Haha, thanks!

The Foundry is not the only thing I work on, though. I also produce the ship team, for instance. I've been doing the production thing for a little while now, and I guess I'm doing OK enough for them to trust me with (my baby) the Foundry.


The role of producer is generally one of scheduling and tracking. So when we have something going to Holodeck, like a new ship, I'll make sure all the pieces for it are done: the powers, the icons, the art, the sound, etc. I don't make anything myself, just follow up with people, help them get resolutions to any technical hurdles, that sort of thing. With the Foundry, it's still yet to be seen what I'll do. I've already been helping out QA by testing it when possible. And there might be some other tasks simple enough for me to tackle. (For instance, I added a bunch of the descriptions to the detail objects that are in the Foundry currently. Like tables and chairs and stuff.)

But I'm definitely glad to be more involved in a part of STO I've always loved.

Great to here the news, Zero!

If you want missions to test for Season 6, be sure to give me a yell. At this point there's not a single mission I have that's not affected by some kind of very alive and current bug, and I fear that Season 6 will break them further. So advanced warning would certainly be great for me!

Foundry is in good hands indeed.

To me, this sounds like QA type of stuff, and it makes sense that one of the QA folks would handle it.

I really hope that they can give you more to do here. I'd really like to see the Foundry grow, and we absolutely need someone on the STO team to make it happen. I understand why the Foundry team may have other priorities, since they're focused on its future and not its past.

In other words, I really hope that this isn't just splitting up QA for season 6, since a big chunk is Foundry updates, with the other QA is in charge of the other part of S6.

Anyway, I probably don't understand how it all works. But, I hope it's good for the Foundry, and I hope that you can make stuff happen for a community that has been... well, you probably know how we feel after barely seeing updates or minor bug fixes for well over a year now.

I really hope it's more than QA kind of stuff, and that you are on the production, rather than the receiving end of things.

QA (game testing) is not production, and Producers aren't QA. I haven't been in QA for more than half a year now.

EDIT:
Sorry, hit enter too soon.

Game production is an interesting position. If you want an idea of what we do, I suggest google. It's a very different position from film and TV production. There's some stuff on Wikipedia, and there are always the job descriptions listed on a site like gamasutra. Hope that helps.

I'd sing "Holding out for a Hero" but we already have one!

All HAIL QUEEN ZERO

I have to say that while it's great that stuff is being done for S6, there are still a lot of pretty bad bugs with the Foundry that have not been addressed. For example, we cannot use Objective Complete or Objective In Progress to trigger map dialogues at all (in the former case, a false error is generated that prevents the mission from being published, and in the latter the incorrect dialogue, often from an entirely different map, will display).

These bugs really irritate me, especially because the Objective Complete one is probably a 30 minute fix (remove the false error message so we can publish, as the functionality works fine). The Objective In Progress bug might be harder to fix, but I'm skeptical it would be that hard since all the other triggers seem to function properly. The point being, my perception is that no one is spending any time working on fixing bugs. It's great that UP is being fixed, but to be honest that is one of the least of the Foundry's problems right now.

Are these serious bugs going to be addressed with S6 or is it going to be another situation where more features are added while current features remain broken, with bugs never being fixed?

This thread is a compendium of many known bugs that we struggle to deal with.

http://forums.startrekonline.com/sho...d.php?t=252643

I worry about this too. It seems like a trend with Cryptic. They will worry more about the new stuff, and they won't take any time to fix the really old bugs. As you say, some of this stuff might be really easy fixes, if the programmer reads the forums.

As we're seeing when a bug affects either BF or another dev, it's like it gets fixed in no time. I really, really, really hope that it's not just new buggy stuff added on top of old buggy stuff.

Awesome!







... I still call you Barclay.