I'm quite familiar with the game since 1.2 and I don't have big problems when doing the story missions (the different 'chapters'), but I often read in forums (Steam in particular) that players get stucked in a mission not finding mission waypoints. Now, I don't want to talk about possible bugs which undoubtly exist, but I'm rather asking: a) What does trigger a mission waypoint? Example: "Find console x", or "Speak with NPC y". Is it the distance or the simple fact that you do that mission part which means it will appear at whatever distance? And if it's the distance, will it disappear when you get further away? b) If you need to find something and in absence of any other text clues, will there *always* be a mission waypoint to tell the player where to go? I ask this because the answer to a comment like "I'm stucked, the mission doesn't work" etc. would then be quite simple, it would be "look better for the waypoint!", a simplistic answer that most people don't even dare to give in a forum I know of course that missions are done by vonlunteers after careful review (I will just assume this in the absence of really knowing the exact procedure) and therefore it is their work to add - or not add - waypoints, right? But if possible I would appreciate a general answer to the waypoint question. Again: all this without considering any bugs. Thanks,
They have "guiding distance" and "trigger distance" which are set separately. Watch for these in one of the game's scenarios (ex. Robinson Protocol) and see the context in which they work. Of course, now that everyone uses the WebPDA to make scenarios, it's a bit hard to see how things work because the WebPDA uses random strings identifiers instead of descriptive names, but we can still make the connections to events with the POIs names in the missions parameters, for example. You can also upload a scenario to the WebPDA and look at it in there, and you will be able to sort things out because there are lots of tooltips and help text in there. "Trigger distance" is when the 1st message can pop up (mission is activated) and "guiding distance" is the point where the waypoint appears.
Thanks Kassonade to elaborate on this. So it's pretty normal that e.g. a waypoint to a console which advances the mission will not appear immediately when you are in a POI like space station etc. , you need to search and eventually the waypoint will appear if you are close enough?
Just to add to this, it can also be an action and not just distance. For example, you might need to interact with a NPC, or have a certain item in your inventory for it to trigger. In your example above, the content creator could have purposely made the trigger area small so that the player has to actually search and look around verses just go to the next marker, in an attempt to give more "game play" to the mission. There are quite a few options in the "Check" action when creating a mission. You can look at the basic tutorial to see some of these in play, like gathering a certain about of ore before the mission advances to the next part, or read through dialog. In any of these cases though, it is very important for the mission creator to make sure there is text that will be output to the PDA so the player can look back and get an idea of what they need to be doing or in which direction they need to travel. In the current 1.5 Survival game mode (Vanilla), there are some issues with the mission waypoints disappearing if you log out in middle of doing one. And with that, some very limited PDA text entries to help guide you back to the mission path. At the end of most chapters the last text entry in the PDA is something like "incoming transmission" but the actual dialog/text is not being output to the PDA, so unless you remember what it said at the time it displayed, you might feel a little lost. Unfortunately, I can no reproduce the same issue/bug each playthrough I try/test and it appears to be somewhat random (unless I am missing something)....it doesn't seem to happen in the same mission or with the same action every time.
Right. The distance is set (I think) in meters, so you can see in the PDA.yaml of a scenario, for example, that a console has to be found in some POI, and the "guiding distance" is set at "2" (meters). So the player will obviously have to search around until he's in the same room, where the marker will finally appear if the player is close enough to the object.
Mission waypoints can be added for any PDA objective that requires you to approach either a specific POI or a specific devices on that POI. The range they show up, or if they show up at all, can be configured by the mission creator. Waypoints cannot be used specifically for any other type of objective, so this is where good direction in the pda itself is important.
Thank you all for these answers! So, what's most important is that during a misison in a compound, if you don't see a waypoint it doesn't mean you won't see one 2 minutes later by searching etc. That's very useful to know indeed. It's what I have guessed before posting and also a reason why I didn't have extreme difficulty in a story mission yet, except that some of these misisons are really hard (=challenging), but not because of waypoints or the absence of them, but that's another story... Best thanks and greetings
It depends on how they set it up of course. I have not done the new vanilla missions myself so I don't know how they do it.
