Reworked Missions (Procedural Generation)

EVE Technology and Research Center Player Features & Ideas
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I’ve never actually made a thread with this idea as the central topic, so I’ll post it here for posterity. Most of the following content is copied over from another thread.

The design goals for missions are to have the content be soloable, beginner to mid-tier, but also scalable so they can be done with other players, thus potentially on boarding players into more difficult or social content. As such, their potential reward output should be relatively low.

What I assume is likely to happen when missions get reworked, is we’ll get a mission board similar to the opportunities window (it might even be listed in that same window in another tab or using a filter to separate pve types.)

A possible option here is to have the same missions globally available, so if someone else grabs the mission, it will disappear, and another will be assembled in it’s place. The purpose here would be to make the universe feel a bit more alive and less, artificial.

The end goal with the prior point, would be for missions and other world events to start impacting each other, so if someone destroys some critical infrastructure to an npc group, that event will spawn a series of missions to address the issue. Or if an npc group gets a surplus of assets, they might get aggressive toward another npc group. But for now, we’ll just fake it with the offered proposal in this thread.

Each mission that appears on the board will have a time to expire (in the minutes to hours range, rather than the current 7 days,) before it goes away and a new group of missions is offered from that agent. Failure not to accept the mission before it expires will not incur a standings loss.

When you click on the offered mission, it will give you a synopsis of the mission and it’s objectives (similar to what is currently offered.)

Eventually, there should be an option to have aura or the mission agent read the important parts of the mission objective to the player. (Ai voice-overs are getting very good.)

The final piece of this, is procedural generation of missions, so we don’t have the constant repetition that exists now. This can be done by creating pieces of content, and then assembling them together to form the whole.

Mission Level and Type : This is your general mission types determined by agents: standard combat, burner, distribution, mining, ect.

filter options when looking at the job board:

An option to modify the mission difficulty by number of players.

Does the mission send the player into dangerous space? (Lowsec from a highsec agent.)

Faction: Anti pirate. Anti drone. Anti empire. Anti Trig. Anti drifter. Anti Edencom. Ect.

below are randomized options selected by the procedural mission generator

Generic Mission Objective: Item retrieval, vip escort (may require remote repair,) vip capture (kill and loot named npc,) tackle missions, pure combat, hacking, ect.

Optional Objectives: Are there any? These would give rewards for full clearing missions sites, hacking containers, rescuing friendly / neutral npcs from pirates, tackling vips for npcs to capture, ect.

This is where generic mission text would be located (modified by the other randomized options) and then given to the player to explain the objective of the task.

Location: where is the mission site physically located? deep space? near a planet or moon? on the celestial’s surface or in it’s atmosphere? Near a station? Is the mission location a static poi or an instanced dungeon?

Site Dressing: What does the instanced dungeon site look like? are there stations? mission buildings? neutral npcs? Are there any named npcs tied to your account in the mission? (This is to make the missions feel tied together into a semblance of a story arch, that have reoccurring characters.)

Combat: What level appropriate enemy npcs are in the mission? Are there friendly npcs that will help with the task? Is there an option to hire npcs for the mission? (For example if you have a hauling mission and want an escort to protect you from enemy npcs or an escort mission and you personally want to dps but want some rr support for the guarded npc.)

Escalation: After the asked for task is complete, will the mission escalate to a higher stage? This might automatically trigger if the player has a partial completion. Ie: Secured objective item , but optional objective vip got away. The mission might then decide to give you the choice of whether or not to track the npc down.

Anyway, I could talk more about this, but I think you get the idea. If each of those options has 50 variations, you’ll get a mission system that doesn’t feel so repetitive. And mission assets can be assembled in a similar way (larger procedural objects assembled from hand crafted objects,) so site assets have a large variety.

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Very good collection of categories, perhaps for courier missions location might be split into starting, intermediate and destination as well as freight is missing.

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Yeah, it’s by no means an exhaustive list, just something to give people the framework of the idea.

I was mostly thinking of that system for combat missions, but it’s true that courier missions could have you fly to an instanced location to pick up the object, and drop it off in another instanced location or a static poi instead of a station. And those locations could be modified using the dynamic mission generator.

That said, I think I would have two courier mission types. One that is added in among the combat archetypes, a “combat courier” if you will, and one that’s closer to what we currently have: trucking items between stations.

The possibilities really are endless with a system like this, and I think it’s a huge missed opportunity for CCP not to do this.

Also, this type of system is something that could also be used for their anomalies and combat signatures. Imagine if every one of these things were unique, it would make exploration much more exploratory.

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By the way what I think you try to point at technical is procedural generation for missions.

There are some videos on it, one on youtube can be found at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-POwgollFeY

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Yup, that’s the general idea. I decided the update the title to showcase that point.

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As this is the general or specific idea I think one needs to know that for procedural generation a different designing approach than static content is required.

At least every element which is interexchangable through the random generator needs to be put in a pool.

You present quite the collection of possible pools, however for it to work I think ccp might have to organize things in several trees.

I reckon for it to appear in eve you and me had to create a technical design paper and send it to ccp, then not hear anything … and one day find it in the game in a different form.

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Yeah, this is possible. Not every choice would necessarily play nice with others.

Ideally this system could be used for anomalies and combat signatures as well, so you’d have a much larger variety of activities to engage in. And since it’s all dynamic, it feels like a living world.

For example: you’re flying to a station, and one of these anomalies activates near the station at a shipyard that surrounds the station. The anomaly tracker updates with a timed event 5-15 minutes.

Some pirate npcs are trying to make off with some ships and other cargo and you decide to intercept. It wasn’t difficult and you quickly destroy the pirates. At the completion of the event, you’re gifted with some isk and lp from the corporation owning the station.

With all these static structures all over the place and neutral npcs as well… it gives players who wish to embrace the pirate fantasy a way to do that before they decide to target players in lowsec as well.

Neutral npcs to destroy, structures to blow up and loot, structures to hack and loot, ect. And the great thing about all that, is all of these station locations, can be used as mission sites for the procedural generator as well. It all feeds back into itself.

I’m not sure if I really expect CCP to do anything about this concept. While I like the idea, and I think it would add value to the game, I also recognize it would take a lot of resources to pull off properly. It would probably be one or two full expansions worth of resources to bring the concept to fruition.

So my main purpose in posting this, is to have it on record. Perhaps a developer at some point in the future will take notice of it and think it’s a good idea.

And I hope they do eventually, because EVE’s pve is in a pretty sad state. Homefronts were a nice addition, but they are VERY repetitive, and in order to do them you need a pre-made group. The mission system in this thread is designed to fill that missing content gap, and potentially on-board people into working together in those more challenging pieces of content.

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And it might be harder for ccp to pull off in eve than it was for chris roberts to pull off in freelancer, alone for in freelancer space was filled with a lot of different zones while eve is mostly empty space.

Freelancer has a lot of scenery to randomly place mobs into, in eve even the scenery had to be precalculated each mission. Most likely even vendetta online could pull if off easier.

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I think the difficulty comes with the intricacy of detail. That extra complexity is the real challenge, the overall design of EVE isn’t really a factor.

In fact, to lessen on load on ccp’s end, they could actually offload some of the calculations for instanced dungeons to the player’s client. Nothing to do with game balance, but all that site dressing stuff, could absolutely be offloaded to the person who pulls the mission. Once it’s been assembled, the client would tell the eve server what the site dressing looks like, and the objects would be placed in space.

This would also allow players to have some controls on their end for how these sites look. If their computer is on the lower end, they could select to remove gas clouds, and a lot of the other unnecessary objects. Doing it this way, instead of just allowing the player not to render those objects, ccp saves load on the server, because those objects were never created in the first place.

This is actually why I want the static sites, such as around stations and gates (some locations even already have them,) they operate as the scenery you’re referencing.

That said, I also have a concept for how to incorporate planets into EVE gameplay. Planets and moons would create a mass shadow that would prevent warp, minimally within 100km of the surface of the celestial. Larger planets and stars might have a much larger area.

Furthermore, the mass shadow would create a warp scrambling effect around 30km from the surface. This serves as an incentive to fit both microwarp drives and afterburners on ships.

I would also put warp scrambling zones of control around some pois within the atmosphere, to serve as geography people would have to navigate around.

When pois are placed within the atmosphere and on the surface of the planet or moon, you’ll be able to recreate that more traditional feel in open world environments, because you have to actually travel to locations rather than just warp to each place you want to travel to.
As a side note, when you take into account potential vanguard interactions, all these surface pois (whether they be planetary interaction nodes or purely npc dressing) can serve as a beachhead for EVE to vanguard interaction.

And finally, when you combine this planetary construction with the mission generator, you truly get a feel for what this stuff is capable of.

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I sort of get the feeling that calculation time, and thus loading time for procedural generated content, are underestimated, then again it could be shortened if it is done as some kind of random branch choice tree walk*, from let’s say root spatial postion to predesigned “clusterign of asteroids” to predesigned “clustering of station objects” to predesigned “clustering of ship groups”.

Additionally the calculations ahd to, after the player computer finished them, resend to the server - generates addditional traffic - to be shared among all who are in the system, and all who enter it during the mission flying of the player.

However thsi could be solved, by having in a system a lot of “seed points” that are normally inactive, yet when a player takes a mission, the server does choose one or several root points, and then assigns the outcome of the branch choices of the tree walk to this point(s).

Well not many ships have enough mid slots, to pull this off in a good fashion.

I personally suggest instead of 30km, a value of 50 to 60 km is more proper for terrestial worlds .

The possible side effect here is, it might end up pulling people out of warp in warp transit through planets. I do no to know, how many want to honor a good sightseeing, or being part of a oh so often violently landed crash site. I do fancy this idea, still I think in this case, navigational beacons in astronomical proximity to planets, had to be seeded to everyone.

Beacons at like pseudo lagrangian points, and named (for Jita) like

“J4MGPD (B18D93-561) JIta IV - Marausi Gate - polar traffic distributor”

sitting above the north pole of jita 4, for the reason that a transport ship can reach jita 4-moon 4, by warping first to above beacon and then to the station.

Those beacons, could be provided with a large astroid structure scener, in the federation advertisment, in the state statues, in the empire shrines and in the republic guard installations.

Which might bring eve closer to the make up of a naval map, and expirience of naval travel. [A relative is a yacht saillor and sailed with me on the baltic sea before corona, hope he invites me again now after corona.]

Though this would increase the entry to nullsec, ccp could not seed beacons in null, and alliances can eihter do that or keep their space beacon free and trade bookmarks instead.

Now for installation of beacons, a scanning ship had to find the gravimetrical sweet spot, near an orbital body by deploying “space time curvator” probes.

To realy hope for such a change of traffic in eve, is likely self delusional, however imagining it is still in order.

Nice idea for interfacing between eve and vanguard.

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My thought on this matter was mostly to have hand crafted content that could be slotted together procedurally (based on the original post outline.) So, all the traffic from the client to the server, will just be a series of asset ids and coordinates (since those assets already exist locally that each client has acess to.) The server will store these ids and then hand them out to whoever warps to the site grid. I believe this is a similar process to how p2p games work, just with the server acting as the middleman.

CCP could potentially have the client create the whole site, however, there is potential for this to be abused. Bounty npc spawns, and loot drop should most likely be handled by the server itself.

If CCP wants to want to go further down the procedural route, the client or server could generate seed ids for the various assets that need to be generated, and hand them over along with the other data. That would offload a lot of the work to the client. After the acceleration gate is activated, the site should be able to be generated fast enough based on those ids, to be rendered before your ship hits the local grid.

I can’t comment for how their server structure works, however, it should be possible for only those who activate the acceleration gate to be given the necessary information for the intended grid. I actually assume this is the main reason why we have acceleration gates in the first place, to allow the client time to load the grid before they arrive at the destination.

EVE is 20 years old, and networking back then wasn’t anywhere near what it is today. I remember 1.5 Mb was a fast connection in the early 2000’s.

EVE’s server already does a version of this. One of the benefits of the way the solar systems are structured, and everything is so far apart, is there’s a lot of empty space.

To be honest, you really only need two mid slots for an armor tanked ship for a dual prop setup. And for pvp ships you don’t need to fit a warp disruptor, so you can replace that with an extra prop mod.

As for heavier ships like drakes, where you might not want to take up the extra slot in pve. You could fit for range, and just tractor beam or send in a buddy with a fast ship to loot the field.

The 30km was for warp scrambling. Warp disruption would be out to 100km. So the idea is, you could run around with an mwd within the mass shadow (while still being unable to warp,) but when you get close to the surface, or one of those zones of control I mentioned, you’d have to make use of an afterburner since the warp disruption effect would come into play.

While I’m certainly open to adjusting those numbers, I actually chose them in part based on game balance. 100 km allows for sniper ships to hit the surface of the planet and still be able to warp away. Also, making the warp disrupted space too large would make it annoying for players with close range ships to do missions on the planet’s surface.

This will also allow people to run PI smuggling missions without making use of the customs office. It’s risky, since they’ll be in the warp disruption / scrambling field, but it would be a way to get around high fees. For this reason, I suppose the field that warp scrambles, should also disrupt cloaking.

While I like this idea, one I’ve had myself in the past, this actually is against established lore. Warp tunnels go into a separate sub-space dimension, this is why we can warp through planets without it destroying our ships.

For this reason, the mass shadows of planets would only prevent transition from real space to warp space, not pull them out of warp.

This is also something that I previously thought of, though I didn’t post about it for sake of brevity. The planet should likely be divided up into various sectors. Something in the range of 20-30 of them (maybe more if ccp wanted to have them be smaller,) and each sector would have a number of navigation beacons associated with it in order to facilitate travel in the orbit of the planet.

I suppose in unexplored space, we wouldn’t have those beacons set up on the planet until infrastructure was built on the planet. So initial exploration would have to rely on natural navigation points, like the Lagrange Points you mentioned.

Granted, this wouldn’t be as big of an issue, if CCP just let us enter coordinates into navigation, and allow us to fly to the location. The coordinates could be attained either by using a probe, or by triangulation.

Even if navigation beacons aren’t necessary for astrogation around planets due to lore reasons, I still really like this idea of concept of needing to be careful navigating through the stars.

Maybe when new solar systems are created, CCP can have nebula that knock people out of warp, so they’ll have to navigate their way around them.

I suppose that could be a new weather effect too, when the Triglavian plot line matures.

Agreed. Navigational hazards, and new ways of traveling would be appreciated. Maybe one day we’ll be given new surveyor ships that can jump to systems without the need of a cyno at the destination. It would be cool to be able to point at a distant star and just jump to it. Perhaps that’s where we include our Age of Sail motifs.

Yeah, for me, the promise of vanguard, was always about integrating as much as possible into the rest of New Eden. The ip is so rich, it would be a shame not to make use of it.

I’d personally also like a ground based rts (even if those units are only controlled by ai,) so npcs on the ground could operate with a bit of intelligence at a macro scale. Personally I was pretty impressed by how player like some of the npcs in Vanguard were, I even saw one bunny hopping, but there’s still work to be done on making them more of a challenge.

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Hum I think we managed to derail this thread through our brainstorming.

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Not really, we’re still on the original topic. All those systems are connected. Whenever ccp revamps the mission system, it will affect all pve in every part of the game. Which invariably affects other systems as well… such as the astronaviation talk we were having.

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pve is only part of the system, pvp is another one, both are interacting with the market as do industry and exploration.

Basically eve rests on different pillars to work:

  1. an open accessible spatial segmented market for many if not all commodities
  2. an open pvp system with partial playfield regions where punishment is applied if undertaking it unrequested.
  3. an industry in which many if not all items can be created from harvestable raw material
  4. methods to gain boni for industrial production or tools that increase combat capability
  5. a search and find system for either production tools for 3. or access to 4. or acces to possibilites of 2.
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Indeed. However, it’s the environment that sets the setting for much of the rest of the game, so it’s pretty important to get it right.

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Astrogation currently is a bit pseudo trekish (“Ensing course for Jita 4-4!” capacitor loads ship turns around “Is ready Sir!” “Engage!!!1!111”) has some star gate in it and when it comes to entering normal space is slightly copying star wars.

While in Freelancer it was a twitch sauce of space bikes and trucks looking cool.

It has this rule of cool being in space ships can break. Totally realistic considering that real vacuum has no friction.

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EVE’s physics work a bit different. For one, in the lore, the planets don’t actually orbit. There was supposedly some accident in the distant past that messed everything up.

Of course there’s also the PEGS (power enhanced generators) that create drag in space as well.

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I’m not against this rule of cool as it makes things related to navigation much easier.

What needs to be assumed for any change suggestion to be applied is to bow to the ominous master of eve which is pvp. Pvp has to benefit from it.

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I’m not really sure it’s so much rule of cool, as it is a lore reason for game mechanics. :stuck_out_tongue: EVE was initially built on a shoestring budget after all.

I think pvp will benefit mainly from there just being more people playing eve. The more content you have, and the more easily its digested, the larger draw the game will have. That’s where pve comes in.

For example: if EVE eventually becomes home to 100,000 concurrent users, ccp may decide they need to release more space. and if that happens, maybe we can get our update to exploration. :slight_smile:

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For most likely a garage project in the beginning, it fares quite well.

Well it has it’s technical reason, and if you tried out Eve Valkyrie you might have noticed that they relied ona more realisitc space flight model.

However we still haven’t decided in which way each one of us would like to see a change of environment, in system map and way of traversing it;, and decided which one we both can agree on.

I’m shure both of us want to keep the warpdrive as it currently is.

Only thing we so far know is, we want a procedural mission generator, to have more variation in missions.

What we can assume is that currently we have a very direct method of traversing the in-system map and that all changes us both can come up are going to increase travel time.

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