Plans for fixing missions?

Game Talk The Bunker
1

So I think it’s pretty clear that the NPC missions are far and away the most prominently broken thing in the game right now. It’s also clear that the team is currently treating reports related to the mission system with extremely low priority.

Now, this isn’t meant to be a complaint thread, but the missions are so badly broken that it’s difficult to complete a single one of them, and even those that do work constantly spam debug messages. You can’t always completely ignore them either, as several NPCs will lead with a mission upon first meeting them, and you can’t even begin to talk to them until it’s completed (Jabberwock hunt and Antibiotics come to mind). I could just play without NPCs enabled, but even with their problems they add a lot to the game for me, so this is an unsatisfactory option.

So, the purpose of this thread is to ask, is there a good reason why the missions aren’t being touched right now, such as an imminent feature freeze or planned replacement/overhaul of the system as a whole, or is it just something that would require a large amount of work that noone has thus far been willing or able to contribute?

If it’s the latter, would anyone else be interested in pitching in to a bounty collection for a mission overhaul? I can contribute around $50 or so myself. I’d really like to see this part of the game fixed, and if possible, improved, and given my extremely limited coding chops, this is the only means I have to contribute.

2

Mission code is horrible. It was written by people who don’t really understand programming, but have the extra time to spare and will to help.
The result is that there is a lot of it which “kinda works”. This state looks like working to the user, but to the programmer it looks like a giant knot that can be cleaned up, but not really tampered with.

I did some moderate changes in the mission system to try to get it to suck less, I see sethsimon updating the window on github.

Recent fixes include antibiotics mission actually ending (ie. not killing the mission giver), ability to specify missions from json instead of this horrible hardcoded mess and rewrite of the mission code that allows further work.

So there is some work, just mostly behind the scenes. Missions have to be workable before they are worked on.
Individual mission code is untouched because it’s a giant case of “work hard” vs “work smart”. Thousand lines of manual mapgen (not the modern symbol mapgen, but “draw line of walls” etc.).

Financial incentives sure do work. If you have a specific target in mind, a target of objectives that can be easily verified as finished (or unfinished), bounty can really help with work being done faster.