Star Citizen New Modular Missions For Alpha 3.19
Welcome to some more Star Citizen we have some details of the Limited Ships being sold for Stella Fortuna starting today and CI talk about Modular Missions including various new mission types for 3.19 with salvage and retrieval missions.
Inside Star Citizen: Mission to Module
Inside Star Citizen started with an acknowledgement of the issues with Alpha 3.18 on live.
Pushing the patch to live was to test the patch at scale, they knew the launch was going to be rough BUT not this rough. They apologies but thanked players for helping with the testing and also explained that the devs are working on getting 3.18 in a much better place!
More and more players are getting in each day and it’s getting much more stable and playable.
Mission Gameplay is core to Star Citizen’s Gameplay Experience.
The Mission system they have now allows them to build missions in days rather than weeks or months.
Originally they had bespoke missions for every mission… which is incredibly inefficient… there is no underlying logic to tie them together. Now they have tools that make them all standardized.
The Modular mission systems allows them to plug everything together easily and operate under the same umbrella.
They can keep adding new sub modules and everything is tied together with a wrapper module which will define the main mission type like delivery or Combat and more specifically for sub modules they have things like linear delivery missions or deliver 5 boxes, or for bunkers eliminate all or eliminate boss .
Bounty Missions have a contract that tells you where the bounty is… there are a load of different types and they will be adding live capture to it when the tech comes on line.
They are working on resource collection missions (Salvage / Mining).
This could also be collect x amount of an FPS harvestable.
They gave us an simplistic example of how this all plugs together for a multi-stop delivery mission:
Delivery Module
Multi-Stop Delivery Wrapper
Initialized Delivery Loop – How many boxes to be delivered?
Round Delivery (x) tracks the delivery progress of each individual delivery loop / box.
Box Pick Up
Drop Off Module – Is their a specific area to spawn? Otherwise it will spawn randomly within some set parameters.
After Picking Up the Round Delivery Initiates Drop Off Process…
Same Loop Again but for the item Drop Off. With a specified drop off point if needed.
It’s waiting for X item from X person. Then verify.
Then that goes up the chain… and it will start the next delivery box in the chain.
Once you have completed all the parts this goes up to the multi-stop and then pays out your mission & rep.
The new Prison mission in 3.18 had to expand out the delivery system to allow you to pickup from a corpse and drop off to a satellite… that was a quick addition of 2 things to allow for that rather than having to re-write an entire bespoke mission.
Salvage Modules / Missions are part of 3.19
Is currently a single module
Take the Mission and it will direct you a piece of salvage.
There might be another NPC there already salvaging…
There could be an illegal version where you have to go to a site and salvage it quickly before someone else comes. They could then bring in reinforcements to chase you off or attack you.
The spawn ship waves module is part of this allowing a designer to precisely design what ships and loadouts turn up.
There is also the Chicken Ship Module… if you turn up at a site and there is an NPC salvaging your loot then you can chase them off by damaging them…
If they get away they might call in their friends…
If you destroy the ship then eventually a large ship might turn up to find out what happened to them.
Another New Mission Type is Package Extraction…
The Nine Tails have taken over a Orison Platform and are holding some valuable Crusader components.
This mission might be open to lots of players and there will be lots of boxes of components to collect and NPCs to defeat.
The System allows them to keep adding to the missions without much additional logic work.
They can also tie missions together, do a bounty mission, that then kicks off a salvage mission for the ships you defeated.
They are waiting on some resources to free up before working on mining missions.
They can then build Custom missions stitching all these modules together if they want.
And there can be a huge amount of variance and options for players.
This is only a small portion of what the Mission Features team are working on.
They may be doing some work on crafting missions soon…
CI Put out a Post – St. Patrick’s Day 2023 – Stock-Limited Ship Waves
Stella Fortuna may be a little behind schedule this year, but there’s still time to kick back, have a drink, and challenge fate. It was important to us to be sure we could get the servers into a better state before kicking things off, and while there’s still more work to be done, we’ve had a number of improvements go out, and we’re seeing many of you now able to jump in and play.
In addition to an all-Origin-themed promotion, you’ll see the return of some stock-limited Fortuna ship packs (which include the Constellation Phoenix Emerald), the highly limited 890 Jump, as well as our Stella Fortuna paints (both new and returning).
Catch the three waves at the following times:
- Wave 1: March 17 – 16:00 UTC
- Wave 2: March 18 – 00:00 UTC
- Wave 3: March 18 – 08:00 UTC
And, of course, you can also look forward to another exciting community contest to win big!
You can expect a variety of green skins and ships to be on sale beyond those as well…