[suggestion] Easy way to implement "persistant" missions

[NW3]

There's actually no need to make missions persistent; they just need to be consistent. This will "fix" relogging to receive additional missions.

Like this...
Create a random seed based on location name and game time (rounded to the nearest half-hour or other duration). Use that seed to populate the mission board, after removing any missions the player has already accepted. You could have an ID per mission (just the current random seed value) or compare the mission text to determine which ones have been accepted. This also means that mission servers will not need to be synched; they will all generation the same mission lists.

To create more continuity, the mission board could be populated using the last 3 duration seeds. That is, you'd see the newest missions, those which are ~31-60 minutes old, and those which are ~61-90 minutes old.

To prevent massacre mission stacking, simply apply a kill to the first mission which has not yet been completed. A simpler solution would be to never provide more than 1 massacre mission at a time (and checking to see if it's already been accepted), but that would probably cause much unhappiness.

 

[Hydrino]

"Easy".

Famous last words.

How do you think FD do it now?

There are a couple of video streams where one of the devs working on missions answers questions and explains some of the complexity.

Also, I don't think your use of Persistent is consistent to how I use it, so I'm not sure what you really mean. We definitely need a more persistent galaxy with more Persistent Tier 2 NPC's to interact with and encounter multiple times. Chained missions could involve a persistent target as well as a persistent mission giver. Right now only mission givers and of course the PP leaders are persistent for any length of time. NPC are generated on the fly for missions and cease to exist when the mission is completed, fails, or times out. USS generate NPC on the fly as well. You will never see or interact with those NPC again (except by co-incidence due to a huge but still limited NPC name generator).

The holy grail of procedural mission creation for me would be difficult to implement but hopefully one day we get close to it and is just what FD put as their ultimate goal for Tier 2 persistent NPC in the Design Discussion Forums back before launch. This would involve using data from the player logs stored on our local machines, since it seems too much data for FD to store and process all NPC interactions for millions of players. We would get new randomly spawned NPC but also a chance for an NPC we encountered earlier, with a bit of "memory" from the log files. This would give the illusion of persistence and continuity without actually requiring NPC data permanently stored on FD servers. But again, not being a single-player game this type of thing is a lot more complex than it might seem at first, and might actually turn out to be impractical or impossible to implement. But I hope FD can one day pull that off.