environmental resource directories and organize them in a way that a program could understand, which would be quite an undertaking from what they showed.

conradhauser · July 2022

I remember in the past I could change some bridges
now they seem locked in
one example is my Section 31 Heavy Command Battlecruiser which has the generic dull bridge
I would love to change it to something else.... ANYTHING ELSE!!!!

davefenestrator · July 2022

conradhauser wrote: »

I remember in the past I could change some bridges
now they seem locked in
one example is my Section 31 Heavy Command Battlecruiser which has the generic dull bridge
I would love to change it to something else.... ANYTHING ELSE!!!!

Yep. Maybe it is too much work to offer all bridges including other factions, but they could at least let us choose from (all bridges for our captain's faction) + (all owned non-faction bridges from event, lock box, lobi, promo pack).

angrytarg · July 2022

Indeed. The generic bridge is just so... bland. Anything would be better, even if it'd be the Breen one for whatever reson.

chastity1337 · July 2022

Once upon a time, long ago, there was this tool called The Foundry...

phoenixc · July 2022

chastity1337 wrote: »

Once upon a time, long ago, there was this tool called The Foundry...

From dev comments over the years the Foundry was even more limited than the game's native toolset, and it was not meant for the STO engine, it was for an earlier game and kludged up to be semi-compatible (and those Kludges broke almost every time the game was updated). The only way the Foundry would be cost-effective to maintain would be if they rewrote it from scratch for the actual STO engine, but the cost of that rewrite would be too much to justify.

And personally, I think that if they put resources into making new tools that they would be better off investing in the dev toolkits instead of player toolkits. On the other hand, some kind of basic interior customizer/builder tool for players could spur interest in interiors in general and get people to buy bridges more often.

phoenixc · July 2022

corinthalas wrote: »

phoenixc#0738 wrote: »

chastity1337 wrote: »

Once upon a time, long ago, there was this tool called The Foundry...

From dev comments over the years the Foundry was even more limited than the game's native toolset, and it was not meant for the STO engine, it was for an earlier game and kludged up to be semi-compatible (and those Kludges broke almost every time the game was updated). The only way the Foundry would be cost-effective to maintain would be if they rewrote it from scratch for the actual STO engine, but the cost of that rewrite would be too much to justify.

And personally, I think that if they put resources into making new tools that they would be better off investing in the dev toolkits instead of player toolkits.

Porque no los dos? You act like the two are mutually exclusive. They aren't. Well-designed tools for developers *ARE* tools for modders, too (which is what the Foundry effectively was). The staying power of Elderscrolls games is proof of just how effective and valuable that can be to a game's longevity in the market. But, of course, you have to have people who know how to develop good tools and the engine to which those tools are married needs to be robust enough to actually support such an endeavor. And I get the impression neither of those are true. Not for Cryptic, and not for STO.

True, if they developed new dev tools they could make new player mod tools at the same time if they chose to. So far there have been some signs that they are either doing some engine tuning or at least preparing to do that, but no mention of any tool development at all (it would have to be a mention, it is not something that would be visible from the player side, unlike the side effects that engine and database tinkering has, so it is possible they actually are doing it and we would never know it, though I doubt they are).

The engine itself seems to be reasonably robust since it has been successfully adapted for at least three games of radically different genres and has seen incremental improvements over the years, so new tools would probably not be a problem for it if they are developed right.

Any roadblocks are more likely to be business ones rather than technical. For instance, PWE was not one for investing a lot into already running games, and the way the announcement of Embracer Group's acquisition of Cryptic was worded was pretty much corporate speak for the same sort of minimal investment treatment like PWE did going forward.

If by some miracle Embracer (or even Gearbox) did cough up some funding for dev tools they probably would be stingy about it so unless the tool developers were fans of the foundry enough to do the work on the side on their own time I doubt those mod tools/new Foundry system would ever get written. If Cryptic plans to make new dev tools using internal resources, then that is probably a ways off since their programmers seem to be rather busy already.

spiritborn · July 2022

sirsitsalot wrote: »

chastity1337 wrote: »

Once upon a time, long ago, there was this tool called The Foundry...

Which we wanted to be able to use to create custom interiors, but were NEVER able to.

Well you could sort of do it, towards the end sure it was technically an exterior map that you had to use but within the limits of "have to use premade assets" you could done quite nice interiors, I remember being able to make a decent enough "New Romulus Senate room" with it on project I was never able to publish due the Sunset.

Please make all ship bridges universal ❤

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