Foundry: First Impressions

So, the Foundry has been live on STO nearly a month.  I can say that I have not played a single Foundry mission, as I've been too busy working on my own.  So, from an Author's point of view, how is the Foundry?

Well, the fact that it's taken me this long and I'm still nowhere near finished is a good indication that the Foundry is not something that a casual gamer is going to get into very deeply.

The mission I'm working on is not a terribly complicated plot, despite being something of a "whodunit".  The player is basically gathering facts in order to solve a problem.  This would be a completely boring mission if not for the branching dialog capabilities of the Foundry.

The Foundry's Story mode is reasonably intuitive, and the advanced dialog editor is not indecipherable.  Once you know how, it's easy to construct complex dialog trees with loops and interconnected branches.  The only downside here is that there is no way to truly fail an objective and thus no way to use that failure to trigger anything else.  The Costume editor is not bad, but needs more costume parts and options.

The real problem with the Foundry, and the place where the learning curve is exceedingly steep, is the Map editor.  Since this is the foundation for everything you're able to do in the Foundry, this is where Cryptic needs to get it right.  So allow me to walk you through some of the challenges I've faced in trying to build my mission.

First, I needed this mission to take place entirely on board a ship.  Your mission MUST start from a mission "door" so it was necessary that the player travel to one of these doors in order to start the mission.  Not a show-stopper, just a bit of an adjustment.

The very next challenge was that there are no good ship maps currently in the Foundry.  A generic Federation ship interior map for the Engineering deck just like I find when I visit my own ship's interior would have been ideal.  But, no such luck.  There is a Federation type bridge map, which was good to start with but not good enough for the rest of my mission.  From the available parts, I think I might have had an easier time building the interior of a Borg ship.

So, I had to take a generic ship interior map (which doesn't look much like the inside of a Federation vessel, by tthe way) and section off everything but one room and one corridor.  It took me 20 minutes just to properly position a turbolift in place of an opening to another room.  I had to build a room containing a warp core from scratch; it wasn't easy and the result was not very satisfying.  Given that we've seen such rooms in-game already, I don't think it would be asking too much to have a map with a complete warp core room and external corridor for each faction.

Placing objects on the map is a very repetitive exercise involving:

1. Finding a suitable object from the list of available objects.  Despite search filters, this isn't easy to do.

2. Placing the object on the map.  This involves placing the object by drag and drop and then fiddling with the X,Y,Z coordinates as well as the object's rotation.  There's no ruler or guide to help you align things.  Also, I would have expected the Y coordinate to be on the horizontal plane, like on a sheet of graph paper.  But no, it's on the vertical.  It gets especially difficult when you're trying to connect objects.  It would be great if there were some intelligent "snap-to-grid" or "snap-to-object" feature, but there isn't.

3. Play the map.  This is where you find out that the object isn't where you expected it to be, isn't facing the direction you thought it would, or discover that it doesn't really look right where you chose to place it.  So you bounce back and forth between the map editor to tweak the coordinates and playing the map until the object is right where you want it.  Getting an actor to sit down properly is nearly more headache than it's worth.  I don't mind the initial placing of objects on a map grid, but there really needs to be a mechanism for being able to move those objects into place from a 3D view.

Finally, I really would have liked to be able to adjust the lighting to set the proper mood... but that isn't one of the things you can customize just yet.

I really like the idea of the Foundry, and I'm rooting for it to succeed.  But it's painfully obvious that it still needs a lot of work before the average user is able to produce a half-decent original mission without a great deal of trial-and-error.

Have you used the Foundry yet?  What's your impression?

Late News Dept: .COM Signed for DNSSEC

.COM has been signed as of March 31st... When will big companies switch over to DNSSEC?
A Red-Letter Day

I have a suspicion that most of them will be dragged to it kicking and screaming by their marketing and legal departments.