Developers walk through building a mission in the Subsumption tool, using the Voidy example. They cover missions as entities, spawn queues, GUID-backed variables, withdrawn missions, PvP missions, and the Mission Feature Team's programmers.
David, my David, he made this into an entity. It'll probably have a reason, I just don't know it, but it's not anything that I can really argue with, because what do I know? I just make missions and half of them don't even work.
Yeah, I can't spell, really can't. But the good thing is that the coders make it safe, so we don't have to spell. So whenever I'm doing variables in Subsumption, the name of it is purely front-facing, so I understand what information I've injected into that variable. But behind the variable, it has a unique GUID, G-U-I-D, which the code uses. So it doesn't use my spelling. So if I spell it 'delivery' here and 'delivery' there, it doesn't matter, because the number of the variable is what links it. So my spelling errors usually don't really matter. It obviously matters when it's a coder doing it because they're unprotected, but they protect people like me, because I can't spell.
In some areas we do. In some areas we might withdraw the mission. If ever you see 'withdrawn', it's because something's happened in the back end that we've detected that we know we can't handle, so we just have to take it away from you. And then we would see that withdrawal on the mission on our analytics page, and we'd be able to go in and investigate as to why that happened. So we do have some things in place. There are other things you might have noticed where you're doing a delivery mission and the marker is on the ground underneath it. That marker is on the OC root of the entire location while we're waiting for the location to stream in, and everything that I need to be loaded for it to then assign you your delivery port.
TL;DRBroken mission elements like unspawned NPCs usually aren't caused by the node chain but by a backed-up spawn queue, which they keep working to make more efficient, and Server Meshing should help.
So the chain they were on about is me connecting my nodes together, and the answer is no. Usually that could be to do with anything. Everything has to go through a spawn queue, and sometimes that spawn queue can get very backed up because we have a lot of stuff in our game. So you could be at your location waiting and someone's just gone to microTech, and that planet kind of needs to be there first because that's an entire planet. You're going to either go into it and it's going to spawn around you and you'll die or whatever. So there are things that are priorities in queues, and the queue system could be huge, but we're constantly working on it to try and make it more efficient and make it so that fewer requests are handled. And things like Server Meshing should help, because the spawn queue would be dedicated to each thing that runs that area.
Yes, we have David Pollard, we have Mark Prades Calder, I'm sorry, I'm going to destroy some of these people's names. We have Mark Mansell, Mikel Guana Lorca, sorry Mikel. Ilya Storovsky, love that guy, and Josh Kitchen. They're all our programmers on our team.
TL;DRElliot says it took longer but works; missions are slow to make, he's not halfway done, and the team would iterate, for example by adding feeding and protecting Voidy for more interesting gameplay.
Yeah, good. It took a bit longer, but we got it working. It's not a simple process to make missions. It takes a while. And then, for example, I'm not even halfway finished, because after this I'd go back and we'd look at it as a team, we'd iterate, we'd improve, we'd have a look at how we could make it better. What happens if you have to manage Voidy's food and water? Do you have to feed him? Would that make it more of an interesting gameplay loop then? Because right now, what I did with Voidy, he is essentially a box in a different form. So having that extra gameplay of feeding him, making sure he stays healed up and things like that, and that you don't die; we can have reinforcements come after to try and reclaim him and you have to protect him, and all that sort of stuff makes for more interesting gameplay.