[Request]: Galactic News

[Falcrack]

No. He's not talking about fluff lore. He's talking about actual events that are taking place in the game. Things which would have an actual impact on our decision making in the game.

Read the whole post. The penultimate paragraph explains why news about actual events suffers all the same issues and others.

I read the whole post. You said it would be a vast amount of work trying to determine which events to trigger news. In response to that point, I said:

"As to having a hard time finding out what is "relevant" to decide what to report as news, here is a small list. Invasions. New station constructions. Sector ownership changes. So we know where the action is."

Not a large list. It is a small list. And it would definitely add to the quality of life, and help folks who complain about a lack of action or knowing what is going on in the galaxy so that they can make more informed gameplay decisions.

[ei8htx]

No. He's not talking about fluff lore. He's talking about actual events that are taking place in the game. Things which would have an actual impact on our decision making in the game.

Read the whole post. The penultimate paragraph explains why news about actual events suffers all the same issues and others.

I read the whole post. You said it would be a vast amount of work trying to determine which events to trigger news. In response to that point, I said:

"As to having a hard time finding out what is "relevant" to decide what to report as news, here is a small list. Invasions. New station constructions. Sector ownership changes. So we know where the action is."

Not a large list. It is a small list. And it would definitely add to the quality of life, and help folks who complain about a lack of action or knowing what is going on in the galaxy so that they can make more informed gameplay decisions.

I reread it too. A couple times. I don't see the issue here.

Would it help to think of it as a *shudder* Galactic Twitter Feed?

I don't think anyone's really asking for news. Just quick updates on what's happening. Like Falcrack said, invasions, new defense station constructions, sector ownership changes.

Not a news story, like 10 words or less.
<Faction> fleet spotted in <Sector>
New <Faction> defense station completed in <Sector>
Sector ownership of <Sector> changed from <Faction> to <Faction>
<Faction> <Shipyard/Wharf/Trading Station> destroyed in <Sector> by <Faction>

[Kadatherion]

Would it help to think of it as a *shudder* Galactic Twitter Feed?

I don't think anyone's really asking for news. Just quick updates on what's happening. Like Falcrack said, invasions, new defense station constructions, sector ownership changes.

Not a news story, like 10 words or less.
<Faction> fleet spotted in <Sector>
New <Faction> defense station completed in <Sector>
Sector ownership of <Sector> changed from <Faction> to <Faction>
<Faction> <Shipyard/Wharf/Trading Station> destroyed in <Sector> by <Faction>

THIS.

Look, I'm one of the oldest advocates for the GNNs of old: they are a staple of the genre and usually are a very good lightweight solution (both for dev workload and system resources) to offer immersion with relatively little effort. It's clear though Egosoft has issues and most likely not enough people in the writing department - the game shipped with even the basic in game encyclopedia pretty much blank - so ok, let's scrap even this feature (even though no, it's not normal for a company to be THIS starved for content creation capabilities).

But some basic and reliable feedback about what happens in a dynamic sandbox game is a CORE feature that can't be left out, it's about playability. Of course I'd like a few more than "10 words" to at least make the feed feel part of the universe instead of just an artificial, "gamey" logbook, but it would be a start. And, for those who want more immersion, once the system is set up, you could always look on the modding community to expand onto it, taking the issue away from Ego's hands.

Plus, a consistent way to keep track of how the dynamic universe is evolving is required also to have a more clear perception of possible balance issues, to the advantage not only of the player but of Egosoft themselves. War and economy mechanics in X4 are still rather broken to this day, and you are swarmed with reports: sometimes conflictual, though, imprecise, the result of impressions that the player gathers without any tool to be really sure of what the cause of the issue is and where the problem originated. Even such a relatively simple system would not just make the game better, but will help with the identifying - and better reporting - of strange balance shenanigans that will have to be worked upon in the months (probably years) to come. Be smart, Ego, for once.

[consiefe]

All talk here has evolved to the general info on aggression. It's not a big deal to tie this basic events to the news. Every ship, every module I guess has an ID. So destroyed and built things can easily be passed to the info feed. Heck, modders can do that work singlehandedly. But we feel this should be in the base game. It's a big bank for a small buck. Why the resistance?

[mr.WHO]

This:

Not a news story, like 10 words or less.
<Faction> fleet spotted in <Sector>
New <Faction> defense station completed in <Sector>
Sector ownership of <Sector> changed from <Faction> to <Faction>
<Faction> <Shipyard/Wharf/Trading Station> destroyed in <Sector> by <Faction>

And this:

Instead of galactic news, maybe war updates can be displayed on the dock platform billboards? Like on the "Holy Order Strikes Again" rolling billboard for example?

An info screen where all war updates are recorded would also be nice.

You literally need just one sentence + plus translations.

These could be very simple pre-defined situations:
- Warning. Xenon invasion in <sector name>.
- HOP took <sector name>.
- Arngon counterattack in <sector name>.
- Frequent pitare raids reported in <sector name>.
- Shortage of <ware name> in <facion name>.

[solarie99]

To save time, I'll quote what I wrote the last time this was requested.

It was done in X2 because it was one of those things that came up frequently on the forums as a requested feature, and there was a groundswell of volunteer support offering to provide ideas for the news articles. We took up that offer, and players submitted a huge number of articles.

What we underestimated was the amount of work involved in sorting through those articles, correcting them and ensuring that they fitted the available space, checking that they didn't cause problems with the lore, formatting them correctly, and then translating them and doing several of those same things all over again in the translated languages. Some of the work was done by volunteers, but volunteers' time is limited too, and we had plenty of other things that they could have been helping us with. But having committed to it, we saw it through.

Ironically, when it was all done, there was mixed feedback from the very people who had requested the feature, with the predominant refrain being that, despite there being literally hundreds of these news articles, they were boring and repetitive. The practical result was that any given player usually read a handful of them in the first hour of playing the game, and then ignored them.

Some people suggested, quite reasonably, that the news would be more interesting if it was "relevant", but that would have required an even more vast amount of work, determining the events that should be reported as news, developing the ways to detect those events and trigger the corresponding news articles with the right names and locations in them, then sourcing (and filtering and translating) corresponding articles to ensure there were enough of a range of reports for each case to stop it from getting repetitive again.

So yes, we saw value in it, but we learned from experience that in a game that people play for 100s of hours, generating enough material to make a news system interesting, let alone both interesting and relevant, provided poor value (to players and to us) for the amount of work required.

How about auto generated news? if that is posible. Say the xenons drop a large fleet into a system. One gets a news sound and a message that braking news the xenons are invading this and this sytem.
It is just a thought tho of how it might work.