Stormshade gave us this update in this thread at the STO forums:

Hey gang!

We’ve got some great news!

Full functionality has been restored to The Foundry! We’ve had to roll back all missions to the state they were in prior to the launch of Season 4, so any and all changes you may have made to missions after Season 4 launched will not be available.

Should you notice while checking out your missions that there has been further data loss than out lined above, or you have discovered any other issues, please post here and let us know about the problem. We’ll be watching this thread closely, and will do our best to assist you with any difficulties you may have.

Thanks so much for your patience while we worked through these issues!

Stormshade

Unfortunately, soon afterwards, the Foundry was turned off, with this explanation given:

Hey folks!

We’re going to be turning off The Foundry at about 5:45 PM PDT (about 25 minutes from the time of this post) for the weekend. This is being done so we can take one last look at all the data we just got over the weekend to ensure there really aren’t any additional issues we need to iron out.

If you did come across any issues during this brief period The Foundry was live again, please continue to post them in this thread.

The plan is to have The Foundry back on for good Monday.

Thanks again for all your patience, I know you’re eager to get back to building!

Stormshade

Hi all, I’m going to need to transfer most of the assets from the wiki to the blog.  So, I’ll start with this one and gradually add more until they’re all here. I’m actually not sure if the values of this are still correct.  Please let me know if the values are whacked. Isistemple – contains X, Y, and Z information to reproduce. PDF:

continue reading…

Hi everyone,

I’ve made a proposal to StoWiki, letting them know that we will discontinue Wiki UGC if they would allow authors to post their missions at their site. I believe that it would benefit you guys and gals to be able to add your missions to their amazingly robust and well-maintained wiki that has become a central information source for the general players.   I think it would also encourage more Foundry authors to contribute to their site in other ways, so that StoWiki continues to thrive as THE wiki of Star Trek Online.

The admins and users are now debating this idea here. Please stop by and share your opinion.

Greetings to all my SBUGC Friends! 

 I have set up a big Fleet event for this weekend that will feature playing Community Authored missions. I have invested a great deal of funds crafting and purchasing Very Rare Purple gear for members who participate. I am doing this in an effort to get some of our Foundry missions the love that some of them have been needing with plays. We all know that for the most part, if you do not have a featured STO mission or one that happens to remain on the top of the first couple of pages they can be overlooked as far as getting good play time. We as authors also enjoy seeing that our missions are getting a good amount of plays, regardless if they are everybody’s “cup of tea” or not. Even with our exposure and ads here we all know it is not easy to get a large number of plays if you do not stay at the top of the list long. As with most things, it is human nature to choose the path of least resistance, so if someone has not played a mission in the top tier, it generally gets picked up first.  I know also that a great deal of missions are not up now either because of the recent Foundry problems. I was fortunate to be able to fix a couple of mine and republish them before the Foundry was shut down, although one still has a minor issue of an invisible object that has decided to jump to the right and cause the player to basically run into a blank wall to activate a turbolift. Unfortunately, this one issue has caused a number of the infamous “1-star” reviews from those who believe it must be my bad design that causes it. That being all said……..

I have created a huge Fleet Foundry Weekend for my fleet this coming weekend! I will be rewarding participants with Very Rare items I have gathered for the event when they play and review (2) Foundry missions from a select list. I am needing to know who of you has missions available on the holodeck that are playable and “need the love” so I can add them to my list. The event will be going on for 48 Hours so it is my intent to make sure everyone knows they can still grind away at ranking up their toons, yet still participate in the event. If they play and review (4) missions, they will be eligible for (2) prizes and so forth.

If they happen to fix and restore the Foundry prior to Saturday morning when the event is started, please give me any missions you may restore so I can have them available for the event. Please add any holodeck missions you have available and working (even if they are not perfect) on this post below so I can create a list. My goal is to get as many of our missions played as possible, and I am hoping with the rewards I have, I will get good participation in my fleet. My fleet is Starfleet Special Operations Group and has over 380 members. I wish I could say they are all active, but we know that is not realistic, but I hope to have a large number join in the fun.

LIST YOUR MISSION NAMES BELOW, BY NAME, AUTHOR NAME, AND LEVEL PLAYER REQUIRED SO I CAN CREATE MY LIST. 

I hope the Foundry gets fixed so I can make a bigger list, but if not, I’ll do what I can to get our missions as many plays as I can. Hope to hear from you!

Duke-of-Rock

Week three of being Foundryless! What are we going to talk about? A lot, actually! Give it a listen!

Click here to listen to the Podcast!
Right click and select “save as” to download the mp3

Show Notes

- Foundry Down Harming STO in General?
- New Animations on Tribble – Girl Walk! – Helna Struts Starfleet Video!
- Final Enterprise-F Design! / Klingon Flagship Coming! – Enterprise-F from Multiple Angles!
- Rollback Testing
- Enough Already: Let us fix it ourselves?

- July Starbase UGC Foundry Spotlight : Best of the Past 3 Months’ Winners!

- Mailbag – podcastugc@starbaseugc.com

QA’s Zero gave us this quick update at the STO forums:

I’ve created a list of all the projects that were noted as MISSING DIALOG and will be rolling those back today.

All other projects I won’t be touching until Monday or when I can confer with a programmer to make sure they’ll be fixed with the same bug fix. I suspect some of the issues are not

After the rollback is completed, authors will need to go into the Foundry (once it’s available again) and manually Publish their missions again.

Thank you all for your patience while we have worked on fixing this

Also, please take note:

However, after we reopen the Foundry, it’s important to not save or edit or do anything to your project if you see something wrong with it. Just post here (or in a new thread if we decide to start one).

Anything done before today can be rolled back, no problem. But if changes are made after today it will be more difficult.

This evening I spent a little time on Tribble helping QA Lead ZeroniusRex debug “To Helna and Back” for missing dialogue. It didn’t go without a hitch the first time around, but by the end of the evening To Helna and Back was published and contained all of the mission’s appropriate dialogue. If you’ve been following me, you’d know that my missions are quite possibly some of the most “screwed with” you can find right now, considering I published, changed, republished, and withdrew them all on the same Season 4 launch date. The fact that the mission was, at least at that moment, displaying all the missing dialogue correctly should put many other authors at ease.

That doesn’t mean anything will be up over the weekend, however. But it’s definitely bright news for us!

However, some continuing discouraging problems involve not being able to interact with NPC Contacts that are behind invisible walls. It would appear this bug may have something to do with the shooting-through-wall fix (maybe), and will hence take a while before anything can be done. If you have an issue with a similar kind of bug in your mission, I personally recommend the archaic, yet tried-and-true method of tying the dialogue to an invisible object. It may be dirty, but it’s a workaround that’ll keep your mission completable.

Good news for those of us who were concerned about this potential c-store/foundry connection. Farktoid has confirmed that it is not intended:

This affects Tribble only because the C-Store is disabled there.

When the Foundry is re-enabled on Holodeck, you will be able to use all species whether you purchased them or not.

link

With no date on when foundry will be fully back I plan to stop this feature until the foundry has fully recovered. I hope that it will be back soon but there is no point on reporting on something that is not there.

A quick tour of the new Starfleet Academy Social Area-available for Foundry usage now on Holodeck.

The second week in a row that the Foundry Editor is down on Holodeck! Foundry missions are up, but in the broken state they’re in, how are the authors holding up to reviews effected by bugs? These are the things we’ll talk about this week!

If you’re into a spirited debate between myself and Terilynn about Phlox’s and Archer’s decision to commit mass genocide by refusing to help a dying race of people in the episode “Dear Doctor”, then TOO BAD, because that was in the aftershow and you MISSED IT. Don’t worry, its so good I might find a way to save it and redistribute it later.

The end of this episode was lost, randomly, somehow, but I have recently invented a way for me to retrieve lost or cut out elements of the podcast, so I have recovered the end of it and edited it back in! On the night when I SHOULD be sleeping in preparation for a surgery. This is how much I love you guys.

Click here to listen to the Podcast!
Right click and select “save as” to download the mp3

Show Notes

- Hav Has … Surgery?
- Foundry Still Down
- Mapolis Weighs In
- Foundry Leaking into Holodeck
- C-Store Species Have Been Restricted in the Foundry?
- Would monetizing the Foundry Be Bad? Is it Fair?

- Mailbag

With foundry back-ish, where contacts in social area will talk about foundry missions, it means that soon the editor will be up and running, hopefully, this week. Now I am hoping that in this downtime that new and old authors will have new ideas for missions. And when foundry does come back completely online, there will be a flood of new missions and I hope that I or a team from Starbase UGC will get to play and review your mission.

But in the meantime head on over to the STO forum and check for a post where new and old authors can promote their new mission that is ready for playing. (http://forums.startrekonline.com/showthread.php?t=218902). Or by the way #freehelna

Something very strange is happening at the social hubs, especially ESD and DS9.  The npcs that Foundry authors often use as doors are randomly carrying on conversations that make no sense.  All players, regardless of hailing for a ugc mission, can read the disjointed thoughts of these bilingual ugc contacts.

Are these random dialogues from UGC missions?  Or, are the devs messing with our minds?

What do we make of this rather strange default prompt of the Starfleet Liason at ESD?  Notice that her costume matches a BO when she is speaking:

The weirdest thing: what she says changes according to which instance you play.  Most of the time, she and other contacts like her are speaking in German.  Yes, the npc contacts are speaking in German.

Check it out for yourself.  Make sure that you have no ugc missions in progress, and visit some of the npc contacts at the social hubs.

Are we seeing random Foundry dialogues, or is something more Cryptic happening here?

Late this afternoon, the devs turned Foundry missions back on.  However, the Foundry editor is not turned on.  We are given the following instructions:

We will need your help on a few things to make sure that we can correct the problems that are currently in it. You will have the opportunity to play your missions and check for missing mission dialog or any other corruption. Should you see any issues, please reply to THIS FORUM THREAD immediately with the project ID code and name so we can roll back any projects that were corrupted last week and catch any new issues that might be lurking in this build

We urge all authors who see data missing in their projects to *not save* and *not publish* until we have a chance to look at it, please!

Right now missions can be played, but we have not yet re-activated the editor.

I thought I would repost this gem from one of my favorite writers in the whole wide world, who posted on the Foundry forums in a response to when dialogue becomes too long. What does one do? Kestrel writes –

Wall of text crits for 9000!

One of the things I’ve learned working on STO is that writing for a video game is very different than writing a novel or a script for a television show or movie. You have to consider everything — does that background info *really* need to be there? Could I just use a line of floater dialogue instead, or could it be cut entirely?

So how do you balance story with action? Couple of tricks that might help:

1. I tend to split my dialogue up into chunks that you can read without a lot of scrolling. If I’m writing something that takes more than two screens, I go back and look at it again. Not every word is golden — there’s almost always something that can be cut.

2. Sometimes there are things I want to add that are good for the story, but not essential to the mission. An example would be the logs of the experiments in “Coliseum.” We made reading them completely optional. The console was there if you wanted to use it, but you didn’t need to do so to advance the mission. That way, the people want to take the time got something extra, but those who just wanted to get on with the mission could do so.

3. Along the same lines, you’ll notice that a lot of our dialogue sticks have a “OK, I’m done” option. At any time, a player can choose that, close the dialogue stick and continue with the mission. Yes, if they do so, they’re going to miss out on some of the story, but that’s the way they want to play. It’s not my place to tell them how to have fun.

Hope this helps!

Yes Kestrel, it does.

Despite the launch of Season 4 causing massive problems with the Foundry, it also introduces a few new features. When the Foundry is restored to normal service, you’ll be able to try these new things out and maybe even use them in your missions.

It’s time for a more optimistic look at the future of the Foundry and what you can expect to be using on Holodeck in the near future! Here’s an introduction to a new trigger type which allows individual dialog prompts inside of a dialog tree to be used as triggers:

That should show you the basics, but I’m sure you’ll all come up with some clever and inventive uses for triggers in your missions!

New Tribble Release Notes do not include any Foundry information.  However, Salemi_Inferno did give a quick update in the thread:

This build has some backend foundry fixes that we hope will allow us to turn it back on soon. It will require some time on an actual shard before our Foundry Gurus can verify that it works and actually determine that we can reenable the foundry.

So, long story short, no actual fix now but we’re getting very close.

I’m just wanting to use this photo I took as an example from the Queensland Floods in Australia back in January 2011. Yes I was a victum of the floods, acutually it is 6 months to the day I took this photo to when I post this Blog.

Yes it was a high stress moment, I lost 3kg that week, cause alot of greef and stress, very simular to what happening now with the foundry.

But if you look at the photo, it is not acually looking at a flooded house, it’s looking down my street and starting a recovery effort.

One thing that happened though the city of Brisbane and Ipswich, where I live, is the helping hand that was received over the following weekend. There were 22000 volunteers that helped over 2 days, complete strangers, that were willing to help the victims, a really strong Aussie tradition of mate helping a mate out. This was later known as the ‘Mud Army’.

I don’t know the full extent of what the outcome of what happens to the foundry, or how it is going to come back to us, and only the author is the only one who can rebuild if it comes to that. But we can be there to play the mission.

So I’m just putting an idea down that we spend a day of forming a ‘Foundry Army’ to help with the recovery effort, and start getting the foundry back to it former glory. It will be good feeling to all of us authors to have their missions played again, even have it webcasted etc.

So what you think?

Helna in chains! This episode, we don’t shy away from the controversy of the Foundry and how its in dire straits after Season 4 was pushed to Holodeck. What went wrong? Why is the frustration as big of a deal as it is? How can we help? All of these things are explored in this two hour, review-less episode!

Click here to listen to the Podcast!
Right click and select “save as” to download the mp3

Show Notes

- Foundy Broken, Missions Borked!
- Lack of Effective Communication, and How to Fix it
- The Foundry Recovering
- Season 4 Foundry Additions and Improvements
- Season 4 Improvements in General: Ground Combat, Borg Combat, Vivox

- Mailbag
- Kirkfat’s Patrol Idea