Fractal Softworks Forum

Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length
Advanced search  

News:

Starsector 0.97a is out! (02/02/24); New blog post: Simulator Enhancements (03/13/24)

Pages: 1 ... 3 4 [5] 6

Author Topic: Building Better Worlds  (Read 43519 times)

Midnight Kitsune

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 2846
  • Your Friendly Forum Friend
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #60 on: February 23, 2017, 11:56:59 PM »

In-game story missions are something I'd absolutely love, but sadly don't see happening. You need quite a bit of variety and depth, otherwise it just doesn't work.
I'd love to see something like a survival mission or a tourny in campaign, kinda like what Transcendence did
Logged
Help out MesoTroniK, a modder in need

2021 is 2020 won
2022 is 2020 too

Gothars

  • Global Moderator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 4403
  • Eschewing obfuscatory verbosity.
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #61 on: February 24, 2017, 03:17:00 AM »


In-game story missions are something I'd absolutely love, but sadly don't see happening. You need quite a bit of variety and depth, otherwise it just doesn't work.

I think once the tools to create story missions are available to modders, we won't have to worry about content variety :)
Logged
The game was completed 8 years ago and we get a free expansion every year.

Arranging holidays in an embrace with the Starsector is priceless.

Bastion.Systems

  • Captain
  • ****
  • Posts: 412
  • Special Circumstances LCU
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #62 on: February 24, 2017, 04:36:55 AM »

Just got my first town leave from the army, 4 new blog posts to read  ;D

Logged

Tartiflette

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 3529
  • MagicLab discord: https://discord.gg/EVQZaD3naU
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #63 on: February 24, 2017, 06:04:50 AM »

I think once the tools to create story missions are available to modders, we won't have to worry about content variety :)

Unless it involves the rules.csv...
Logged
 

Clockwork Owl

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 790
    • View Profile
    • Starsector South Korean Community
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #64 on: February 24, 2017, 07:41:21 AM »

I think once the tools to create story missions are available to modders, we won't have to worry about content variety :)

Unless it involves the rules.csv...
Nooooooooooooooo
Logged

nomadic_leader

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 725
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #65 on: February 24, 2017, 11:27:06 AM »

I think once the tools to create story missions are available to modders, we won't have to worry about content variety :)

Unless it involves the rules.csv...

Can you give some more context for the many people reading the thread who don't now anything about rules.csv and its implications for modding?

I haven't gotten into modding starsector but dealing with java and JDEs and so forth both has a lot more potential, and much greater expertise hurdles, than the modding capabilities of games like Escape Velocity/Endless sky, where it's basically just simple text files or hex flags to create missions and storylines. Not a lot of potential but the modders in those games pushed it to the limit to come up with some really interesting and inventive stuff.

Maybe the modding difficulty hurdles is why many starsector mods appear to be just faction mods with new weapons and 30 new kitbashed sprites a piece; more, but about the same. Rarely much new in the way of different gameplay or features, or storylines, or mission threads. I thought that was the whole point of the fancy java modding?

Note I could be wrong since i haven't played mods that much because they mostly just seem to be more ships and weapons. Needless to say there are some mods that do add features like ironclads, mayorate, twiglib, etc.

Anyway it's been really disappointing to see that despite the great modding powers of starsector, modded storylines and quests never became a thing and the universe still feels dead and procedural.
Logged

David

  • Global Moderator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 910
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #66 on: February 24, 2017, 11:46:15 AM »

To know rules.csv is to know the Black Arts, the arcane methods of knowledge best left lost and lying; not sleeping, but never dead; waiting. To USE rules.csv is to know unending power, infinite maddening potency! But at what terrible price?

(By which I mean we're going to do some neat stuff with it, though I wouldn't call it the focus of this patch by any means.)
Logged

Alex

  • Administrator
  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 23988
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #67 on: February 24, 2017, 11:54:32 AM »

(To elaborate on it a bit, rules.csv contains ...rules... that can govern a lot of interactions, such as what options show up when you visit a market, what conversation options are available, etc. Mostly, the same effects can be achieved in other ways, i.e. with normal Java code. Some of the rules are simple, but some can be pretty opaque - but I think that'd be more an impediment to tweaking something existing than to adding something new.

Edit: feedback welcome! I did document how they work, but it does seem like it didn't exactly take off as far as being used by mods. I don't think it'd be practical to change anything major about it at this point, but, still.)
« Last Edit: February 24, 2017, 11:59:36 AM by Alex »
Logged

Midnight Kitsune

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 2846
  • Your Friendly Forum Friend
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #68 on: February 24, 2017, 12:03:44 PM »

Unless it involves the rules.csv...
Can you give some more context for the many people reading the thread who don't now anything about rules.csv and its implications for modding?
Rules.csv is a convoluted and confusing abyss that controls 95%+ of the dialogue in SS. Even most of the ModFathers have issues with working with it as far as I know, to the point where I think only one has really done a lot of work in it

Edit: Damn, ninja'd by Alex AND David... >.<

Maybe the modding difficulty hurdles is why many starsector mods appear to be just faction mods with new weapons and 30 new kitbashed sprites a piece; more, but about the same. Rarely much new in the way of different gameplay or features, or storylines, or mission threads. I thought that was the whole point of the fancy java modding?

Note I could be wrong since i haven't played mods that much because they mostly just seem to be more ships and weapons. Needless to say there are some mods that do add features like ironclads, mayorate, twiglib, etc.

Anyway it's been really disappointing to see that despite the great modding powers of starsector, modded storylines and quests never became a thing and the universe still feels dead and procedural.
Sounds like you aren't playing the right mods then. Try Nexelerin, SS+, Dynasector, Ship and Weapon Pack for some diversity in your modded life.
And yes, many factions are just ships but some from the ModFathers are damn near Expansion level mods, especially for the ones that are coming in the future. But even the "simple" mods these are NOT that simple. You need to make interesting star systems, markets that don't crash the economy, (unlike one of the mods you listed) many varied variants, fleet types and compositions, and of course you need to BALANCE it right!
Oh and those 30 "kitbashed" sprites are usually from the guys just starting out and learning how to sprite. The better ones kitbash and paint over or just flat out paint it from scratch, which ain't easy if you want a vanilla quality sprite!
Logged
Help out MesoTroniK, a modder in need

2021 is 2020 won
2022 is 2020 too

nomadic_leader

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 725
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #69 on: February 24, 2017, 05:10:50 PM »

David why aren't you making more paintings about Dominions 4?

Now about starsector: Basically there are already a lot of ships in vanilla, and a mod that adds like 50 more, no matter how well balanced it is, and no matter how much sprites look like vanilla, well there's a point of diminishing returns. I want there to be optional quests with stories, characters, life. Maybe i'll check those mods you mentioned midnight.

From Alex' post, it sounds like this can be done with rules csv, but modders and players just aren't that interested. Perhaps this is because most testers only care about combat in starsector. Starsector was just combat in the beginning, so most of the testers/modders that it attracted were only interested in that sort of thing.

If I didn't have other things to worry about now I would build some framework that made this easier to do, by creating a few basic templates for missions/quests with a bit of randomness thrown in and a way to define them all in csv files that the java would read from.
Logged

Dark.Revenant

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 2806
    • View Profile
    • Sc2Mafia
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #70 on: February 24, 2017, 05:36:27 PM »

The reason for the lack of story missions is that they're a lot of work.  Ask Histidine, who created a mod that essentially does what you want (Steiner Foundation), how much effort it requires.

However, the biggest issue is the lack of options with regard to story missions.  Until 0.8, just about anything you'd do is a variation of "trade X good", "escort Y fleet", or "kill Z fleet".  SWP's IBB chain of missions is a bunch of "story missions", strictly speaking.  But because of the lack of context or deeper interaction, they're more just a set of challenges than an actual story.
Logged

nomadic_leader

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 725
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #71 on: February 24, 2017, 07:11:21 PM »

What works well in these types of games can be pretty simple. You don't need in depth interaction. Did you ever play Escape Velocity or Endless Sky?

It's just a sequence of quests framed by text dialogues with some forks that branch into different missions that aren't too complex: kill such and such, escort so and so, survey something, capture something Nicely written text interaction that isn't too pretentious and helps bring the world alive. A choose your own adventure that can quickly recede into the background when you feel like mindlessly blasting things.

At the end of it, maybe you get a fancy modspec unlocked, or a really rare ship, or a planet switches allegiance, or a station is destroyed, so the player feels like they're having an impact on the game universe.

That's all. It's not much, but it really fleshes out the world.

If Histidine's thing works with the current release I'll try it.
Logged

Tartiflette

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 3529
  • MagicLab discord: https://discord.gg/EVQZaD3naU
    • View Profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #72 on: February 25, 2017, 12:28:39 AM »

What works well in these types of games can be pretty simple. You don't need in depth interaction. Did you ever play Escape Velocity or Endless Sky?

It's just a sequence of quests framed by text dialogues with some forks that branch into different missions that aren't too complex: kill such and such, escort so and so, survey something, capture something Nicely written text interaction that isn't too pretentious and helps bring the world alive. A choose your own adventure that can quickly recede into the background when you feel like mindlessly blasting things.

At the end of it, maybe you get a fancy modspec unlocked, or a really rare ship, or a planet switches allegiance, or a station is destroyed, so the player feels like they're having an impact on the game universe.

That's all. It's not much, but it really fleshes out the world.

If Histidine's thing works with the current release I'll try it.
That "That's all" doesn't begin to describe the inordinate amount of work it represent to create in Starsector, plus several of them aren't possible yet. Plus, missions are something that was planned for a long time in vanilla and modders didn't wanted to spend hundreds upon hundreds hours of work on something that could very well become obsolete the next release.

 The main issue with these type of simple missions is that you can't have just a handful of them, otherwise people will get bored fast. You either need to write dozens upon dozens of them for every fleet composition / player level imaginable, or go full fledged procedural story generator. It is not something you whip up during a boring weekend.

 Heck I postponed Seeker for two years despite having a dozen of extremely scripted artifacts, fully implemented, completely weird, with interesting stories and quests attached to them sitting on my hard-drive because it is beyond my competences to implement the dialogues properly.

 There are maybe four or five people on this forum, including Alex, that can properly read, understand and write quests. Unless Alex has some kind of tool to translate them from human code into machine code, I have no idea how he can do that for anything more than basic station interaction.

I invite you to open that file and see for yourself. After all, modding is open to everyone, if you don't like the lack of quest mods you can fix that!
« Last Edit: February 25, 2017, 12:34:16 AM by Tartiflette »
Logged
 

Clockwork Owl

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 790
    • View Profile
    • Starsector South Korean Community
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #73 on: February 25, 2017, 05:24:10 AM »

I opened the thing once trying to localize Starsector into Korean. Then it got updated... made me quit the project.
Logged

Histidine

  • Admiral
  • *****
  • Posts: 4661
    • View Profile
    • GitHub profile
Re: Building Better Worlds
« Reply #74 on: February 25, 2017, 06:04:34 AM »

N.B. The tutorial mission in Steiner Foundation works with 0.7.2a, but it was meant to be a one-off and was designed accordingly; it does not offer a modular quest API.

Edit: feedback welcome! I did document how they work, but it does seem like it didn't exactly take off as far as being used by mods. I don't think it'd be practical to change anything major about it at this point, but, still.)

Well, here's my abbreviated list of problems with current rules.csv implementation:
- The documentation is really incomplete
- It lacks a bunch of basic programming flow stuff, like OR in conditions
- There are a number of little things that can trip a new modder up, like the text column's contents being displayed before the script column code is run (so you can't get variables in the same row that as the text that uses them)
- Programming in a spreadsheet editor is generally clunky to begin with – a couple of people in the modding chat mentioned than an editor would be nice
 
As an aside: a really hardcore implementation would be to dispense with the custom scripting language entirely and make the conditions and scripts use raw Java code with Janino script evaluation.
Logged
Pages: 1 ... 3 4 [5] 6