No more mission spawning

[Shinee-ID]

Since the new mission update my missions seemed to be working fine but I have reached a point where no more are spawning. I have completed maybe 10+ and still have 2 pending due to no having a water pump for the fire missions.

I have slept for about 9 months now and still nothing. Is there anything reason I'm not getting anymore missions or is this a glitch.

[RoboJon]

It would quickly become extremely complicated to procedurally generate interesting missions that didn't feel either too simple or to similar to others. I'm not going to rule it out, it's just not something we're looking at doing in the immediate future.

The missions we have at the moment are quite simple, but they represent only a small set of features that missions will eventually be able to have. For example, we're working on systems at the moment to allow missions to interact with vehicles (e.g. to trigger a boat sinking or activate an airlock), and to make branching missions possible (you might get a different set of objectives depending on whether or not you rescue all survivors or leave some behind, or a mission with multiple endings). There's a lot of room to improve career mode, and it will come in time.

[Archangel]

Originally posted by RoboJon:

It would quickly become extremely complicated to procedurally generate interesting missions that didn't feel either too simple or to similar to others. I'm not going to rule it out, it's just not something we're looking at doing in the immediate future.

The missions we have at the moment are quite simple, but they represent only a small set of features that missions will eventually be able to have. For example, we're working on systems at the moment to allow missions to interact with vehicles (e.g. to trigger a boat sinking or activate an airlock), and to make branching missions possible (you might get a different set of objectives depending on whether or not you rescue all survivors or leave some behind, or a mission with multiple endings). There's a lot of room to improve career mode, and it will come in time.

While it is true that with current technology and the way the game is set up it would become extremely complicated to generate procedural missions, my personal question was aimed more towards a pseudo-procedural missions, which have a number of criteria which get picked from a population of choices for a few of its steps. This will keep the direction you want the game to go to and, at the same time, will allow for doing seemingly the same mission with different steps and objectives.
Sorry for any confusion I may have caused regarding the "procedural" aspect.

I am sure people understand that this is just an early access stage and the game is extremely far from polished. That being said, the fact that you have a large amount of components, allowing for complex creations is probably what causes the confusion of people expecting a fleshed out career mode.
My personal opinion is that the old version of the mission system (with the repatability) was more enjoyable due to the included "unlocking" of components through missions. If you mix the aforementioned pseudo-procedural mission generation with this, the career mode will immediately become more enjoyable for the people who want to play it.

Until such a thing happens, I guess we will just stick with creating our own missions and hoping members of the community will share theirs on the workshop :)

[7 am Tequila Snorts]

Same here

[Shinee-ID]

Originally posted by Flashko Staskata:

Originally posted by RoboJon:

It would quickly become extremely complicated to procedurally generate interesting missions that didn't feel either too simple or to similar to others. I'm not going to rule it out, it's just not something we're looking at doing in the immediate future.

The missions we have at the moment are quite simple, but they represent only a small set of features that missions will eventually be able to have. For example, we're working on systems at the moment to allow missions to interact with vehicles (e.g. to trigger a boat sinking or activate an airlock), and to make branching missions possible (you might get a different set of objectives depending on whether or not you rescue all survivors or leave some behind, or a mission with multiple endings). There's a lot of room to improve career mode, and it will come in time.

While it is true that with current technology and the way the game is set up it would become extremely complicated to generate procedural missions, my personal question was aimed more towards a pseudo-procedural missions, which have a number of criteria which get picked from a population of choices for a few of its steps. This will keep the direction you want the game to go to and, at the same time, will allow for doing seemingly the same mission with different steps and objectives.
Sorry for any confusion I may have caused regarding the "procedural" aspect.

I am sure people understand that this is just an early access stage and the game is extremely far from polished. That being said, the fact that you have a large amount of components, allowing for complex creations is probably what causes the confusion of people expecting a fleshed out career mode.
My personal opinion is that the old version of the mission system (with the repatability) was more enjoyable due to the included "unlocking" of components through missions. If you mix the aforementioned pseudo-procedural mission generation with this, the career mode will immediately become more enjoyable for the people who want to play it.

Until such a thing happens, I guess we will just stick with creating our own missions and hoping members of the community will share theirs on the workshop :)

Same here. I was quite happy with repeating missions, it was also more about the development of unlocking new items and slowlng creating new vehicles to make the missions easier and quicker for me to complete.

[RoboJon]

That makes sense, I hadn't thought about the repeated missions being an opportunity to improve on a previous attempt.

Something we want to do with the missions in the future is giving them more narrative such as named characters that persist between them. It would be good to hear some thoughts on whether or not you think adding more story elements to missions would improve them, and if so, how it might affect immersion if for example a specific character has died or their story has ended but their missions repeat anyway.

Maybe we have some repeat and some not. We were discussing on the discord the possibility of setting random spawn points for mission objects like in the Arma 3 editor, so you could replay the same mission but potentially have it be slightly different each time (perhaps a good compromise for procedural missions).

[SimpleSimon]

You could have two mission types, story missions and side missions kind of like how open world sand box games have. This way you could over time develop your story missions and characters but still have content that can reoccur to flesh out the game.

[Tsutenkaku]

Originally posted by SimpleSimon:

You could have two mission types, story missions and side missions kind of like how open world sand box games have. This way you could over time develop your story missions and characters but still have content that can reoccur to flesh out the game.

I totally agree this. It's something like a space combat sim. I prefer career mode than creative mode. Collecting parts one by one is very fun and rewarding.

[Frank Castle]

could you add destruction to blocks if you strike land or rock

[Archangel]

I see potential in how some "story" components might fit in the game and help with immersion. Unfortunately I think I am one of the few people who start the game and sailing in rough seas is thinking "Well, it's coastal Scotland, what do you expect".
For most of the people all the games including "block"-building are just a playground for creating stuff, not really reading a story and immersing in it.

That being said, what people proposed just above this post sounds like a good middle-ground to look into, if it is a direction you would want to take with the game's career mode - "main" story missions, with fixed objectives, characters, narrative, whatever you feel like(perhaps some of these NPCs could get saved/perish and this would impact whether or not you would have access to a piece of land or base), along with semi-procedural repeatable missions which generate based on weather conditions and time elapsed from last one generated / mission spawn locations like the Arma 3 idea you have.

[Relins]

i have just had the same prob hear but only done anout 6 now is there a fix or any time fram on new mishons

[RoboJon]

These are some good suggestions. I like the idea of having some distinction between story missions and side missions.

We've made the missions repeatable again in the next patch. They will only start to repeat when the mission system fails to spawn any new missions for 2 in-game weeks. So in most cases, you should get unique missions that you haven't seen before, but once there are none left it will reset and they will all start to spawn randomly again. This is pretty much how the old system worked, with the only real difference being that there should be a more even distribution of missions that respawn instead of it being fully random. This will be in patch v0.2.9 which will go out sometime this week.

We'll likely look at having story missions as an extension to the new system sometime further down the line. And of course, expect more official mission content in the next few weeks too!

[Tsutenkaku]

Originally posted by RoboJon:

These are some good suggestions. I like the idea of having some distinction between story missions and side missions.

We've made the missions repeatable again in the next patch. They will only start to repeat when the mission system fails to spawn any new missions for 2 in-game weeks. So in most cases, you should get unique missions that you haven't seen before, but once there are none left it will reset and they will all start to spawn randomly again. This is pretty much how the old system worked, with the only real difference being that there should be a more even distribution of missions that respawn instead of it being fully random. This will be in patch v0.2.9 which will go out sometime this week.

We'll likely look at having story missions as an extension to the new system sometime further down the line. And of course, expect more official mission content in the next few weeks too!

I’m happy to hear that. You should adopt also good user-created missions as side missions.

[Flankus]

My main input in this discussion is how is money making fitting into the campaign mode? It takes cash to open the larger islands so that larger vehicles can be operated, but cash only comes from missions, and if the missions stop.... Also there used to be cash in crates but that seems to have diminished or vansihed alltogether.

[Agent Jody Highroller]

Loving this game so far.. My personal opinion on the mission discussion: I'm not really concerned with any story or getting attached to any characters - I'm more interested in the problem solving aspect of completing complex missions. I'd much rather have a large amount of unique missions to work through as opposed to a story.

[RoboJon]

The missions are still quite unbalanced in terms of rewards so they possibly need more money. The crates give similar rewards to missions now (1-4 random rewards, more chance of money or blueprints than stock). Eventually the missions will scale their value to things such as number of objectives, distance to travel etc so longer missions give a much more satisfying reward.

I agree with Agent Jody Highroller, I'm personally interested mainly in more logistical missions with environmental challenges/hazards that require you to think more about the design of a vehicle, or find a creative solution to the problem. I think there's still room for those sorts of missions to have story as well though. Stories in the world wouldn't necessarily be huge movie plots, but you could have say a specific NPC who is asking you to salvage different parts of a ship, culminating in a mission to tow the reassembled ship somewhere.