Mission Editor for ED

[Spacecat]

TLDR: To ensure the future of ED, give us a detailed mission editor, please.

Ed missions. as they stand, are all created by FD and generally follow a standard template. Consequently they are fairly boring credit farming ventures.

Now if you look at Arma 3 (and all previous versions) they have a magnificent mission editor available to the players for them to develop and publish their own hand crafted missions. This mission editor has evolved and developed over the years into a powerful and essential part of Arma. The user created missions range from rescues, attacks, ambushes, escapes and a huge amount more to even a space sim mod of sorts (Cosmos Engine). Some are huge multi-part campaigns and others single one offs. Some single player, some multiplayer and all are made by the players.

I believe that the mission editor in Arma has given this game a great deal of longevity (15yrs). Rather than keeping the players away from the development of the game, Bohemia Interactive have actively encouraged the players to be part of the process. This has made Arma a stand out game in my opinion and has a huge mission building community. This is something that FD should look at, it has made Arma into a long lived success in the military sim world and this is where ED could be in the space sim world. We have this huge galaxy so let the playerbase fill it with missions and adventures.

It has been said dozens of times, that FD have created a fabulous sandbox but with little depth, now in a way that's understandable, any game company would be hard pressed to fill such a vast space with interesting things to do, so a Mission Editor would give access to all the passionate players, groups, factions etc out there to develop their own stories and adventures, to then have them accessible on the mission board for other people to participate in, filling the bubble and beyond with more missions and advetures than you can shake a stick at.

Now, and this is the big now, This would mean that FD would have to develop mission editor software, something with proper tools, maybe with a graphical starting point of the galaxy map. We would need tools for routeing and mapping, allies and enemies, waypoints, text and video boxes, and a whole host of other tools to create meaningful, deep and fun missions. NPCs would figure big in all this so we would need a lot of tools to control their actions and whereabouts, branching controls and all sorts of things.

Also, a way of testing the missions content would be needed before being uploaded to the game, so maybe volunteer testers, similar to the forum mods, could do QA then pass them up to FD for final testing and then insertion into the mission board.

And I would like this by Christmas please.

Actually Christmas 2019 would be ok

I'd send players 200 ly to a system in search of a nonexistent tourist beacon.

 

[DaggerSnake]

Well a lot of players would not consider the BGS when designing missions.
Bad idea in my book!

Simon

or they would purposely to make missions that influence BGS, CGs and PowerPlay. Could get ugly.

 

[Starstrydur]

Forget some fancy tool. Just a simple template like we use to report a bug could go far. The background of hire able crew is pretty generic for example. It's obvious the devs could use some simple varied content. Nothing complicated is needed, just more variety. Things like this could be very simple and break the repetitive descriptions, background, a step towards depth.

 

[Agony_Aunt]

Seen this in GTA5. Its quite nice, as long as its heavily curated. Can't go having deliver 1 ton of biowaste to the system next door for a billion credits.

My guess is that FD might be interested in doing it, but are wary of the resources required to maintain such a system.

TLDR: To ensure the future of ED

LOL... i have no idea why people post phrases like this. As if without player generated missions the game is dooooommmmeeddd!!

 

[roryclague]

Yeah, I mentioned this in the old Alt.Fan.Elite USENET forum back in 2002.

As previously mentioned though, I can't see this coming for quite a while if ever. The other challenge is that the hand-coded missions in FFE worked because the game was single player; with ED hand-coded missions are now CGs so anything user-created would be lost after the first person had played it.

Just gotta say, reading that thread was a real pleasure. It's amazing how some of the things people talk about now are so mirrored by what they were talking about in 2002. Discussions about missions, about first person gameplay, etc. And then the board turns into a flame war about dynamic typing in Python, and the relative advantages of pure C vs C++ vs assembly language.

Some fans have been waiting a long time for this game. This constitutes bit of healthy perspective for the newer crowd.

 

[DirkLarien]

This!
So much. I cannot agree more.
Just like Star trek online did. It brought some of the best stories i ever seen in a game and i play rpg-s and similar since 95. (anyone here played City of polmar ree?)
Its like asking Devs to work for free. Its Win / Win idea.
They just have to check it for exploits that is all....even that can be crowdsourced to community.

 

[VR jefranklin18]

Some fans have been waiting a long time for this game. This constitutes bit of healthy perspective for the newer crowd.

Some would say we're obsessive, I would say dedicated Not sure how many of the old alt.fan.elite crowd are here though.