Oh good this is normal, I thought the damn thing bugged out on me again. :pinch:

If I'm not mistaken, you need 5 people to review and rate your project before it goes public. Any user can sign up as a reviewer on the foundry tab. I'm out of town til tomorrow, but I'd be happy to give you a review when I get home. I always love a good foundry mission! =)

PS the project ID is ST-HO77CF73G, if that's useful. The Foundry shows it as published, but I'm not actually seeing it. Does it take a while to show up in searches?

Title: Free Advice is Seldom Cheap
Author: @Tekn0mancer
Faction: Klingon
Level Requirement: 16+
Author Notes: This is my maiden voyage with the Foundry tool. Feel free to pick it apart looking for the bugs that almost certainly exist, the Foundry UI drove me nuts for days.

This is episode 1 of what will be a 2-part (I think) mission arc. It's very much story-driven; the (space) combat that does exist is largely optional, but you can opt-in to quite a bit if you want to. There is only one encounter that by design you can't really avoid, but even that can be dodged if you try hard enough.

I hate some of the lazy storytelling (official and otherwise) in this game so I really put a lot of effort into the story and dialogue, including using online language databases for some Klingon flair. The mission was originally supposed to be cross-faction but when that turned out not to be an option, I went all-in on the KDF side. Given the direction that took the story I doubt I'll bother trying to adapt it to the Feds, so if you don't like playing Klinks, sorry in advance.
:P
You might find it a bit slow going at first, but I was trying to pace it like a standard Trek TV episode...the first bit is mainly setup and backstory. Depending on which dialogue branches you take and how much combat you choose to do, it should take between 25-45 minutes.

Other than that I'll let you judge the story for yourself, because:

For mods, it really depends on what you can afford. The advanced fleet dmgx3 crtd weapons are respectable now. If you really want pens, then you can find them on the exchange. (Just because you crafted it yourself doesn't mean it was free....)

As for energy type, the differences aren't that big when it comes to the proc. AP is the best for damage. It gives a 20%*crth cat-2 bonus, which for me is maybe 2% or 3% of that weapon's damage. When non-weapon damage is counted (plasma explosion, kemo, etc.), it's an even smaller percentage of the total. The other procs do less.

Disruptor is not affected by subd (subd buffs subsystem shutdowns and disruptor's proc is a damage resistance debuff) and partg doesn't affect plasma's proc (the devs have said that if it comes from a weapon, then it's not affected by part gens, except for the procs on the gravimetric and PEP torps).

For more on the math behind mods and procs, here's the bible: https://www.reddit.com/r/stobuilds/comments/2yront/the_hard_and_soft_numbers_on_weapon_mods_and_procs/

Yeah, the foundry tool is a bit neglected. If you have a chance to play some of the spotlighted or other missions in the library, it might give you an idea of the limitations/possibilities of the editor. Although I'm not new to the foundry, I often learn about new things that it's capable of by playing other people's missions.

If you're trying to build a level that's elevated above the surface of the map, be sure to use the foundation block asset as your ground level rather than the platform asset. This should address the falling through the floor issue, if that's what you're attempting.

I haven't experienced the crashes that you're experiencing, however. It can definitely be a challenging and sometimes frustrating tool to use. Good luck with it! If you have any specific questions that aren't answered in tutorials, feel free to ask them here. There are a few of us like Ali, Midnighttlc, myself and others who have foundry experience and might be able to answer your questions!

I've spent all weekend working on a scenario, and at least a third of that time has been spent watching the software crash, reloading the game client and force-verifying, watching the Foundry server sit at the loading prompt, or finally getting into the thing and trying a playtest -- and being either unable to move my character at all, or inexplicably (and helplessly) plummeting to my doom in what should be a zero-gravity environment. WTF?

:angry: If I had known the damn thing was this buggy when I started out, I would have never bothered. But I've got too much effort in it to stop now, so I'll finish the scenario -- if it will let me.

Hi Teknomancer,

A long time ago I started creating single-page, written tutorials for the Foundry. I didn't do many, and rather like me they're a bit old and out of date now - the Foundry toolset has certainly been updated since I wrote the tutorials. But there may be something useful there.

foundry101.wordpress.com

I hear what you're saying about the limitations of the Foundry toolset dashing your story-telling hopes. I've been there many times, but I like to be an optimist and believe that limitation fosters innovation.

Keep at it!

Ali

This is awesome! Any kind of info or page that's not linked to FaceBook someone that doesn't have a FaceBook account can check for updates?

Great fun today! thanks for the Accolade run!

Thanks guys. I took a look at the kirkfat videos, and they've been reasonably helpful (if a bit outdated). I honestly think there should be better and/or more official resources for the Foundry just in general, though.

Here's a big issue I have...a sector map showing which maps are available for space or ground use and/or which are not would be incredibly handy. I may be an old-school trekkie, but I don't know by heart the names and locations of every single star system in the game. I know roughly where on the star map I want stuff to happen, but I don't know all of the systems/planets/stations by name, and it seems like a lot of them are just plain N/A. If you want A to happen in Klingon space, B to happen in Fed space, C to happen in Romulan space, D to happen in a border area etc., there's not really an easy way to filter that sort of thing from what I can see.

After following along with setting up a basic mission (go to the place, do the thing), I'm kind of disappointed. Looking through the toolkit, a lot of what I wanted to do appears to be impossible in the Foundry context, at least in the way I wanted to do it. Looks like the devs keep all the real goodies for themselves, so that we mere mortals can't use everything the game engine is actually capable of presenting in a mission context. Even some of the locations and options I would have liked to use seem unavailable, because reasons. This is forcing me to rework the story itself to make it fit, which is just plain bad design -- story should always drive process, not the reverse.
:angry:

if i was just looking for some doff assistance, what info would be required to enable someone to suggest what would be good for me slot into active duty?

atm im basicaly not using any.

toon is a 60 eng, t6 fleet arbiter (the fed battle cruiser) phaser beam arays with 1 torp.

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V O T H .. B A T T L E Z O N E
Join us one hour before the Accolade Hunting on the Voth Battlezone to enhance your Dilithium bank balance with this double Dil weekend!

+1 for kirkfat. those were the ones i kept coming across during my searches too...when i made the Bacon Wars saga foundry missions. :-)

I switched almost all of my Science ships over to tetryon-based weapons because of the synergy between the OP science abilities and destroying shields.

I've found plasma to work well with my engineers too, polaron as well. It's also just so colourful ;)

YouTube has a good set of video tutorials by Kirkfat. Just search STO Foundry Tutorials and his should come up. Once you click on one, his entire library should be accessible through his channel. Watched his myself when I was learning :)

Isn't/wasn't the official Mac client already just running in a Cedega wrapper?

I don't know yet if my irritation with how Cryptic/PWE has handled this will outway my desire to play the game.

It would take a dig, but someone here once posted a step-by-step list that looked promising. I find most of the videos out there are just cursors flying around screens with no explanation of what they're doing.

I find it interesting that a developer is recommending Wine and similar software. I would think the developers would be disinclined to vocally support nonstandard software.

Well this seriously sucks. I really enjoyed this game. Looks like I'll now have more space on my hard drive.