Missions & Complexes

Plus some Rokhs (or any Tier3 BS) in there just for the flavor.
On the other hand, i guess 80% + of carebears never went on an epic arc missions.

Howdy folks,

You're right. The pirates are pretty terrible at fitting ships sometimes. Either because they've been employing rookies, mismanaged horribly (the Serpentis have been dipping into their own supply, the Raiders are drunk on blood, the Guristas are too busy chasing tail, etc), or simply because they don't have the resources to compete with the capsuleers. (Strength in numbers!)

But in reality, you're right. The pirate NPCs are lagging behind the rest of New Eden. Part of this is due to the staggering amount of NPCs in the game. Tweaking all the NPCs will take a lot of time and manpower to do, and while we try to do our best at it, other priorities arise, and it's a matter of how big a priority updating these NPCs becomes as opposed to balancing other things (like player ships, for example).

Another issue is balancing these new ships with AI. Incursion (and Apocrypha) introduced that badass Sleeper AI, and I would love to see that applied to more NPCs across the board. Players want more engaging combat from their NPCs, we want to make more engaging combat for players, and the vast majority of our pirate NPCs are not up to that level yet. But, adding a layer of AI to the ships makes balancing that much more challenging, as it's no longer a matter of tweaking stats, but rather an issue of tweaking stats in relation to behavior.

I'm in complete agreement with you guys, though. These rats should get their heads out of their asses and get with the times. LIVE IN THE NOW, ANGEL CARTEL. GAWD.

Anyway, we hear ya on the inside. One of the Content team's big pushes for the past few years has been an increased effort to rebalance a lot of PVE content and mission content. We'll always be pushing for renovating this old stuff and making it better. And hopefully, you know, removing those rail guns from the Ravens.

You sound as if changing some old database entries take as much work as the whole engine for space barbies... It's easy to see where those priorities lie...

This sounds like a typical bittervet opinion, but personally i agree.
For me it looks like a lot of developers left ccp and the new ones dont wanna touch the old code. Instead they like to make new shiny stuff which looks awsome.
Problem is, we dont want that, we want fixing them old bugs and bring in more content. But this is hard work and not easy to do. Nobody really likes doing it.

If you're talking about ship skins, then I can't help you there - that's Art's department, and I won't even pretend to know how their mystical voodoo works. It's beyond my feeble ken. It would be great to have more of them available for missions, but if it comes at the cost of updating a player ship or making a new ship altogether, I'd rather choose the latter.

You missed the hint. tl;dr version: CCP's left arm doesn't know what its right arm's doing. It's officially another department's responsibility, we're not touching it, even if it's 5 minutes worth of work by an intern.

How many artist does it take to conjure up some brown camo pattern? Aren't basic photoshop skills universal those days? Many of us have reskinned something for game mods somewhere along the line. It's a cakewalk even without proper modding tools. It's a skin.

Perhaps you can sit down for 5 minutes and... just do it. Instead of waiting for someone else to do it.

How many artists does it take to conjure up some brown camo pattern?

You could read the devblog dealing with ship textures and get some idea of how much work is involved. In addition to the actual texture itself there are bump maps, specular maps, glows and transparencies to sort out. All of this needs to be rendered on a bunch of different cards to make sure nothing is breaking by surprise. I reckon that for a simple change of colour, this work would take about four to six hours (i.e.: the actual productive time from one work day).

Then that new skin has to be applied to an NPC in the game. This will require database work (new NPC descriptors), which also involves tests to make sure that adding the new NPC doesn't break other stuff by surprise. Let's estimate that they have the system automated, and adding an NPC to the game ("NPC is Mordus Mammoth, it's a Rokh, it uses this skin") takes a matter of minutes.

And then that NPC has to be placed into missions. Which missions? Is it a simple drop-in replacement? Let's assume that the new Rokh-based NPC is a drop-in replacement for an existing Raven-based NPC. It affects five missions. So we go into the mission description and swap the "spawn NPC" instruction for the old Raven with the new Rokh. Now you have to run through a suite of tests for that mission. Is this automated or does it require human intervention? It takes a skilled mission-runner 20 minutes to blitz through this mission. Do you test just the behaviour of the mission for the skilled mission-runner, or the newly fledged L4 mission runner in their T2 fit Drake?

Let's imagine that the test is automated, and consumes one workstation resource for 20 minutes to run through the mission and establish that baseline behaviour has not changed. You have eight scenarios to work through for each mission, but only two workstation resources to dedicate to the task. That's a couple of hours just setting up and monitoring the automated tests. This becomes much longer if you manually test the missions.

Interestingly enough, you could try to "crowd source" the testing: publish the modified missions on Singularity, ask players to test for you. Perhaps reward players who run these tweaked missions with a palm full of Aurum (a dozen Aurum here or there could come out of the development/testing budget and won't break the Tranquility economy). This would also be a PR win since involving the players in the testing process enhances our feeling of ownership/emotional investment in the game.

Having run those tests, even with thousands of test runs by various players flying Drakes, Ravens, Tengus, Paladins, iskhurs, whatever - you then have to package that modified skin into the game client.

So that's a day of art time for the different-colour-rokh, then a day of mission developer time for each mission which needs to be modified to use the new NPC. This is assuming the infrastructure is in place to automatically test or crowd source the testing. If the developer has to test themselves, add an extra day to the timeframe. And this is all assuming there are no distractions such as fixing bugs, fighting fires or contributing to future planning discussion.

It's simple enough to you and me.

Failing to test the new skin will lead to odd effects due to the interaction of certain texture encodings with the rendering engine, especially if run on a graphics card which behaves oddly in certain "corner conditions". If the texture is fed into a procedural shader (e.g.: for pulsing engine glows or blinking lights), expect to find odd things happening.

Using a new model can lead to odd effects too, such as spawning the NPC partially inside a structure, or spawning a model which can no longer navigate through a debris field.



If you've managed to do cut/paste like this in a 3D simulated combat environment with complex texture and lighting models, perhaps you should be explaining how you do it right the first time around.

They've accepted the fact that a large proportion of the playerbase are hi-sec "carebears" who like to mission and just generally chill out.

Instead of updating the content they're using there's this big push to get them all into low and null instead.

Ship skins? Phooey! We'll just nerf missions and loot so they'll have to find something else to do.