Fiction In-game NPC Communication Guidelines?

[CMD Malandark]

I am currently researching into a project I have in mind to populate my game with a 'realistic as possible' Station/NPC chatter using Voice Attack & a plug-in by jgm. The actual coding logic is fairly easy to implement, but in order to make this realistic and therefore immersive as possible, I need to adopt and intergrate a number of protocals/guidelines that would exist in Elite Dangerous in the year 3302, that would in turn govern/define the way Stations & NPC's would interct with the player.

In absence thus far, of canonical guidelines to the above (does this info exist somewhere?), I have put together 9 starting assumptions and hope that if any are wrong, or inaccurate, that someone can correct or add further ones that I have not yet mentioned or taken into consideration.

I'm sure those currently writing, or planning to write their RP journals/logs in the Lore & Roleplay forum will find your replies informative & helpful as will I.





1. The in-game station announcements are specific to each faction (i.e Empire/Federation/Independant) and convey a set tone of authority based according to their owning faction?. Federation station announcements for example are highly geared towards generally warning the players to follow/obey the rules or risk annihilation, while in Empire controlled stations they use a softer authority approach, using such words as 'Please...', 'warmly thanked...', 'With regret...','It is with pleasure....'. etc


2. I assume therefore, that authority/police vessels when commicating with players would also follow a simular 'authority tone' according to their home faction?.


3.I also assume that 'Stations to player' communications would also use their faction's 'authority tone' in their greetings when the player requests docking?


4. In the case of perhaps corporate type stations, is it possible that once the player requests 'Launch Clearance' that sometimes the station would play a short jingle for a fictious product instead of, or after their normal 'Launch clearance granted commander...' message?


5. Would Stations/ports/hubs etc all have their own 'control room' for directing and handling of incomming and outgoing traffic?


6. If yes to 5. Would this be controlled by computers or humans? I'm assuming computers would be the better option?


7. Ship Callsigns. Does this exist in any shape or form in the canonical/Lore Elite Universe? If so, what format does it take? How would authority/police vessels address the players in absence to Callsigns?


8. I assume that the standard communications radios in all civilian owned ships (even those in military ships that are owned by civilians) would never hear any military/security chatter unless said ships directly communicated with the player. Is this correct?


9. Just like with our car radios, we can tune into many frequencies, however, realistically speaking, we stick to just two or three local ones unless we move into another area. Going forward with this idea.... Is it realistic to 'assume' that in the year 3302 that all civilian owned ships would also have 2 or three frequences/modes pre-programmed into their ships that automatically changes according to wether the player is in Supercruise (System wide commuications - Medium Wave sound quality) or Normal space (Local Station/Port/hub communications - FM quality sound) or, when in Supercruise and in uninhabitate space i.e (Exploring - Short Wave sound quality) that would cover a neighboring system or two.


10. In Federation controlled space or, in Empire space, are their any set 'special' political or religious days in the year that are celebrated factionwide?




Many thanks in advance for your replies,

-Malandark-

 

[CMDR Byr Goefin]

Not exhaustive by any means:

I have seen wideband and narrowband comms mentioned.

Narrowband is point to point, probably encrypted. It is unclear if it can be 1-1, N-1, or N-N. I would assume all three modes are possible: person to person, person to group, group to group.
Wideband: Anyone can hear and retransmit. This is SOS or news broadcast.

Ship call signs: Given the sheer number of ships in game, it would by necessity be a unique Hash, and not something human readable, just to have the number-space available for billions of ships.
hashes, for the not hash familiar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function

We human would give them names of course, and military would have alphanumeric and real names probably, like modern ships: CVN-65 USS Enterprise vs FDS-1129 FNS "Starlight Express" Federal Drop Ship 1129, Federal Navy Ship "Starlight Express"

But the transponder would send something like:

5cb45d950eea0e4f043be0066f06c8dd

You could feed the designation in and get the same hash back out, to verify it is identifying itself correct.

 

[Allen Stroud]

I am currently researching into a project I have in mind to populate my game with a 'realistic as possible' Station/NPC chatter using Voice Attack & a plug-in by jgm. The actual coding logic is fairly easy to implement, but in order to make this realistic and therefore immersive as possible, I need to adopt and intergrate a number of protocals/guidelines that would exist in Elite Dangerous in the year 3302, that would in turn govern/define the way Stations & NPC's would interct with the player.

In absence thus far, of canonical guidelines to the above (does this info exist somewhere?), I have put together 9 starting assumptions and hope that if any are wrong, or inaccurate, that someone can correct or add further ones that I have not yet mentioned or taken into consideration.

I'm sure those currently writing, or planning to write their RP journals/logs in the Lore & Roleplay forum will find your replies informative & helpful as will I.

Happy to answer with the caveat that 1) I'm not Frontier and 2) I can't reveal information from the guides, that's for them to decide when and where and if they are put out.

1. The in-game station announcements are specific to each faction (i.e Empire/Federation/Independant) and convey a set tone of authority based according to their owning faction?. Federation station announcements for example are highly geared towards generally warning the players to follow/obey the rules or risk annihilation, while in Empire controlled stations they use a softer authority approach, using such words as 'Please...', 'warmly thanked...', 'With regret...','It is with pleasure....'. etc

Yes I think that's the idea. The sound library packs are factional and some of the chatter is reflective of your legal status. I had the Leesti authorities irritated at me for a while without realising and wondered why they were so rude.

In the fiction you don't want to be too restrictive. There's no reason people can't be making the announcements. For Lave Radio we use 'Niamh' as the station announcer. In Lave Revolution, back in AD 3265 'Niamh v12.03' was a voice address computer system used across the planet.

2. I assume therefore, that authority/police vessels when commicating with players would also follow a simular 'authority tone' according to their home faction?.

As above, you can pick that up from gameplay as a guide. I would flavour it a little if I was writing this stuff though.

3.I also assume that 'Stations to player' communications would also use their faction's 'authority tone' in their greetings when the player requests docking?

Possibly, it depends. In Lave Revolution, Orbital Traffic Control at Austin Town in Arquce tried to sell Heldaban Kel a variety of services whilst he was on station approach.

4. In the case of perhaps corporate type stations, is it possible that once the player requests 'Launch Clearance' that sometimes the station would play a short jingle for a fictious product instead of, or after their normal 'Launch clearance granted commander...' message?

Nothing wrong with that as an idea.

5. Would Stations/ports/hubs etc all have their own 'control room' for directing and handling of incomming and outgoing traffic?

I would suggest different stations operate in different ways. Authors gave some of their own interpretations and abstractions related to this. Proscribing an absolute 'it's like this on every station' might be a problem for Frontier in their ongoing development of the game.

6. If yes to 5. Would this be controlled by computers or humans? I'm assuming computers would be the better option?

See above, follow the narrative need.

7. Ship Callsigns. Does this exist in any shape or form in the canonical/Lore Elite Universe? If so, what format does it take? How would authority/police vessels address the players in absence to Callsigns?

‘To matters at hand, ship ident A00013320B546, the Gallant, which just appeared on top of us,’

See above quote. You have a variety of ident set ups. I gave my ships number IDs and names using the navy designation of italics in the text. I wouldn't state that was an absolute for everyone though.

8. I assume that the standard communications radios in all civilian owned ships (even those in military ships that are owned by civilians) would never hear any military/security chatter unless said ships directly communicated with the player. Is this correct?

Can't comment absolutely, but encrypted channel tech is available now, so I would think available then. I did write some encrypted comms from ships, but again, that doesn't dictate policy to Frontier.

9. Just like with our car radios, we can tune into many frequencies, however, realistically speaking, we stick to just two or three local ones unless we move into another area. Going forward with this idea.... Is it realistic to 'assume' that in the year 3302 that all civilian owned ships would also have 2 or three frequences/modes pre-programmed into their ships that automatically changes according to wether the player is in Supercruise (System wide commuications - Medium Wave sound quality) or Normal space (Local Station/Port/hub communications - FM quality sound) or, when in Supercruise and in uninhabitate space i.e (Exploring - Short Wave sound quality) that would cover a neighboring system or two.

Range of comms was discussed in detail in the DDF. I proposed a relay comms system and that FTL comms was very expensive. Essentially, ships that entered a system locked onto data feeds from every other ship in system in a kind of peer network, uploading and downloading information from their previous location and new location. The only issue in implementing that would be that Frontier systems would be out of touch and that would be hard to represent in game.

10. In Federation controlled space or, in Empire space, are their any set 'special' political or religious days in the year that are celebrated factionwide?

Probably worth trawling Galnet for that information.

Many thanks in advance for your replies,

-Malandark-

No worries.

 

[CMD Malandark]

Ship call signs: Given the sheer number of ships in game, it would by necessity be a unique Hash, and not something human readable, just to have the number-space available for billions of ships. hashes, for the not hash familiar:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_function

We human would give them names of course, and military would have alphanumeric and real names probably, like modern ships: CVN-65 USS Enterprise vs FDS-1129 FNS "Starlight Express" Federal Drop Ship 1129, Federal Navy Ship "Starlight Express"

One possible option I'm looking into is this format, model (i.e Python) ABC-1234 as this gives somewhere around 170+ million different combinations off-the-top-of-my-head and is short enough to use in NPC to Player conversations. With 1.4 million copies of Elite Dangerous sold, this call sign format should give me enough unique call signs to last me almost forever. I need to do a bit more research into this though.


-Malandark-

 

[CMD Malandark]

Happy to answer with the caveat that 1) I'm not Frontier and 2) I can't reveal information from the guides, that's there's to decide when and where and if they are put out.

+rep

Your Sir, are a gentleman!

I can work with these nuggets, there is just so much I dont know about the Elite Universe I'm flying around in, and as you hinted, so much still waiting to be implemented or finalized.


-Malandark-

 

[Allen Stroud]

Glad it's useful.

Worth taking a listen to the first two seasons of Escape Velocity. Its an unofficial audio drama, but Chris had access to the guides as he was writing fiction for the Tales from the Frontier Anthology. Being an audio drama series, it has to find solutions to a few things to may not have been apparent before.

http://laveradio.com/EscapeVelocity/

 

[IliteratSqirel]

Good evening CMDRs Malandark and Stroud,

first of all: thanks for putting up such excellent questions (and then for taking the time to answer).

Since the Engineers has come out I think there is now some additional guidance to go on. Traffic controllers now have specific accents, but what's more important: they have station-specific phrases such as "have a productive day" or "we hope you will find our station's services adequate to your needs" (if I remember correctly).
Now granted, as far as I can see they aren't necessarily specific to Empire or Federation, but rather specific to stations.

On the matter of ship designations: I'm particularly interested in those since I'm currently pursuing my own writing project, for which I will now need to align with the in-game designations. So my T6 is now designated "Lakon India-Lima-India". However, I think this would need to be amended with a sequential, numerical or other, designation to account for multiple ships in the traffic controller's 'air'space.
Using this particular example, I propose using "Lakon India-Lima-India - 0001". Have you implemented any updates since Engineers, CMDR Malandark?

 

[CMD_B34R]

this is an awesome idea, keep us updated with the progress!

 

[CMD Malandark]

Greetings everyone, I'm back.. I took some months off from playing ED as I was getting a little burned out with the game. But when I heard of the latest major update had just come out I felt compelled to return and see for myself all the improvements the game had to offer.

I'm actually quite excited that FD finally got round to improving the background chatter and just as importantly, that they took the time from what Ive so far seen, to keep it more-or-less, specific to the controlling major faction, which was, my original thought basis for the station announcements.

@ IliteratSqirel Before I took a break away from the game I had written a *basic framework* for Voice Attack to implement a version of background chatter that uses the following ship designation i.e Python Alpha Bravo Charlie - Number, Number, Number, Number. My way of thinking is this. Rather than assigning a ship a temporary 'traffic controller's air-space designation' that would naturally change from station to station, it's perhaps more in keeping with Elite Lore? and real life to have a unique ship registration assigned to each ship in the game and then have that registration used throughout the lifetime of that ship.

As it happens, a very useful Voice Attack plugin was released just before my long break that created and implemented a random/unique registration for every ship the user had in the designation format shown above, to which I have found is in keeping with the game thus far. Without getting too bogged down with ship registration formats, the only 'useful' addition that I can think of to the above designation is a prefix designating what faction the ship was bought from. There's no API from FD that gives this information out, so it cannot be used by any utility that reads FD's API in-game, but there are many scenario's that I can think of where this designation prefix would be quite useful in-game!

Ultimately, I guess its down to individual tastes to how ship registrations can be used within the game, until that is, FD decides to nail this down further, but this is such a low priority task for them to ever want to implement.

By-the-way, how is your writing project coming along?

-Malandark-

 

[IliteratSqirel]

Good to see you back, CMDR Malandark!

To your point - I agree individual ships should/would have a specific handle that would not change from station to station, akin to registration numbers on today's planes. Also, similar to today's flight numbers used as a handle by ATCs, you would need an additional temporary ID.

In my writing project I've gone to using the format ''Core Dynamics Mike Alfa Charlie Niner Three– contact 59', with the latter part constituting the temporary (local) identifier.

The project itself is coming along nicely, thanks very much for asking! Currently sitting at nearly sixty-thousand words, about a hundred pages, I'm at about a quarter of the final book, I think. Editing should bring down the total words count somewhat afterwards.
Unfortunately, I've had no luck trying to contact FDev about it, so far. So I will finish the draft first and then send it in for review - the way of the first-time author, I'm afraid.