>>18401384

Quest friends forever
tccoxon posted on August 1st, 2016 in Dev Blog, Featured

Evening, folks!

We’re aware of a crash bug effecting OS X users since v1.0.3 and we’re working on a fix – we’ll let you know more as soon as we can! In general, at the moment we are working on another patch containing some fixes and small adjustments, and we’ve started working on our first post-1.0 content update. :)

It’s been a while since we had a real technical dev blog, though, so for tonight Tccoxon’s written up a post about how he built Starbound’s procedural quest system!

~Mollygos

Since Starbound hit 1.0, I’ve found myself looking back over my contributions over the last couple of years. I feel incredibly lucky to have had the chance to work on Starbound, and be a part of the community. I know the rest of the team here in the office does too.

One of my favorite features in Starbound is procedural generation – the way it produces endless distinct planets to explore, the way every weapon you find is different, and every NPC has a unique appearance. I know that from a design perspective, procedural generation is often inferior to hand-designed content… but designing a procedural system that produces pleasing results is still an interesting puzzle that fascinates me. (And has been central to the concept of one of my other projects, Lenna’s Inception.)

So I jumped at the chance to build a procedural quest system for Starbound!

We had three main goals for a procedural quest generation system. The first goal was encouraging the player to explore more, playing to Starbound’s strengths. Exploring in Starbound is fun. Walking across the surface of a new planet, you’ll encounter monster fights, treasure, new building and crafting materials, dungeons to clear out, friendly NPCs with something to say, and occasionally hostile NPCs to engage in combat with. So to make the best use of Starbound’s other features, the quest system should encourage you to explore the planet you’re on.

Second to that, distant parts of a planet in Starbound often don’t have anything to connect them. For example, a planet can have a floran village and an avian temple on it. You might wonder about how these two groups interact and relate, but the chances are they’re distant enough that the NPCs that live in them never see each other. A good procedural quest system that involves both of these places can provide more context and story. If you rescue a floran that has been kidnapped by avian fanatics from the temple, you can read into that and determine that there is some tension between these two groups.

saving_zalim

Many games have repeatable quests that quickly become dull. One of the reasons for this (in my opinion) is that the quests often have no meaningful cause or effect. If an NPC has asked me to kill the rats in her basement ten times in a row, I begin to wonder why the rats are entering her basement, why the NPC is not doing anything to keep them out, and what effect my actions are having on the local rat population. I feel dissatisfied knowing that there is no cause or effect for this quest. IMO, good quest generation systems should at least try to give their quests some semblance of meaning, so I made that the final, aspirational goal.

Starbound isn’t the first game with a procedural quest system. Skyrim has probably the best known quest generator, Radiant. Most quests produced by Radiant consist of a randomly chosen location, enemy type and reward. The locations can be things like homes, businesses and dungeons. The type of quest you get, whether an assassination or theft, depends on who gives you the quest.

The stated goal of Radiant was to get the player to explore locations they haven’t been to before. It achieves this, I believe, and it also happens to do reasonably well at producing meaning. I think it’s because of that that I didn’t realise I was playing procedural quests until I was half a dozen quests in. :D

Radiant quests generally have some sort of cause — you receive theft quests from the thieves’ guild because you’re a thief — and sometimes an effect — someone you’ve stolen from can seek revenge. What I think reduces the meaningfulness of Radiant quests is that the same causes and effects are used repeatedly. There just isn’t much variety. With Starbound, we experimented with an idea to produce a wider variety of causes and effects.

Earlier in development, Starbound had a series of placeholder quests to make a cup of coffee for an NPC. The sequence was something like:

Find coffee beans and use a machine them into coffee liquid
Find sand and craft it into glass to make mug
Find silver, craft it into a spoon and use it to stir the coffee in the glass

It’s not a great story line, but each quest in the sequence does exhibit purpose, cause and effect. That’s partly because the result of each quest is used in the next. That’s a pattern that’s easy to formalise and use in a generator:

Get A.
Use A to get B.
Use B to get C.

The quest generator in Starbound doesn’t generate just individual quests, it plans entire sequences of quests (like the above) that achieve an NPC’s goal. Surprisingly, this isn’t really anything new. At its core, the quest generator is something known as a regression planner — an algorithm that has been known about for at least 40 years. This may simply be its first use for generating quests in a commercial video game.

What a regression planner does is find a sequence of actions that will take it from the way things currently are, to a world where its goal has been achieved. A futuristic household robot might use a regression planner when you ask it for a cup of coffee. It would work backwards from its goal (a cup of coffee in your hand) to determine that it needs a cup of coffee in its own appendage, and in order to get there it needs a clean cup, some fresh coffee and a spoon to stir it with. The fresh coffee would need brewing. And in order to brew the coffee it needs some beans…

In the case of the quest generator, the goal is randomly chosen from a pool. It can be anything from finding the NPC a new friend, improving the state of the village, broadening a merchant’s stock, gaining influence over another NPC, or finding a stylish new hat.

hatI didn’t have the heart to tell him!

These goals are especially designed to produce permanent effects on the world, and many of them can affect the generation of later quest sequences. For example, when you’ve completed a quest to help an NPC assert dominance over another NPC, he/she can later use that influence in another quest to extort the victim for a needed item.

By giving each goal a permanent effect, and having each quest serving the next quest, I think we’ve done a decent job of making sure Starbound’s procedural quests are meaningful. Some quests and goals work better than others, but overall I’m pleased with how it works, and I hope our players enjoy them. :)

One of the things I learned while building this system is that, depending on the context, even bad or stupid procedural generation can be positive. The first sequence I remember Starbound generating was one where an NPC wanted to make friends with his neighbour… so he asked me to steal his neighbour’s torch off the wall, and then give back to the neighbour as a gift from him. The neighbour was so delighted to have a torch again, they became instant friends!

The reason this is funny instead of jarring is that the NPCs in Starbound always look dumb, thanks to their cartoony emotes and exaggerated behaviours. So if you know you’re going to be using procedural generation in a project, you can design the context around it to turn its mistakes into (in the legendary words of Bob Ross) happy accidents.

Starbound was pretty much the perfect environment in which to experiment with procedural quest generation, thanks to its cartoony NPCs and wide variety of mechanics and activities.

dumb

I’ve also learned how to make a better quest generation system.

Starbound generates multiplayer quests. Multiple players can accept a quest, and what happens — whether they can all complete it together or whether they must compete for the reward — depends on which quest it is. I think this was a mistake because it complicates the system and prevents the generator from reasoning about the player’s progress. Quests individually tailored to each player would be much better. The generator would know what the player’s been doing on other planets, it could involve their other colonies, and tailor the difficulty of enemies more precisely. Right now, it can’t make any such assumptions about the player.

Quests with branching paths and multiple actors would allow the player more freedom to complete quests the way they want. Right now, quest sequences have only one ending, but theoretically multiple endings could be generated with a more advanced iterative planning algorithm. If you receive a quest to steal an NPC’s item, an alternative quest could be provided that allows you to report that NPC to a guard instead. Branching quests probably wouldn’t fit Starbound very well, but would be interesting to see in other games!
http://playstarbound.com/quest-friends-forever/

>>18406520
Ну, я там им немного подредактировал хар-ки. Теперь они не ломаются, по крайней мере так быстро.
>>18406531
Да это хуйня на самом деле. Вот полный список что я надобавлял, если кому интересно.
- Во всех предметах связанных с водой(за исключением унитазов) можно набирать воду и наполнять водой бутылки.
- Во всех предметах относящихся к Foundry можно набирать лаву.
- В продажу в Infinity Express добавлены: Oculemonade, Reefcola, Bottled Water, String, Copper Wire(x5), а также фонарики всех цветов.
- В продажу в Wending Machine добавлены: Reefcola, Chocolate, Canned Food.
- Цены в Infinity Express и Wending Machine значительно уменьшены.
- Добавлены 3 вида расходников которые на непродолжительное время значительно ускоряют регенерацию энергии.
- Изменен внешний вид Wooden Workbench, Engineer's Table.
- Изменен внешний вид и крафт Apothecary.
- Изменен внешний вид, крафт и описание Forge. Forge переименован в Autoforge.
- Изменен внешний вид Wooden Cooking Table.
- Крафт Wooden Cooking Table перемещен в Inventor's Table.
- Добавлен крафт Metall Cooking Table в Engineer's Table.
- В Foraging Table доступно создание каменных кирок.
- В Anvil доступно создание медных, железных и волфрамовых кирок.
- В Autoforge доступно создание всех типов буров и кирок.
- В Replicator доступно создание Laser Miner.
- Добавлена новая станция крафта специализирующаяся на жидкостях - Liquid Interaction Tank. Крафтится на Inventor's Table второго уровня.
- При старте новой игры в Ship Locker будет добавлен флаг каждой из рас(только ванильные расы).
- Изменена иконка манипулятора материи.
- Цена на все виды телепортов уменьшена с 3000 до 1000 пикселей за штуку. Время на демонтаж увеличено в 2 раза.
- Крафт Bottled Water и Bottled Healing Water больше не требует никаких станций крафта.
- Стоимость крафта Lantern Stick уменьшена, добавлен альтернативный крафт.
- Добавлен альтернативный крафт Mining Helmet.
- Убран крафт фонарика.
- Консоль для апгрейда техов теперь не уничтожается при демонтаже. Время на демонтаж увеличено в 2 раза.
- Добавлены недостающие рецепты готовки для Raw Tentacle и Raw Ham.

Да я даже лог виду, лол. Чтобы точно знать что добавил, а что еще нет. Может даже в стим воркшоп вылажу, если мне весть этот список изменений кто-то переведет на ангельский.

>>18406622
Done.
- All things related to water (except toilets) can draw water and fill the water bottles.
- All things related to the Foundry, you can dial the lava.
- The sale in Infinity Express added: Oculemonade, Reefcola, Bottled Water, String, Copper Wire (x5), and the lanterns of all colors.
- The sale in Wending Machine added: Reefcola, Chocolate, Canned Food.
- Prices of Infinity Express and Wending Machine considerably reduced.
- Added 3 types of consumables which for a short time significantly accelerate the regeneration of energy.
- Change the appearance of Wooden Workbench, Engineer's Table.
- Changed the look and kraft Apothecary.
- Changed appearance, Kraft and description Forge. Forge renamed Autoforge.
- Change the appearance of Wooden Cooking Table.
- Kraft Wooden Cooking Table moved to the Inventor's Table.
- Added Kraft Metall Cooking Table in the Engineer's Table.
- The creation of Foraging Table available stone picks.
- The Anvil available to create a copper, iron and volframovyh picks.
- In Autoforge available to create all types of drills and picks.
- The creation Replicator available Laser Miner.
- Added new crafting station specializing in liquids - Liquid Interaction Tank. Kraft at the Inventor's Table tier.
- When starting a new game in the Ship Locker will be added to the flag of each of the races (race only vanilla).
- Changed the icon manipulator matter.
- The price of all kinds of teleports decreased from 3000 to 1000 pixels each. Time to dismantle increased by 2 times.
- Kraft Bottled Water and Bottled Healing Water will no longer require any craft stations.
- Crafting cost reduced Lantern Stick, Kraft added alternative.
- Added an alternative kraft Mining Helmet.
- Removed Kraft flashlight.
- Console upgrade techs no longer destroyed during removal. Time to dismantle increased by 2 times.
- Added missing recipes for cooking Raw Tentacle and Raw Ham.

>>18412302
Более-менее пофиксил.

- In all things related to water(except toilets) you can draw water and fill the water bottles.
- In all things related to the Foundry, you can dial the lava.
- The sales in Infinity Express added: Oculemonade, Reefcola, Bottled Water, String, Copper Wire (x5), and the lanterns of all colors.
- The sales in Wending Machine added: Reefcola, Chocolate, Canned Food.
- Prices in Infinity Express and Wending Machine considerably reduced.
- Added 3 types of consumables which for a short time significantly accelerate the regeneration of energy.
- Changed the appearance of Wooden Workbench, Engineer's Table.
- Changed the look and craft of Apothecary.
- Changed Forge appearance, craft and description. Forge renamed to Autoforge.
- Changed the appearance of Wooden Cooking Table.
- Wooden Cooking Table craft moved to the Inventor's Table.
- Added Metall Cooking Table craft in the Engineer's Table.
- Stone picks available for creation in Foraging Table.
- Copper, iron and volfram picks available for creation in Anvil.
- All types of drills and picks, except the most advanded available for creation in Autoforge.
- Diamond-reinforced Durasteel Pickaxe, Diamond-reinforced Durasteel Drill and Laser Miner available for creation in Replicator.
- Added new crafting station specializing on liquids - Liquid Interaction Tank. Can be crafted at the Inventor's Table.
- When starting a new game in the Ship Locker will be added the flag of your race(only vanilla races).
- Changed the icon of matter manipulator.
- The price of all kinds of teleports decreased from 3000 to 1000 pixels. Time to dismantle increased by 2 times.
- Bottled Water and Bottled Healing Water craft will no longer require any craftting stations.
- Lantern Stick crafting cost reduced, added alternative craft.
- Added an alternative Mining Helmet craft.
- Flashlight craft removed.
- Upgrade techs console no longer destroyed during removal. Time to dismantle increased by 2 times.
- Added missing recipes for cooking Raw Tentacle and Raw Ham.
This mod not compatible with mods that change vanilla picks and drills.
This mod not compatible with mods that change vanilla crafting stations.

- Everything related to water (except toilets) can store water and could be filled by water bottles.
- Everything related to the Foundry can be fulled with lava.
- For sale in Infinity Express added: Oculemonade, Reefcola, Bottled Water, String, Copper Wire (x5), and the lanterns of all colors.
- For sale in Wending Machine added: Reefcola, Chocolate, Canned Food.
- Prices of Infinity Express and Wending Machine considerably reduced.
- Added 3 types of consumables which for a short time significantly accelerate the regeneration of energy.
- Change the appearance of Wooden Workbench, Engineer's Table.
- Changed the appearance and recipe of Apothecary.
- Changed appearance, recipe and description of Forge. Alsom Forge renamed to Autoforge.
- Change the appearance of Wooden Cooking Table.
- Crafting Wooden Cooking Table moved to the Inventor's Table.
- Added Metall Cooking Table crafting in the Engineer's Table.
- Stone picks crafting available on Foraging Table.
- The Anvil avail to create a copper, iron and volframovyh picks.
- In Autoforge available to create all types of drills and picks.
- Laser Miner could be crafted in Replicator.
- Added new crafting station specializing at liquids - Liquid Interaction Tank. Craftable at the Inventor's Table's second tier.
- At new game every race's shiplocker will contain apropriate flag.
- Matter manipulator's icon has been changed.
- Price of all teleports reduced to 1/3. Time to dismantle increased by 2 times.
- Bottled Water and Bottled Healing Water no longer require any craft stations.
- Enlightened Lantern Stick's recipe, added alternative recipes.
- Added an alternative recipe of Mining Helmet.
- Removed flashlight craft.
- Techs Station no longer destroyed on dismantle. Time to dismantle increased by 2 times.
- Added missing recipes for cooking Raw Tentacle and Raw Ham.

Ленивый фикс.

>>18421761
Ладно, сам попробовал.

Пробная версия FAQ:

– Какова актуальная версия игры? Я пират.
На 3 авг 2016 это 1.0.4.
– Ну чё там, по сравнению с бетой дохуя нового?
Очень спорный вопрос. С одной стороны почти нихуя нового, с другой стороны затягивает по-новому. Лучше сам проверь.
– Где найти Core Fragments?
ВНЕЗАПНО, у ядра планеты, ближе к лаве. Ещё на первой планете обычно можно найти шахту, но там скорее всего не хватит.
– Где найти топливо для корабля?
На лунах, но перед этим надо сделать EPP, чтобы было чем дышать.
– Чё за хуйня розовая на лунах?
Эта хуйня бессмертна и запилена чтобы тебе было не так скучно собирать топливо. По запросу Erchius Ghost в воркшопе ты можешь найти мод на выключение/смертность этой хуйни. Но мы тебя за это обоссым.
– Как апгрейдить манипулятор?
Кнопка манипулятора справа вверху, кожевник.
– Как апгрейдить корабль?
Для начала тебе надо пройти основной квест до открытия второй (кажись) расы. Откроется магазин с лицензиями на аутпосте Penguin Bay. Тогда можно будет расширять корабль за ящики апгрейда.
Иначе, ты можешь проходить квесты в деревнях на планетах и брать аборигенов к себе. Также можно за алмазы брать пингвинов в подземном баре аутпоста, после прохождения босса-пингвина.
– Сюжетку прошёл, чё дальше делать?
Это же песочница, а не каловдьюти, прошёл он мне тут, бля. Строить хрущи, выращивать бульбу, ебашить колонии, собирать сеты шмоток, окаменелостей… Аутировать, в общем! С модом Fracking universe открывается пчеловодство, генетика и куча всякой хуйни.
– С пираткой на серв можно?
Можно, лишь бы версия была актуальная. Гог-версия должна подойти. Архив модов для сервера с модами когда-нибудь добавим.
– У меня игра без модов, а на ваш сервер без модов не хочет заходить, пишёт assets чё-то там, чё делать?
В настройках поставить галочку Allow assets mismatch. Это для начала.
– Со своей музыкой можно заходить на сервер?
Категорически нет, иначе сервер может упасть, а ты окажешься навсегда забанен.