Lavecon News?

Hi folks,

Any word on the announcements at Lavecon or the Q & A sessions? I've seen a couple broken links to some sort of ship announcement, but I'd love to know more ...

Right on commanders!
 
Lots of little bits of news. Bit tired so a quick summary:

Sandro has the same hat....
Zac is as enthusiastic and helpful in person as he appears to be on the forums.
SJA is an evil genius and gave a number of small groups of us an insight into AI behaviour, how the npc rankings are being tweaked and improved and exactly how to beat reverse flight combat.
They are liking the idea of ship variants... especially when they help bridge gaps in their internal ship 'backbone'. More on that later.
There is a 10 year plan.
The UA thing isn't a wild goose chase, we are apparently 'close' and there is more awaiting us as and when we work it out.
Imperial Eagle concept artwork shown... may well change over time.
More support for player groups 'Soon'. Watch the gamescom news.
There is a plan to use the upgraded missions system to give us more depth. The upgrade was 'under the hood' to extend capability to do missions conditional upon statuses of all sorts.... Longer range and more complex missions were a 'yes' and got a 'very soon'.
The PC release of cqc from what we could tell will be hot on the heels of the proper xbone release.

And much more. Will tap notes up properly after today but essentially we are having a cracking time, the devs have all been superb, the community drank the bar out of ale and are all bonkers and we have 1 day left.
 
Oh, and a very generous member of their team stayed late for a couple of weeks and made a special Lavecon logo decal and paintjobs for Sidey, Vulture and Cobra only available to Lavecon attendees.....

It has flames.....
 
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Thanks for the tidbits! :)

In regards to the mission system: Did anyone ask them if the new mission system will allow them to inject new mission types/variants "on the fly" over the server without updating the client?
 
Thanks for the tidbits! :)

In regards to the mission system: Did anyone ask them if the new mission system will allow them to inject new mission types/variants "on the fly" over the server without updating the client?

That would be a great boon if true.
 
FD went home just after 9pm after staying and talking to people far longer than most developers would. I've been to some conferences where the devs are treated like rock stars and only the special few can get access to them.

This was a totally refreshing change.

I did ask about missions, particularly about how many of the missions are of the kill 10 rats, err pirates type and how very few people actually read the mission text. Sandro mentioned that the mission system isn't anywhere near done, and (with a glint in his eye) said that they were thinking of ways to make missions a lot more than just reading text, find pirate, kill pirate type.

Read into that as you will, but it was clear to me is that there's still a lot more they want to do to the mission system.

It was my first time at an elite meet, and one of my biggest impressions is that frontier love their game (probably more than we do) and would love to share more with us but practicalities prevent them.

So many stand out moments, but for me the most concerning was talking to Sarah Jane and noticing the glee with which she described some of the proposed AI changes. My impression is that solo will soon become as dangerous as open play xD.

I left the hotel about 2am, just after a altercation broke out amongst some wedding guests(nothing to do with Lavecon guys) so I figure plying Fdev with booze is'nt the best tactic :)

I'm not sure if Fdev will be back today, but the time they did spend with us was very valuable and appreciated.

The venue was fantastic, the volunteers worked their butts off all day, and the delegates all great and thanks to it being a smaller conference(~150) it had a really snug and intimate atmosphere.

So thank you Fdev and the organisers it really was a huge success and your efforts were really appreciated.

Off to bed now, only had 2.5 hours sleep...
 
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Michael doesn't want to inject hand crafted missions for non 'main arc' activities. They are looking at procedural generation for your own small mission arcs and working out how to make it rich and engaging.... or so he said. The mechanisms for delivering the missions and context related to rank, standing etc are in place... all they need to add is the auto creation of the content in enough variety.

All very encouraging... doesn't sound quick to implement though.

Had a long chat with Zac about Galnet, stats, story pieces and their creative writing. All once again very encouraging.
 
Michael doesn't want to inject hand crafted missions for non 'main arc' activities. They are looking at procedural generation for your own small mission arcs and working out how to make it rich and engaging.... or so he said. The mechanisms for delivering the missions and context related to rank, standing etc are in place... all they need to add is the auto creation of the content in enough variety.

All very encouraging... doesn't sound quick to implement though.

Had a long chat with Zac about Galnet, stats, story pieces and their creative writing. All once again very encouraging.

I didn't mean "hand crafted missions"...just new types and templates for the PG to work with. The text for missions for example are text with lots of replaceable fields that the "PG" can fill in. That's the kind of "types" I'm talking about.

Things are already pushed over the servers like this, CGs for example, but I'm just curious about if the normal BBS missions also has this capability.
 
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This is actually the best news about the game I have heard for a long time. It sounds like there is a recognition that the say nothing policy has gone too far, and that they will be letting us know 'sfuff' at the sort of level we can reasonably expect (very rough dates, high level content, approximate direction).
 
I think it's fair to say that they are fully aware that it needs more - my opinion (from translating what was said) is that they aren't improving it piecemeal, there is quite a significant mission improvement coming in the near/mid future.
SJA DID mention 1.4 but nothing about when, or anything other than the AI content stuff. It was interesting hearing about how the team split up high level and low level AI tasks between them - how the NPC behaviour used to be in mini "black boxes" of code and is now more integrated. Bugs have been discovered and fixed - not least of which that the NPC's aren't paying attention to our rankings and loadouts properly sometimes and after they do, there will be more intelligence in how they respond to your loadouts (after a scan) and when they do interdictions based on the difference in your and their rank (amongst other things). All very well thought out stuff.

There is a weather eye on not making it too hard, by making Harmless ships fly like a muppet. Also asked whether NPC ships fly co-operatively in anything other than "all respond to incoming fire" and it appears that in their own wings, there is no co-ordination of what they're up to in terms of combat tactics or flight tactics.

All sorts of little bits from the whole team. Frontier really are still passionate about the game, they DO still play it personally in their free time (Michael plays both XBone and PC - it allows him to tool around in combat and dip in for a laugh without messing with his primary account).

There was a message from DB recorded just for Lavecon where he apologised for not coming in person and introducing a few of the sneak peeks. The usual "thanks, we love you" that we know and expect from him - genuine and heartfelt.
 
This is actually the best news about the game I have heard for a long time. It sounds like there is a recognition that the say nothing policy has gone too far, and that they will be letting us know 'sfuff' at the sort of level we can reasonably expect (very rough dates, high level content, approximate direction).

All this news is a great start to Sunday. And props to FD for this new change in direction, bodes well!
 
Zac and I also had a long chat about the forums and how the "good" comments, threads, positivity and enjoyment end up condensed into lots of "me too" constructive threads, but the negativity when it happens seems to much more go to a "I want my own thread about that" which makes the page LOOK more negative than it is going just by the headlines. He's a very aware and sharp individual when it comes to understanding forum behaviour, our particular community and has plans on how to help keep everyone more informed and theoretically happy. Many, many of our very public concerns are being addressed as best they can.
 
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