Taken from Darren_Kitlor’s “PROJECT: Starfleet & KDF Intelligence versus Section 31 and other Fringe Groups”:

1) Urban Environments

Urban landscapes (while not the final frontier) are curiously absent in Star Trek Online. These environments would be remarkably suited for diplomatic and intelligence matters (and such environments exist in Champions Online). A solid question exists – how do you create a city at random?

A temporay solution, until the community finds something better, are developing an array of tilesets for major factions (i.e. Klingon Buildings, Romulan Buildings, Federation Buildings, Cardassian Buildings). Assets already exist in the game for many exterior building structures.

The trick with Urban environments is that they are both horizontal AND vertical spaces.

To add building diversity, structures could have catwalks and stairs, allowing players to move between them (and possibly avoiding detection, i.e. aggro distance).

There are a number of missions that could fall under the umbrella of intelligence/espionage: from sabotage/theft/hacking, to convincing contacts, to personal level intelligence gathering.

How can multiplayer be implemented?

3) Faction Cities

Using art assets already in-game or developed in part 1 (and developing just enough to give the “feel” of iconic cities in Star Trek), the developers could quickly roll-out iconic cities from the series.

Examples of canon Capital City Layouts:

* Old Quarter – Qo’noS – Klingon ( – see here – )
* Administrative District – Romulus – Romulan ( – see here – )
* Capital City – Bajor – Bajor ( – see here – )

Many development concerns exist: in-game performance issues, lengthy development time, and whether it’d actually be useful to gameplay/socialization/etc. Here’s some ideas (whether used already or not – just as background).

Performance &/or Development Time Tricks:

* Occlusion – hiding objects behind other ones (fencing/siderails as in Qo’noS).
* Skybox – using a pre-rendered texture box to give the illusion of depth.
* “Invisible” walls – used to prevent access to unfinished areas.
* LoD buildings – used in conjunction with 3, LoD can give the appearance

Note: Using existing assets will help speed up city development.

Suggested wards, burroughs, or cantons to each city:

* Trade Ward: (culture specific and faction-common items, exchange)
* Bars/Clubs: (social hubs)
* Embassy Row: diplomatic missions from your faction (also where intelligence assignments can be given by factions).
* Starport: (ship items, courier/dignitary transport from faction official)
* Instanced housing: players could have a private (on planet) meeting place, perhaps with a pre-rendered skybox of the city out the window, assuming the faction has property laws.

With the ability to eventually create our own custom environments, I think it’s about time to propose a project for UGC creators to build a few cities. Darren’s thread has a few ideas in creating urban (environments) but I thought I’d open it up to suggestions on cities that should be made first. Obvious choice for Earth are:

• San Francisco, US
• Paris, France
• Any suggestion that wins the most votes on Earth (New York City, Las Vegas, etc)

Unfortunately, we should only pick one Federation allied city and work on that until completion (unless we have the manpower to have multiple Federation cities being worked on). Having one city complete and ready to be used for mission making would prove to be a useful benchmark in the creation of other popular locales. It would be rather embarrassing on our part to use cities that are half-baked or mostly incomplete for the variety of missions that will be created for them.

But I also propose we not forget our Klingon counterparts/colleagues. We should also begin a Klingon city proposal. Since there is hardly mention of Klingon cities and even fewer actual pictures of Klingon cities, collaborators will have to get a little creative.  I have included a list of cities named in Star Trek lore from Memory Alpha so we can vote on the particular city we should work on first.

Cities of Qo’noS

• First City (capital)
• Qam-Chee
• Quin’lat
• Tong Vey
  

Anyone interested?

Hi all,

I really don’t like the idea of policing your posts to the blog. They are your posts, and this is your site. Nevertheless, please don’t violate the non-disclosure-agreement on the blog. If you are a closed beta tester, do not post screenshots, videos, or any privileged information about the Foundry toolset.

If you do so, not only do you risk losing your tester access with Cryptic, but you’ll give this site a bad reputation with Cryptic. So, I sincerely ask that you wait until open beta, and then let lose the dogs of war.

Thanks,

dstahl has dropped the bombshell on the official forums:

Season 3 release is scheduled for Dec 2nd.

The Foundry specific testing and Closed Beta starts today (so check your email starting today for invites).

The rest of the Season 3 update is scheduled to hit TRIBBLE in early November. The goal is that when the Season 3 release hits TRIBBLE, the Foundry is then open for everyone to test.

Note that even at Season 3 release to Holodeck – the Foundry will stay in a Beta state.

Good luck to everyone who gets in. May your bug hunting prove fruitful!

So dstahl decided to jump in and say a few words on the ratings process. I won’t color it with how I feel about it.

http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=185900

THIS IS ALL SUBJECT TO CHANGE

In order to avoid unnecessary speculation and bring some clarity to the review process – I’m starting this thread to show you the current plans on how Published Foundry Missions end up and in game.

Since this feature is still in development and the Foundry is in Beta (and not even at Closed Beta at time of first writing) all of this is SUBJECT TO CHANGE.

RATING PLAYER MADE CONTENT

Upon sign-in to STO, players have 2 options: Play or Create

If you select create, you are inside the toolset where you create, playtest and save your Foundry Projects.

Once you are happy with your Project, you can Publish it.

The Publishing process sends your Project to a queue where some AI code is added to your maps to ensure pathing functions.

Once your map is finished Publishing it is now available for Play Testing by anyone who has signed up to Play Test Foundry missions. These players are given a list of missions to play, or can look for specific missions, or can simply say play newest. As a Foundry author you can both create and play test missions.

The goals of play testing is to complete the mission. If the mission is completed, the reviewer is given the chance to rate the mission 1-5 stars (and possibly add comments).

Once a mission has been completed X number of times, it now qualifies to show up in Player Made Mission searches for any player in the game.

In order for any player to take a player made mission, they must go to the remote contact list, select the new Player Made Mission tab, search for the type of mission they want to play, and then select the mission to grant themselves.

Once they grant themselves the mission, it shows up in their mission list and it tells them where to go to start the mission. When any player completes a mission they are also given the option to rate the mission 1-5 stars (and possibly comment).

FLAGGING PLAYER MADE CONTENT

There will be a Foundry Terms of Use Doc that outlines rules that must be adhered to when making content. This will include CBS guidelines for what can and can’t be used, as well as specific things that are deemed not-allowable and cause for Flagging.

While playing a Foundry made mission a player feels that the mission has violated the specific rules laid out, they can Flag the content. They will be asked to select the specific violation they are reporting and we will log their account info along with their complaint.

We will take flagging content very seriously as reporting missions in this manner can lead to a mission being pulled from the game until the author addresses the complaint.

This Flagging will not be used for things such as “I didn’t like this mission” or “This sucks” or “This doesn’t feel Star Trek to me”… but instead for things that violate IP license rules (example: using a character or likeness that is on the not allowed list), violating standard terms of service rules (example: advertising other products or services in your mission text), or attempting to circumvent foul language filters.

NOTES

Any player made mission can be played by anyone so long as the person playing it has signed into the Foundry and agreed they are willing to “review” missions that may or may not have crazy mind-altering badness in them (i.e. no one but the author knows what you are about to play – so be warned). Players can send other players the link to the mission. They can search for it. They can just randomly find it.

Whether or not a player made mission shows up for all players boils down to it being completed X number of times – NOT what have reviewers rated it.

Ratings are intended to give players an idea of what others who have completed the mission thought of it. They don’t carry the I think this sucks therefore it will never see the light of day weight some think it will. It may impact some search filters (such as show me the highest rated content) but since you can search for missions by other filters, it is really designed as a tool to describe the perceived quality of the content. We’ve even talked about turning this on for Cryptic missions as well.

If a mission is Flagged for violating terms of use rules it is possible the mission will be pulled until the author addresses the issue and re-publishes. If the same mission is then again flagged for the same thing, there is a chance for further investigation and discipline (TBD). Likewise if we feel someone is abusing the Flag system and false-reporting issues, there is a chance of investigation and discipline on their end as well.

Greetings, this is Captain Allen of the Federation star ship Andromeda here again to continue my mission to bring technical speaking to every star ship Captain in the galaxy. Last week we saw the UGC Foundry tools really only allow a Text field for the dialog of the NPC or Bridge Officer pictured and allows only a simple sentence (possibly 5 words?) for the Captain to respond, and I gave an example of using Impulse Engines as part of technobabble dialog for a simple introduction to a mission. This week we will delve more deeply into dialog relating to technology and help bridge the gap between a mission hook or complication and making the player feel like they are a part of solving it and not simply reading it.
continue reading…

The universal cross-faction chat channel for UGC is
”La Forge”

Disclaimer: Posts by admins and editors do not reflect “the” opinion of this website. Rebuttals are encouraged.
———-

There has been so much confusion at the official STO forums surrounding the Foundry’s “Review Board,” which serves as QA component of the coming UGC implementation system. According to Cryptic’s current scheme for UGC, a player authored mission must pass through a review process before it becomes part of the “main game,” showing up as suggested missions from a remote contact, such as a specific Admiral who tells players, “Hey, go here, and check out this player made mission.”

As Stormshade explained, “All published community authored episodes need to be reviewed by the reviewers and given the okay before the rest of the community sees the content.”

In other words, the Review Board helps to ensure that only the best and brightest player-made missions get promoted in the game, and reviewers serve as the guardians of quality assurance, making sure that adult content and other offensive stuff doesn’t get pushed on casual players.

This setup has led some players to complain about the rise of a new “council,” reminiscent of the infamous player council idea that got shelved after weeks of community outrage. Yet, in my opinion, it is quite unlike that previous council. Instead, it is a wise compromise between two irritating extremes.

First Extreme: All player authored missions become instantly promoted by the game’s UGC remote contact. In the same way that players instantly put items on the exchange, they could also instantly put their homemade mission out there for all to see. Sure, it’s democratic, but the cons are obvious. Just as the exchange gets flooded with spam, overpriced crap, and irritating BS, so too would the UGC contact list. Unlike the exchange, however, it would be difficult for players to sort through the crap to find the goodies. Not only would this anarchic free-for-all clog the Foundry contact with missions of poor quality, but it would also mean that players of all ages and backgrounds unwittingly stumble upon offensive missions that need to be reported.

Second Extreme: An elite “council” would serve as sanctioned guardians, wedding out the bad and judging what is and is not worthy for the eyes and ears of STO players. UGC authors must submit their missions for the council’s approval, making the success of their UGC mission subject to the whims, biases, and misunderstandings of an elite group of overseers, whether they reside inside Cryptic or whether they consist of a Cryptic-approved assortment of influential players. While this system would ensure that only quality missions get promoted in the “main game,” it also reeks of tyrannical corruption, with certain fleets or popular players dominating the arena of what is and is not permissible.

Obviously, we need a middle way between these two extremes. In my opinion, Cryptic’s current outline provides an almost perfect compromise.

Edit: Some of the speculation in this post has now been corrected by Dstahl’s announcement. Anyways, read on if you want.

Here’s how it works: There is a set of approved reviewers… ALL OF YOU. Anyone, yes anyone, who wants to be part of the Review Board simply acknowledges that he or she may encounter some offensive missions and inappropriate content. It’s up to you to help play through random community authored missions, reporting what is and is not suitable for the “main game.” You also rate the quality of the mission, helping to weed out the bad from the good. Not only does it help ensure that the good rises to the top, but it also prevents offensive and adult content from being forced upon all of the players.

It’s a wonderful compromise between two extremes. On the one hand, it serves as essential quality assurance. On the other hand, it is openly democratic and pluralistic, in that everyone can participate as judge and jury.

At the same time, regardless of how a mission scores according to the Review Board, it can still be played. It can reach a mass audience. A person can post their “Orion Love Slave #23″ on this blog, or create a page in the Wiki. If so inclined, you can scream at the top of your lungs, “MY MIZZION HAZ BOOBIES!” Just because that type of mission may not make it into the “main game,” becoming promoted by the remote contact, that doesn’t mean that it won’t be played. Everyone who clicks the disclaimer can search for it and play it, so long as it doesn’t get removed for violating the terms of service.

So, everyone gets at least a big chunk of what they want, unless they want to spam the system with 389 identical “Shave My Tribble” missions.

If you create a quality mission that doesn’t contain offensive content, then there is a very high chance that your mission will make it to the “main game,” earning a shout-out from a Starfleet Admiral who endorses the mission and tells players to check it out. And, after you spent so much time and effort creating the mission, it won’t get buried by “Who Moans for Morn,” and “Bolians Gone Wild.”

It is the best of both worlds. It may not please everyone completely, but it is logical, organized, and rational.

Please leave comments.

In yet another update, STO’s devs have put together a set of FAQs to cover some of the basics. Read on:

Stormshade’s FAQ:

Q: What is The Foundry ?

A: The Foundry is Cryptic Studio’s tool set for allowing players to create their own content for Cryptic’s games. This is also called a Mission Authoring Tool. Star Trek Online will be the first Cryptic game to use this tool set.

Q: Who can use The Foundry?

A: Anyone with an active Star Trek Online subscription will be able to use The Foundry for Star Trek Online (Beta) Mission Authoring Tool, after agreeing to the EULA for The Foundry.

continue reading…

Implications of rank in your story

Even before you start writing that heart-breaking story or mapping out the minute details of your mind-blowingly beautiful star system, you (as author) have an important decision to make, what ranks in-game will see it? This is a little known aspect toward story writing in game.  The newest weekly missions in STO out of Cryptic are level agnostic or available to the majority of the player base while many of the base missions have level restrictive. There’s plenty of people in game who accept or even welcome level agnosticism. And it is pretty tempting to set up all of our missions this way as it has the widest audience possible.

But there’s a not-so-good side to level agnosticism. I’m going to ask you as authors: in your mission are you going to send any inexperienced Lieutenant Johnnies to single-handedly stop an entire invasion force or conduct high level talks between factions? Or on the flip side, are you going to send seasoned Vice Admiral Janes to single-handedly defeat the “weak and womanlike” Spiderians of Tarantulon 6 or to officiate the trade low-level talks between two merchants?

On paper, there might be nothing wrong with the gameplay of these missions, but you should consider that your work might be graded on your story as well as your ability to create an interesting mission to play. To make it into the Holodeck (the main) server, your mission is going to have to be well rated by those who end up testing it. Without a doubt, they’ll be looking for a (relatively) bug-free experience as well as a good entertainment from your mission. You don’t have to write a novel, but definitely make it a good read.

So where does it all begin? A good place to start is by taking into account a player’s rank and creating missions correlate to a person’s rank. Keep those high stakes missions for the the captains and admirals. This doesn’t mean that you should only create boring missions for the lower ranks. For the ranks below captain you should  emphasize the player’s rank, make them feel like they’re actually part of an organization and that they need to work their way up to the coveted position of captain. In fact, this is your opportunity to get creative. Create surprises along the mission and let the lower ranks “think” outside of their academy years, show command ability or even impress their superiors.

As you formulate the super awesomeness that will be your mission, keep in mind, everyone’s stretched from freshly minted lieutenants to battle-hardened admirals/generals. As an author, you should be considerate of the following question : Is my mission appropriate for X rank? Don’t be afraid that you’re isolating a segment of your population by restricting levels, it might make a  better story if you do.

There has been some confusion following a recent Mapolis interview. At the STO forums, Stormshade gave us this update:

Hi guys,

Let me try and clear some things up here.

1) Let’s talk about “The Life of a Community Authored Mission”.

To start with, the author will create the episode using The Foundry for Star Trek Online Mission Authoring Tools. Once the episode is complete, and the author is satisfied with the content of the episode, he or she will publish the episode.

Once published, the episode is available for play by all community members who have signed up to be reviewers. Anyone can sign up to be a reviewer of Community Authored Episodes, by clicking a button, and then agreeing to a new EULA, which essentially states that while reviewing new content, it is possible that users may experience objectionable/offensive material.

The newly published episode will need to be played through by X many reviewers, who will then after playing through the complete episode, be able to rate it. Essentially, these people will will say, “This mission does not violate any Terms of service and isn’t offensive/objectionable,” or will say, “This episode is inappropriate.”

If it passes the “review board” it will then be made available for all members of the Star Trek Online Community to play. If you play through it, and find that it has objectionable material in it, then you’ll be able to report it, and it will then be reviewed again by Cryptic Staff.

I’ll check in on the XP concerns and get back to you all in a little bit.

I hope this helps to clear some things up.

Thanks,

Stormshade

Dan Stahl then chimed in with clarifications:

continue reading…

One of the heated debates concerning the UGC is the planned review/rating system and how it can (and likely will) be abused. The question I have to ask is why should we even need such a system? Why not design the UGC system so that it polices itself. Make it so that every element we put in our missions counts towards a meta score for that mission. So if all we have is a mission that has us blowing up a bunch of enemies over and over, then the meta score would be extremely low. The system should be intuitive enough to treat intentionally duplicated objectives in such a way that only the first instance of the objective is counted… So it would classify a mission with five objectives, each one to defeat X number of enemy ships (enemy ships being the controlling factor even if different types of enemy ships are used) as being only about defeating enemy ships… Meta Score = 1

In terms of UGC mission reward payout, what gets paid out should be based on the meta score. Destroying the enemy ships themselves would pay out no XP and they woulde drop no loot. Only at mission completion would the reward be presented, and the lower the meta score, the lower the XP payout would be, and the odds of getting useful loot would be a lot less. And low meta scored missions would be pushed to the bottom of the mission list.

The player should be able to set the threshold of the meta score to find missions that have greater potential payouts…

Exploiting Repeatable Missions

When the ability to repeat missions goes into effect, it will be possible to exploit UGC missions by playing them over and over again. Each UGC mission should be assigned a meta name, based on the objective that are in each stage of the mission.

Let’s keep with the example of the mission used above. Five stages, involving defeating X enemies (we’ll say five enemies here.) Let’s say that the option to defeat enemies is the third option for the objective. That mission’s meta name would be 33333… When this mission is completed, the game would flag you as having completed mission 33333. No matter how many missions that have the same objectives are given different actual names, if the objectives are the same, they would all be called 33333 by the game. Only one instance of completing 33333 would pay out a reward within a 24 hour period. So one could do the same mission as many times as they want, but they will only be rewarded once per day for it.

So that’s two small meta fields that can be assoicated with each mission that is part and parcel to that the mission author sets up for players to do.

The key to getting a higher meta score so the game will actually rate it as being more “worth doing” would be to have it where the player must undertake multiple objectives, each of a different type. And while this does not necessarily mean the story would be any good, it would mean that the objectives would at least be more varried.

Story is conveyed through dialogue. So there could be a requirement for each stage of a mission to be offset by a dialogue tree. When defining a mission objective, default text would populate the NPC’s dialogue with a single choice [Acknowledged] presented to the player by default. More options could be added, each requiring text to be added by the player. Each text block would be subject to strict spell ckecking, and varrification of proper names. If I include a character’s name in the text, then that name will have to exist in the list of UGC-legal names from STO characters, or of names of NPCs we create for potential use in our UGC missions. Such names would be subject to filtering to prevent silly garbage.

Also, every screen of a UGC mission needs to have a report button that only works if CTRL+ALT+SHIFT are held down, so it cannot be accidentally clicked on. When this is done, the player will be able to enter a reason for reporting, but in addition to that, the state in which the mission was in at the time of the report is also sent so the GM who reviews the report can jump right to where the player was when something offensive was presented.  This button can be disabled for those who don’t want to see it, but if they do so, they willingly waive the right to report any content they may find offensive while the button is not displayed.

While some of this may be a bit complex, I think it is really all we will need to prevent exploitation of the UGC and to ensure that authors who want to maximixe the visibility of their missions will put some actual work into them, giving players more to do than just one thing over and over.

The more the system is designed to police itself, the less we have to worry about our peers abusing any sort of rating/review system. As UGC authors, we would be at out own mercy in terms of our content being visible and considered worthy of doing.

Of course, those who don’t really care about the quality or content of UGC mission can set their preferred meta score check range to ANY.

I welcome any and all feedback.

Thank you for your time.

Since last we spoke the official name of STO’s UGC System has been revealed, and as such the writers guide shall receive a name change to “A Writers Guide to the Foundry”.  Have to keep the guide as current as possible after all.

So, previously we examined the various aspects of writing for characters in user generated missions.  Now while taking into account how you want to use your characters in your story, you have to keep the setting of your story in the forefront of your mind.  I know this sounds like a “this is obvious so why get into it” moment and it kind of is.  However I cannot tell you the number of times where I have ended up in a user generated mission, in say Star Wars Galaxies with their chronicler system, that had Rancors hording Imperial technology on Dathomir.  I would assume that all sorts of self evident problems are made obvious from that statement, so let’s begin.

Once you have decided on that type of story you want to tell, and the characters you want to use, figuring out what location you want to use is critical in establishing the tone of the work.  Since we don’t know how the map placement is going to work just yet, let’s go with the assumption that nearly every ground map in the game is going to be made available for us to use.  That’s a lot of maps.

So, what can you do to choose the prefect map?  The answer goes back to the characters that you have chosen.  For instance if you want to tell a story involving Klingons, fighting for honor and battle against a Federation Starbase the map of Starbase 24 is ideal, however the Ruins of Romulus aren’t, nor is the backdrop of Infected.  Each of those maps have a very general and specific use in the game, so using them for something other than a memorial, or a starbase liberation is tricky.

It will be tempting to go out and use opposing faction maps as the basis of missions for the opposing faction, and it would be fun sending a cloaked Klingon Invasion force to Vulcan and enslaving it’s people.  However there are a couple of serious problems with that scenario.  First, Vulcan is only a stone’s throw away from the heart of federation space, second it is one of the most defended systems in the federation, and third you can bet that at least four different Federation fleets will be on your butt before you can say Gre’Thor.

A prime example which will also showcase the difficulties with using opposing faction maps, but will be a mission that I’m sure will come up, is a Klingon invasion of Sol.  Let’s face it who hasn’t thought about blasting that starbase out of the sky.  The problem with it is that after the mission is said and done, Sol is still going to be there, Quinn is not going to be dead, and Sulu is still going to be in Terradome.  Using high profile locations for missions is a bad idea because of this, for once the mission is over, then what.  Nothing will have changed, immersion broken.

So how do you make use of locations other than your own faction’s for your missions?  There are a couple of things to consider about this.  First, does the mission really need to take place on this particular map or can it take place and be more effective on a map that’s already in Faction control?  Second, would it be realistic for my mission to take place on this map?  Third, would it be believable to explain how my ship got over there?

I can’t help you with the first two questions, you’re going to have to answer those questions yourself, but I can help you with the third one.  Is it believable to send a large Cloaked Klingon Taskforce to Vulcan?  No.  If that was going to work the Romulans would have done it Unification rather than go to the trouble of stealing three ancient Vulcan ships.  Is it believable that a single or a handful, no more than five, cloaked Klingon ships would follow directly behind a bribed Ferengi cargo ship into Vulcan space?  The answer of course depends on how much latinum was used in the bribe but that trick could be used for a single raid type mission.  Admittedly what counts as a single raid type mission is different between each writer, so keep that in mind.

Another thing to remember about location is specifically which side you’re writing the mission for.  If you’re looking for writing for both look at the weekly series that are being published by Cryptic to see the guidelines for it, however if you are writing for a specific faction, more options are opened up.

When writing for a Starfleet Captain the entire game is your sandbox, however everyone who plays the Federation side of the game also falls under the umbrella of a “Starfleet Captain.”  This means that most Starfleet Captains are going to react to a specific situation, in a specific location in a very professional and by the book manner; unless the name of your captain is Kirk or Calhoun but we’ll ignore them for now. Therefore with Starfleet you have a world of options in which to place your story, but a rather limited way to go about telling it.

When writing for a Klingon Captain, the game is currently a bit more limited in where the missions can take place, but the options for how to tell each mission are widely different.  The Klingon Empire is in a unique position of having not only military trained KDF Captains at in command of their ships, but also Gorn, Nausicaan, and Orion Captains.  Unlike Starfleet, in which they strive for nearly cookie cutter procedure when dealing with a situation, the various species that fall under the banner of the Klingon Empire are under no such restrictions.  A Nausicaan Captain will act differently than a Gorn Captain and will act differently than an Orion Captain.  This also means that with each species you get a wider range of where you can tell your stories.  Orions are known for being pirates who are known for operating as far into Federation Territory as the Rigel system.  For the Gorn, it’s closer to Cestus III due to the location of their homeworld, but would be harder to explain elsewhere.  And for the Nausicaans, well they’re mercenaries for the most part they work for whoever pays them the most, and so they can go, almost anywhere.

There is a problem with writing a mission for a specific species of captain.  Simply put the mission will not make sense if the player playing the mission is not a Gorn and you wrote the mission specifically for a Gorn.  It is known that initially being able to write a specific set of dialogue for the players character based on their race is not going to be in the initial beta release of the Foundry.  It has been hinted as something the Devs would like to put in at some point, and if/when it is would fix this problem.

And now for the second most important part of selecting a location for your mission, four little words known as “Scotty Beam Me Up!”  Realistically this is the hardest aspect to get over when writing a mission and it’s all based on location.  Will the location allow for a transporter lock to be maintained at all times?  In most situations, and considering the level of technology available in the twenty fifth century the answer is yes.  But that would also get boring if all your missions had the same “safety net” that is present in a majority of the missions already in game.

Occasionally it would be beneficial to the narrative if your captain were in a moment of danger, and didn’t have the ability to say, Scotty Beam me up!  The trick to doing that properly is of course using the right means to block a transporter lock given the location the story takes place.  Memory Alpha has an excellent article describing how a transporter works in detail and specifically what can block a transporter signal.  I highly suggest reading this and keep it in mind to define whether or not a Tranposter block is possible given the current location.

As a word of warning, Transporter Scramblers are impossible to use at the moment due to the graphic nature of the device, this is both in terms of how messy the end result of a beam in or out is and the game engine being unable to reproduce this effect.  So don’t use that one.

That’s everything for now.  I shall return next time, where we will discuss the very important matter of “‘But That’s My Story, You Thief!’ – A.K.A. Plagiarism is a bitch to deal with.”

As seen in the screenshots, the Foundry will require that UGC authors understand how to place objects in 3d space using the X, Y, and Z coordinates. So, for those of you who have never dabbled in this stuff, I created this video tutorial. I may not use the correct terminology, but I try to use common sense.

If you find this helpful, then I can make more on using X, Y, and Z scales, along with rotating the objects using X, Y, and Z.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I just wanted to thank Red Shirt Army for inviting me on their show to talk about our website.  Please listen to the show and make fun of me.  It was fun, and I hope that all our readers check it out. (Adults only!)

Red Shirt Army Episode 29

Now that pictures of the Foundry Editing Toolkit have been posted in the latest Engineering Report, we’ve finally got our first scrap of knowledge to work with. So, in time-honored Interwebz tradition; here’s a long-winded breakdown of the images, along with plenty of assumptions and guessing how The Foundry might actually work!

Standard disclaimers apply. This is derived from Screenshots of an early Alpha build of the Toolkit, and the final product may be entirely different in scope and purpose.

Also be warned that this is a long read, as it covers a lot of functionality.

Now read on…

continue reading…

The Physics of Impulse

Greetings, this is Captain Allen of the Federation star ship Andromeda here again to continue my mission to bring technical speaking to every star ship Captain in the galaxy.  Last week we covered what technobabble is by looking at a famous example quoted on Memory Alpha.  This week we will look at writing some dialog that includes technobabble in the context of script for a playable mission that you will write as a script.  We just saw the alpha version of the Foundry tools and  I’m not entirely sure what is possible with the dialog system but it appears the first generation will have simply dialog “Text” and a button that you can write the Captain’s response in. continue reading…

A few new bits and snipets from the devs here.   Late last night, Dan Stahl told us:

The Foundry is going into a short closed beta this week (crossing fingers)

Stormshade gave a few more details about what to expect:

Hey gang,

I just want to give you a quick heads up about The Foundry’s Closed Beta. We’re going to be keeping this closed beta test very small, and limited. It will also be very short. Our goal is to keep it as short as possible while we work very hard to incorporate the feedback from a very small focus group in order to prep The Foundry for a Tribble release for Open Beta.

So, essentially what I’m saying is, if you don’t get in to the Closed Beta, rest assured that your wait for the Open Beta should be fairly short.

Breaking News, from the new Engineering Report. Dstahl writes:

We are also happy to announce that the Foundry (our mission authoring toolset) will be moving into Beta in the next two weeks. This will be the first step in turning on authoring tools that allow players to create their own missions. At the start we’ll be focused on stability and usability with a few guinea pigs who’ve shown their value as testers on TRIBBLE.

Once we’ve verified the publishing system is functional and stable, we’ll open it up on TRIBBLE for everyone- most likely in the first half of November. We recognize that with a tool such as this, it will take some time of player interaction and feedback to iterate on the functionality of the authoring system. We expect the Foundry to stay in Beta even as we release Season 3. Even though the Foundry will remain in Beta, our goal is that everyone will be able to participate in testing these tools either on on TRIBBLE or HOLODECK as we gather your feedback and play the missions you are creating.

More details about the beta program will be posted as we get closer to opening up the system on TRIBBLE. For now I’m attaching a few screenshots I took today while editing a patrol mission I’m working on. Consider it early alpha sneak peak footage

Screenshots:

Full Engineering Report

I went through and read the entire timeline to 2409 last night.  A part of me is almost sad I did.  I now feel that Cryptic dropped the ball even worse than I initially felt like with their initial leveling content.  I was thinking this morning that maybe we could pick up the slack?  There is so much content that simply begs to be written!  I was wondering what people would think about making a “grand unified” project to bring the missing content that never made it into the game?

What the game should have had:

Federation Klingon Front should have been 45 levels focused heavily on combat and PvP with live open PvP centered around the Archanis Sector.

*The J’mpok/Martok struggle and the federation involvement along with the territorial advances in the Hromi Cluster

*The defense of the Federation and attempted diplomatic attempts to stop the war

*The focus on rooting out the Undine infiltrators.

Federation Romulan Front should have had 45 levels focused heavily on intrigue and diplomacy with a twisted path leading to an attempted alliance against the Klingons.

*Discovering the secrets behind Sela’s disappearance a few years ago.

*Solving the clues to discover what happened to Taris.

*Repulsing further attempts at Klingon incursions into Romulan territory.

*All of this under the Romulan mistrust, political tensions, and backroom politics.

Federation Cardassian Front should have focused heavily on crafting and rebuilding a devastated but slowly emerging Cardassian democratic society and it’s defense against the Alpha Jem’Hadarr and rogue True Way faction.

*Crafting a variety of items using crafting minigames to help rebuild Cardassia Prime

*hunting clues as to the werabouts and resources of the True Way faction

*performing tactical strikes or using crafted resources to hamper or mitigate the True Way/Jem’Hadar threat

*Neutralizing the Gul Madred threat to the Cardassian democracy.

Klingon Empire should have focused heavily on faction wars (KvK) and PvP (FvK)

*Two houses and their allies, J’mpok and Martok fight for internal control over the Klingon Empire.

*Agressive war in the open PvP Archanis Sector

*Small forays into the Romulan Empire for supplies

*Facing the Orionis crisis with the Borg and Undine

Little of this seemed to make it into the game, certainly not an extensive full content for each one.  Instead we’re left with a small story arc for each area before we quickly move on to another front, and each one outside of the story basically fights the same way and has the same lack of non combat development.

My question is. . .could a combined StarbaseUGC effort be made into delivering these missing components (obviously we can’t create open PvP)?  Would a core group of dedicated and talented UGC artists be able to catch the eye of Cryptic in order to bring this content into the mainstream leveling field.  Is it even feasible that we and Cryptic could deliver 4 separate level 1-45 fronts?

Maybe I’m just hallucinating and getting too excited about UGC, but I felt that if everyone worked together and we took things in small chunks we might eventually reach a lofty goal such as this.  What about the rest of you, what are your thoughts?

~D

I mentioned this idea on the STO website but needed to move it here for discussion. One of the big problems with having a lot of varied user content is trying to find what sort of content you are wanting to play. While not everyone may like my particular method I do feel that some type of universally accepted sorting needs to be in place to differentiate content. My particular suggestion is in the spirit of STO, in particular a nod to the tags designed to set apart special items, or in this case, content.  A list of the tags I’ve come up with can be found HERE.

I am not sure exactly where I would put these tags, my first thought was they should go in the title, however this would end up making for some very long titles if someone chose to use a number of tags.  The best possible solutions I can think of would probably be to put them into a box on the right side of the mission page.

Organization wise what I would like to see is two things. The existing format by location is a great idea. However the ability to sort by particular tag would also be nice. If people here at StarbaseUGC are agreeable with this system then we can set up a page for each tag where missions could also be added (so two locations) for those who want to browse for a type as opposed to a location. Also missions could be sorted by [TAG] within each location page. Thus the two options could be

• Gamma Orionis
  • [COM]
    • <mission>
  • [DIP]
    • <mission>

or it could be like this:

• [COM]
  • Gamma Orionis
    • <mission>
  • Regulas
    • <mission>

~D

Hi all,

I just wanted to post this video, because I think it shows the potential of some incredible UGC content if the camera tools can be used in conjunction with the Foundry toolset.

It was made by Rachel Garrett of the STOwiki, and it was originally posted here (thanks Alecto!):

Enjoy!