Who has been playing Mass Effect 2 then? 😉 Yes I like this idea Uncle Bob. Info brokers selling information, to help you in following up leads to the location of your target. Yes that would be very satisfying if you just chased someone across multiple star systems. Would you have to assume that all the information you pay for is accurate though? What would happen if someone gave you a mis-leading.....er lead?

Well, it's not like they invented the concept. And I didn't play LOTSB, unfortunately.

Player frustration is what would happen, I assume. It is imaginable if you generate a plot in which the misleading information has some meaning and impact and can therefore be reflected as such, but I'm not aiming that high (yet). If you buy information and just don't find anything at the location without any explanation whatsoever, people will only shout "BUG!".

Or mis-leading info could lead you into an ambush 🙂

The mission ideas floated so far sound great, and they got me thinking. Understanding some of these might require tech that isn't present currently, or might never be practical, here are some scenarios that struck me:

Tailing: Following a ship across multiple jumps to see where it docks/lands, then reporting its final destination to the client in a timely manner. (would require an AI flight plan and some way of detecting you've visited its landing spot, not sure if this is feasible). But it would be exciting, especially if you might be led beyond your own operating range or into an ambush.

Chauffer: You're hired to fly a VIP to another system, then wait for them to finish their business, and fly them home.

Quest: Search for a reputed alien artifact in some distant system, and either fly within a certain range of it, or find a way to bring it home (if it even truly exists). Might even be orbiting (or hovering stationary) over a planet/moon, or floating free in interplanetary space. Maybe a monolith type object, too big to fit in your cargo hold? You might be tempted to use mining lasers on it, and bring home a sample, not knowing if it will defend itself in such a case. (I expect this would require a ton of new code).

Messenger/mail carrier: The Pioneer universe is like the Age of Sail, where the speed of ships is the speed of communication. I imagine there'd be a great demand for both pony-express-style rapid courier missions and slower bulk mail/email message delivery, either for governmental mail services or corporate communications. It could be a good way to earn money, and there'd be a certain amount of risk in the less-traveled systems.

Traveling Salesman: A company gives you 100t of some specialty product (cosmetics, fitness gear that doesn't work, commemorative coins) for you to unload as fast as possible, with the greatest profit. It's up to you to find a market and sell it. To simplify the bookkeeping, the conceit is that you BUY the goods at a reduced rate, then keep whatever profits you make from the sales. Perhaps this is done solely through the BB system, so you'd visit a station and look for a "Want to buy XX" message that matches the goods in your manifest?

Special Delivery: A corporation needs 100t of computers from system X within a certain time frame. Big bonus if you deliver ahead of schedule.

Coast Guard/Combat Patrol: Fly to a starport/space station and patrol for a certain period of time, standing ready to defend against raiders. Perhaps you need to fly within a certain distance of ships going in and out, in order to scan them for contraband.

Refugees: A civil war/plague on some world creates a situation where your ship is pressed into service evacuating the inhabitants to other worlds in that system, as quickly as possible. Would require life support for the cargo hold, and a fast or large ship. Each trip would lessen the number of evacuees, until the number reaches 0 or the crisis passes.

Canvasser: You're tasked with delivering junk mail/religious pamphlets to a series of outposts.

some nice ideas here. The "pony express" is pretty much the same as a delivery mission though, and the traveling salesman would be too much like normal trade. It might be an option to get the goods for free, and keep 10 percent or so of what you sell, (bookkeeping should be possible, i think), so it becomes an alternative for traders that find themselfes too short on money to fill up their holds.

I like the trailing. No problem over one jump, but i don't know exactly if hyperspace clouds will be spawned when you enter the system, if the ship in question has already left the system. Should be doable somehow, though, and is actually quite a nice idea to include in the bounty hunting i'm currently writing...

Departure clouds in one system will automatically be turned into arrival clouds in the next system the player jumps to if the cloud dest is the same system. Everything else is under script control. You set your script controlled ship to jump, and then wait for onEnterSystem (you'll get it regardless of whether or not the player beats your ship to the system). Once you get it, you do whatever is appropriate - fly to a starport, jump away again, whatever.

If you were to keep track of where your target ship is jumping to, then you can check where the player is in onEnterSystem. If its not the same system your target jumped to, then you could fail the mission instantly. Or, if you wanted to be tricky, you could simulate the target moving around other systems just by searching for nearby systems and updating your data. If the player did enter the system where the target is, then you re-spawn the ship from scratch.

You could make that even more interesting by giving the player clues or rumours about the mark's location via the bulletin board or comms.

The only one of those that isn't totally doable right now is the Quest mission, because we don't have custom cargo and equipment yet. The Coast Guard mission would be complex to code. The Pony Express one is pretty much already in place, although I did also have an idea for a sub-bulletin board of general mail for transport. I didn't bother taking it any further on the grounds that we already have half a squillion delivery missions in the average BBS.

I figured that much by now. The question is, if a ship jumps from my system to another system, and then imediately jumps another system ahead before I arive at the interim system, will the system contain the hyperspace departure cloud? I would think not, but I really don't know. If not, is it possible to spawn a hyperspace cloud?

It won't jump before you arrive, because your script can't tell it to jump before it physically exists, and things only physically exist in the player's system. The earliest that your script could tell it to jump would be at the player's onEnterSystem event, or the ship's onEnterEvent if (and only if) the ship's is later than the player's.

Yeah, makes sense...

That is a good point though. Right now you can't make it jump until the player is in the system. If you wanted to mimic it arriving and then immediately jumping away, you have to wait until the player arrives, which depending on mass, drive class, etc could be anything up to a couple of weeks away. Then you jump the NPC, and it will look like it jumped immediately after arriving until the cloud is analyzed, then it became clear that it hung around for a couple of weeks doing nothing.

We could make API to allow manipulation of clouds to help with this, but I can't quite see how to make it sane off off the top of my head right now. I'll probably wait until someone is actually developing a module that requires this function before doing anything about it.

making it sane doesn't sound so hard, needs three parameters: a ship object and a system path, and a jump-off date. Define a ship (no need to spawn it), get a path to the arrival system and the supposed date of the jump, send it to the function that spawns the cloud and let it do the calculations- And let it return false and not spawn a cloud if the ship can't jump to the system. Something like that, anyways. 🙂

Technically, this isn't completely true, which might be considered a bug.

It is true that a system, and anything in it, doesn't exist until the player arrives. However, currently, ships that were carried over in clouds from the previous system and have arrived by the time the player does, will have their onEnterSystem events queued before the player. Hence the system_updated variable in TradeShips.

Edit: Looking at Space::DoHyperspaceTo it would be trivial to queue the player first.

Some more mission notions:

Traitor: I don't think Pioneer currently models faction standings yet, but it would be exciting if you accept a sensitive courier mission, and face a difficult choice at your destination: deliver the message to its intended recipient, or sell the contents of the message to a competing corporation who promises to double the delivery fee. (There would be two different messages on the bulletin board. Of course you'd take a reputation hit with your original employer (maybe even to the point of being targeted for assassination), but you might earn some bigger perks by turning traitor. On a related note:

Sucker: A competing corporation pretends to be the rightful recipient of the message, and careless players who don't notice their ignorance of the arranged passcode might be fooled by the imposters.

Your papers please: If Pioneer eventually models spheres of influence, they might require the player to pay for fees and register with authorities, or risk police action. Then it would behoove you to know the local laws and either skirt them, or bow to the red tape. There might be tariffs/taxes/duties associated with landing or taking off legally. One might also be able to buy a hacked IFF device that mimics the proper protocols for system entry/exit, and thus skirt the laws...at some risk of discovery, of course.

When in Rome: Business actions or flight ops might be prohibited on certain days in certain systems, due to local holidays, religious or cultural customs. The player would have to advance time to the next available business day.

(edit: fixed stupid typos)

Pebblegarden, those are some great ideas! 😀

some good ideas, although they're not strictly speaking mission ideas. Some are game mechanics (papers please), while others traverse into the realm of procedural plot generation (traitor, sucker).

I think the best would be to have a fair amount of diverse mission types that don't branch too much, i.e. With a clear beginning and ending. Later we can think about an infrastructure of branching one into the other and create short episodical plots.

(you sold that package to another buyer, he sends an assasin after you to shut you up about it, which forces you to on a bounty hunt type mission for the evil ceo in question, because he will keep sending assasins after you as long as he's alive, etc.)

I have some pretty clear ideas on how to get there, but the basis of it would be a large pool of "dumb" do this or that missions. Whe that pool is large enough, "all" that needs to be done is a function in every mission type to create it with custom text and target, and a master algorithm that goes about creating these mission parameters in a connected way. Not that it's going to be easy to code, but there's no technical problems with it. But a versatile pool of missions that are fun to play on teir own is what we need firsr.

The Lua engine can be used for game mechanics. That already has some precedent with the Breakdowns & Servicing script. Certainly, non-governmental factions (corporations, organised crime syndicates, religious groups, environmental groups, etc, etc) can be implemented in Lua.

We already have character sheets. Adding relationship information to those won't be a problem, and the player even has a character sheet of their own (named Peter Jameson by default, with random gender).

Package deliveries could be expanded and enhanced. At the moment, a package is received by the person who sent it, which stretches disbelief a little once you notice it. If it was a little more realistic, you'd have to take it to a named contact, or leave it at the post office or whatever. They wouldn't approach as you dock and take it off you, because there's no way they could know which ship the sender had found to take the package. There should be a bulletin board advert (several, really) expecting a package. You should choose the correct recipient and hand it over. Choosing the wrong recipient could have them either refuse it, or take it anyway (with a character sheet test on lawfulness, perhaps). Giving some lame excuse to the actual recipient afterwards should prove amusing.

This gives scope for identity theft, of course. Questions about the risk of this could be asked of the sender, along with the "How dangerous?" and "How soon?" questions. The sender might provide a password, leading to recipients having a "What's the password?" option for the player to select, so that they can respond with either the password or a guess.

Governmental stuff (Federation, Empire, etc) could only really be done in Lua with engine support, and the engine might be the best place to leave all that. Information about system-wide allegiance should appear in maps, system information and so on, which Lua can't do yet. Also, Lua would need some API calls allowing the scripts to nudge allegiance stats up and down.

What about missions that require the player to compete against a number of similarly-equipped NPC ships to be the first to a geographical goal, like a station or spaceport? In the future, items that boost total thrust and agility could be purchased and installed onboard to make these missions easier.

Other missions could require ships equipped with cargo scoops. Whoever can collect the most cargo, or the most credits worth of cargo in a given time would win, get a cash or item prize, and possibly advance to the next level of a tournament/cup/series.

There could be many kinds of contest missions the player could enter, from last ship standing demolition matches to trivia challenges presented by random NPCs or televised events. Obviously, a demo match could be disastrous for someone that only owns one ship, so I'm not entirely sure how that would work.

If generic models could be created to host certain types of missions, like raceways, tv stations, and mysterious religious temples, they could be placed anywhere desired on a body and selected as an autopilot target after accepting the mission, giving the player a unique place to visit, whether it be within an existing town or on an otherwise uninhabited planet.

I have no coding ability, but I can create story content or at least help with textual aspects of mission writing if any help is desired.

That's possible, too, CreepyStepdad, with the exception of performance-enhancing gadgets. Interestingly, you do get a performance boost (thrust *and* agility) by carrying less cargo.

Having "CreepyStepdad" used seriously exposed a major flaw in my choice for a funny sounding moniker. It probably isn't as funny as I first thought. Bear with me, people.

Some of the smaller ships only have a few tons of cargo space. When the player has a number of parts like autopilot, scanner, shield generator, and upgraded hyperdrive equipped, since they add to mass, they would slow the ship down. This would mean the player would need to sell everything but absolutely necessary items and empty their cargohold before even attempting a race, at least if they wanted to be competitive. I guess you could get around this by having the NPC racer ships generated be very similar in mass and speed, or have a script that temporarily removes all cargo and superfluous parts, returning them after the race or if the player cancels the race.

How absolutely necessary is a hyperdrive? My race script was going to feature a character with a very highly tuned ship; the player would have to be fairly ruthless with equipment, etc, to stand a chance.

I have that "boy racer" script designed in my notebook. You can just see it here, from back in September, although it wasn't finished at that time:

Being able to not only watch the game evolve as time passes, but also to interact with those actually doing the creating. Very nifty.

Thinking of mission archetypes. Racing, trade, assassinations, taxi and recon seems to cover many of the missions one would expect from an open space sim. What about emergent scenarios? For example, could a player hyperjump and at their destination find themselves within an asteroid field? While there would be no reward in terms of money, the player may still feel a sense of accomplishment at their continued survival. Other scenarios could include a large asteroid or other threat that has been diverted by rebels/criminals/pirates and is heading toward a station or spaceport. If the player can divert or destroy the threat from impacting the target, they get...whatever. Even though factions haven't been added yet, blame could still fall on the generic badguy.

@Brianetta: It IS pretty easy to just sell extra weight, including the hyperdrive, before an important race. How far out are racing missions in the nightlys? Because you guys don't have enough other stuff to do. 😆

Racing missions are as-and-when. If somebody else codes a half-decent one, it'll probably become the official one.

Asteroid fields are fun, but fictitious. The only places with rocks (well, ice) that dense would be gas giant rings. While Saturn's rings are 50,000km across, they're only about 10m deep, so even then it's not much of a challenge.

Point taken. But what about a debris field from one body impacting another? An article I read recently said there probably was once another planet that was ejected from our solar system to become a rogue planet, altering the orbits of Earth and other bodies on its way out. Say a rogue planet enters a new solar system and alters the orbit of one of the existing planets, causing a collision that results in complete planetary destruction and a large debris field.

Surely in the vastness of space there could exist an area where various chunks of matter pose a threat to a pilot navigating through it? Even if easily avoided at normal speed, not paying attention to objects could potentially cause a collision at high time acceleration.

Maybe it wouldn't add that much, I don't know. I'm not obsessed with this particular idea by any means, but it does seem possible, though perhaps improbable.

If I understand correctly, Pioneer strives for realism over fantasy. I also understand that many of you know a great deal more about this subject than I do. But with how little we actually know about the Universe, what's to say that something doesn't exist?

* I guess the distances and speeds involved play a much bigger part in this than I first gave them credit for.

Oh, don't get me wrong, they could be coded up and put into the game, but they would be a complete fabrication. Even in the event of a collision such as you described, you'd end up with chunks of rock, all moving in different directions, which means moving away from each other. Unless there's a force keeping things in the same place (there might be a few rocks orbiting Lagrange points in real life, or in planetary rings) they simply won't stay together. Any clusters that did would be seen as a single tiny obstacle to travel around, rather than something that must be travelled through.

There is an asteroid belt in the Sol system. There are also asteroids in Jupiter's leading and trailing Lagrange points (the Greeks and the Trojans, respectively). The density of matter in these places is negligible. If you were sent coasting to Jupiter, right through the main asteroid belt (as all of our probes must) you'd be lucky to even see an asteroid, let alone actually hit one. You may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.