Droid Engineer Archive

Howdy all,

I'm an aspiring droid engineer, and had a thought the other day. I was making my rounds, checking on my harvesters the other day. As part of this process I diligently record the last visit time, maintenance remaining, power remaining, etc. into an Excel spreadsheet (the one described in http://forums.station.sony.com/swg/board/message?board.id=artisan&message.id=25375-- I highly recommend it). This makes for a lot of alt-tabbing between SWG and Excel, and a lot of mindless data entry. Then it occurred to me -- THAT'S WHAT I MAKE DROIDS FOR!

So, what I'd like to see is something like a droid recorder module. Build one, stick it in a droid, and the next time you visit a harvester (it could also work on other types of structures/objects) you whip out your droid, target your harvester, invoke some command on the droid's radial menu (such as "record status") and let the droid get and maintain all the pertinent data. It wouldn't need to maintain all the neat stuff the above mentioned spreadsheet does -- but at a minimum it should keep track of date/time of last visit, power, maintenance, resource being harvested, concentration/extraction rate (essentially any data available thru the hopper and status interfaces). Anytime after you get back to your city/home/wherever you should be able to call out your recording droid and do something like a "view records" to see what the status of your harvesters is -- probably in a datasheet format. NOTE: this would be a projected status of what it "should" be based upon your latest data collected, not an "actual" status (more on this below).

There's been some talk both here and among artisans about having droids be more active participants in the survey/harvesting process. This is one possible way for this to happen. Another would be if weight restrictions were ever put into the game. I mean seriously, does anybody think they're going to run out to theri heavy mineral harvester and put 80,000kg of iron in their backpack? Of course not! That's where BLLs should fit in! Add some storage modules, and the capability to have them retrieve resources and let them tote all that iron back to town . . . gives them a role to fill (and solves one my biggest personal annoyances)

You might be thinking at this point "Sounds good, and I can stay in town and just have my droid go out and do all this for me". Sorry, I don't think that's ever going to happen. Some amount of "risk vs. reward" needs to be maintained. So I'd be greatly surprised if we ever see unaccompanied droids (seeker droids are a special case/exception) out performing tasks without their masters. This includes gathering status reports, paying maintenance, surveying, picking up resources, or whatever -- I just don't believe the developers are going to allow us to separate the personal risk from those tasks. (I hate to use the "unbalancing" word . . . buuuut . . .)

Just some ideas . . .

Voco Ackopogo

Hey you know, accually I was thinking of posting on the architect forums thinking that maybe they should have the Architect crafted Data terminals, which are furniture, accually do something. They take lots of resources and components I think, like electronic memory modules and those types of things. I was thinking that they should be able to record data like your idea for droids, only they could record merchant info, such as who buys things, what price and what item they bought and when they bought it. You could look at what sells well and for what price and change prices and stock vendors accordingly. I think that that would be a great idea to add some more functionality to the game. Thats what I am all about really, is adding more functionality to the game. I say stop adding new things until the old ones are fixed and made more useful. Well anyways I think ill go present that idea on the Arch. forums, and see what they think. Good post btw, lets just hope that maybe the Devs will read it....

Interesting idea Mullet,

I had originally not considered this in a broader context (specifically, in this case vendors), but what you're saying makes a lot of sense to me. Anytime there is "interesting" data generated in-game, there should be at least minimal tools provided in-game to collect and organize this data. It seems almost absurd that a convenient droid or data terminal should sit idly by, while I'm off wasting game time doing data entry in an externalspreadsheet, database, or even a piece of paper. After all, we're not playing in a medieval setting -- we're playing in a technologically advanced world (galaxy).

Whether this functionality can be best achieved via droids, data terminals, a mix of both, or a "hybrid" solution developed jointly by DEs and architects is open to debate. I would enjoy hearing some more feedback on this.

Voco Ackopogo