Contacts screen and radar?

I've been watching a couple of videos and I don't understand the logic behind the contacts interface design. Not only you cannot see which contact you are selecting since you can't see the radar, but you don't get information such as distance either. Too much "streamlining"? :D
 
I've been watching a couple of videos and I don't understand the logic behind the contacts interface design. Not only you cannot see which contact you are selecting since you can't see the radar, but you don't get information such as distance either. Too much "streamlining"? :D

I love the 3D radar it (generally) makes sense to me.

That being said, and am sure it is just my (mis)understanding of it......

So am i right in saying you have to scan any target before you can tell if they are clean/offender/criminal??

once scanned it looks to me like the blip on the radar does not change? i say this because 1 vid i saw with a chap trying to scan for people with a bounty on them, am sure he kept scanning the same guy.

perhaps once you have scanned someone their radar pin should change colour to represent their bounty/legal status (so Red for if they are attacking you (or you have engaged them) orange for scanned with bounty status, yellow unknown and green for clean and then flashing for if you have locked on to them)

IF this is already the case and I am being dumb, feel free to give me a digital head slap and i shall go back under my rock ;)
 
There are some aspects of the radar and locking things up which concern me too, but not for the reasons you suggest. Principally this is because there is a lot of nonsense and misunderstanding where weapons, radars, scanners, detecting and locking targets is concerned. So in actual fact, I would hope that the scanner would be somewhat limited in capability. This would actually make the game a challenge.

I blame a lot of bad war movies for this sort of expectation personally. Alright, we are in the realms of sci-fi with ED, so a bit of 'magic' is allowed, to take into account extrapolated capabilities of weapon technology in a thousand years, but as Scotty always says: 'ye canne change the laws of physics'.

The amount of crap war movies I've seen where some fighter pilot gets a warning as a heat seeking missile tracks him is hilarious. Heat seekers are passive sensors; there is no way to detect such a passive sensor, because it isn't emitting any signal. Then you have the missiles with endless amounts of fuel which can apparently turn around and make several passes at a target (yes, I'm looking at you Behind Enemy Lines with your magical SA-13 missile), and this isn't even getting deep into the fact that they can pull 25G easily and travel at nearly Mach 3. One look at the size of an average AA missile will tell anyone, who cares to think about it, that the rocket motor would only burn for about five seconds, even if we did not know this was genuinely the case.

Then you have the magical cockpit warning receiver which can not only detect the range, bearing, speed, heading and altitude of everything, but also its type and probably what the pilot had for breakfast, and all this regardless of whether the target is transmitting any electromagnetic radiation of any kind whatsoever. The enemy could be parked up on the ground and these magical warning receivers still display the things. How the hell are they actually managing this?

You also have the magical radars which, unlike the real thing, don't give your position away long before you have detected a readable return. These Hollywood wonders don't need to switch between different search and scan patterns, don't need the pulse repetition frequency and strength to be adjusted, can see through clouds, and can apparently 'lock on' to multiple targets flawlessly, enabling the radar to magically guide multiple SARH missiles all at the same time. And they never ever come close to losing that gated aperture return signal sat in a ten degree cone off the nose, even when the aircraft is performing aerobatics that would make most people puke.

Step up everlasting guns. You can cheerfully ignore reality here, despite the fact that, for example, a Supermarine Spitfire Vb had only enough ammo for less than a 10 second burst of fire from its cannons before it had to ****** off home to rearm. And that was one of the best fighters of its time.

I hope ED doesn't pander to all the Hollywood nonsense and actually makes combat a challenge. You know... like it really is when you want to become Elite.
 
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The older I get, the more I'm finding it harder to suspend by disbelief. I can forgive a wrist-watch on a roman as a continuity error. But lack of basic script research, especially concerning military technology of a given era grinds my gears.
Actually, it started, for me, when I was watching westerns, with their “six-shooters” firing rounds like it was a Glock 19 with an extended mag.
It’s certainly got better, but you can find anachronisms in a lot of modern war films too.
Anyway, back to the OP: I find it very easy to suspend my disbelief in a sci-fi game and don’t need a rationale for every magic box or function.
I think the phrase used in such instances is “Oh, it’s made from handwavium!”
 
hmm...when you select a contact from the contact list, its targeted and the HUD shows the distance. You press '2' and you see him on the radar.

In the scenarios we have I do find it awkward to have to find the player in the list, select to see if he has a bounty by which time I'm typically crashing into an asteroid.

It seems like there are some instances where I want to slow down and strategically look at target information, perhaps using the cargo scanner...but in the heat of the battle I'd just like to see information such as bounty on the hud for the targeted ship.

I might be off topic now. Perhaps something to open a discussion on in the Alpha forum.
 
Anyway, back to the OP: I find it very easy to suspend my disbelief in a sci-fi game and don’t need a rationale for every magic box or function.

That is true, but there are some things currently being discussed/proposed which are fairly ridiculous, notably having to manually reload projectile weapons. If the Spandaus and Vickers guns on Fokker DVIIs and Sopwith Camels in 1917 were belt fed, I find it preposterous to imagine we'd be have to be manually pressing reload on space fighters over a thousand years later.

Sure, have them overheat so you can't just hold down fire constantly, and limit the ammo, but manually reloading them? :S

Likewise defending against lasers. I find it difficult to believe that in a thousand year's time it would not have occurred to anyone that simply mirroring the surfaces on the rear of a ship by coating them with beryllium would deflect nearly 100 percent of the energy. No need for any 'shields' nonsense if that was done.
 
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I dont know if its a design choice to have to turn your head to watch the contacts screen but it would help some to see the bounty on the target looking straight ahead in the heat of a larger furball in space. I assume almost this has been discussed in the alpha-forum or DDF.

But if it is a design choice (to be more tactical) to have to sit quietly(heatwise) looking non-threatening and searching for targets with a bounty looking to your left then it is what it is :)

Or maybe in the beta/release we can buy interface-upgrades that gives you more info directly where your looking (or directly ahead of you) or about your target? Like in the old Elite/Frontier games?
 
So in actual fact, I would hope that the scanner would be somewhat limited in capability. This would actually make the game a challenge.

I think most of it is just traditional gameplay with rules that pose certain challenges. But REALISTIC scanning I'd expect to be perfect and omnidirectional a 1000 years later. You could scan passively by optical/infrared/electromagnetic waves sensors. Smartphone cameras are already so small and high res, imagine like 100 sensors sprinkled around your ship hull and all have like 100kx100k resolution and computer vision analyses everything it sees in different spectrums and can do stereoscopic distance measuring. There are currently breakthroughs in CV so soon we'll have self driving cars and robots that can "see" in chaotic environments. For a spaceship it would be even easier. Realistically drones would be vastly superior in every aspect.

Especially I find it hard to suspend my disbelieve that I have to point towards a target to track him for 1-2 seconds (an eternity for a supercomputer of the future) to be able to fire a guided missile at him. But it makes a fun gameplay challenge.

And I totally agree with the lasers lol I thought about that too. Maybe they use rays in different spectrums so reflective coatings that are non reflective in other spectrums would get cracked and the normal laser would take effect.
 
I love the radar, that is classic Elite, I am not a huge fan of having to look away to see the details of the contact, but I don't suppose their is any other way of doing it.

At least the ship doesn't come to a standstill whilst you do look at the details screen (like in some other recently failed space game).
 
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I love the radar, that is classic Elite, I am not a huge fan of having to look away to see the details of the contact, but I don't suppose their is any other way of doing it.

At least the ship doesn't come to a standstill whilst you do look at the details screen (like in some other recently failed space game).

Personally, I wish it were more like the classic Elite scanner, which was a work of genius.
I believe that the scanner in ED tries a little too hard, & the auto-zoom is just confusing because it can make a ship travelling toward you appear to be maintaining a distance between you, making it very hard to identify attacking ships and/or their direction of travel. Alternatively, it zooms out & is filled with ships that you're not interested in & which block your sight of the marker for your target.

I'm fine with it using different hollow/filled shapes as this conveys useful info that wasn't possible in the original games because of the low-resolution screens of the time, but the auto-zoom often obscures the markers anyway.
It's beginning to really get on my nerves & it appears to be a case of "If it ain't broke, fix it until it is !" :(
 
I've been watching a couple of videos and I don't understand the logic behind the contacts interface design. Not only you cannot see which contact you are selecting since you can't see the radar, but you don't get information such as distance either. Too much "streamlining"? :D
Agreed
 
I think he means, is the radar zoom automatic, manual, or both?

Or as I'd put it, 'ow's it work? :)
I'm not sure if there's an automatic element. I haven't noticed. But there's certainly manual control to increase and decrease the radar range.
 
I'd rather they at least have your current target selected by default if you turn to the contacts screen.
Having to turn and then scroll down a list to find out if the ship you have just targeted from the front view has a bounty seems a bit clunky.
 
At least I'm happy I'm not alone. I would have preferred a both active and passive sensor system, but oh well that couldn't be. I just don't understand the design decisions.

hmm...when you select a contact from the contact list, its targeted and the HUD shows the distance. You press '2' and you see him on the radar.
Precisely. In what is supposed to be a contacts panel, what I would have expected to be a panel offering some sort of tactical information regarding contacts, all I can see is list of:

* Sidewinder
* Sidewinder
* Sidewinder
* Sidewinder
* Sidewinder

And I have no idea which any of those are relative to my position unless I have both the unfocused contacts panel and the radar in view, I don't know at which distance are either unless I go through each of them and target them, and I don't think you even know which of them you have selected unless you lock them.

So a paucity of tactical and strategic data that would be IMO relevant in a contacts list, but there's a whole column worth of space with LOCK, that could have easily solved by a little icon. I mean, sure, design wise maybe they don't put a skull to people who have a bounty to make people go through their lists (I would argue that a delayed skull on first ship contact would fix that...). But wasting a whole column of space just to say ON?

For a contacts panel it feels, ahem, "streamlined". That auto zoom thing, how you don't know your target's range unless you have it on screen or how its speed is nowhere to be seen isn't helping either.

The thing is I'm unfortunately I'm starting to have very painful flashbacks of Rebirth here... I guess on the plus side this should be easy to fix and improve with mods for offline play. Anyway I'll shut up now.
 
I agree that the target sidepanel could have more information (e.g. numerical distance to each entry - surely that should be visible!, or perhaps a general bearing?); there's a lot of room on the display tab.
 
I'd rather they at least have your current target selected by default if you turn to the contacts screen.
Having to turn and then scroll down a list to find out if the ship you have just targeted from the front view has a bounty seems a bit clunky.

Yes, absolutely! Has annoyed me to quite a lot! Should probably send in a ticket about this...

At least I'm happy I'm not alone. I would have preferred a both active and passive sensor system, but oh well that couldn't be. I just don't understand the design decisions.

There are going to be both passive and active sensors in the game.

http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=7828
SENSOR MECHANICS
  • Default Sensors for all ships
    • Upon arrival to a new location a picture of potential contacts around the player based on their distance and signature appears (see Signature and Sensors below)
    • More detailed sensors are located in a forward facing arc that have better range capabilities thus resolving contacts where the default all-around sensors cannot (usually a multiplier to the default sensor range)
    • In addition to the above false positives are put into the mix depending on the quality of the sensors and/or any environmental factors (see Signature and Sensors below)
    • To resolve a contact the distance between the ship and the contact needs to be reduced and/or the signature of the contact needs to increase (see Signature and Sensors below)
      • A low signature contact won’t resolve until it’s quite close where as a high signature contact can be resolved from quite a long way away
    • Signature can be based on several factors including heat and engine emissions
    • Only contacts that have been validated can be targeted by the targeting computer so that weapons can provide assistance/gimballing/lock-on etc.
  • Advanced Passive Sensors
    • These are deployable sensors that dramatically improve the ship’s forward facing detection abilities by significantly increasing the range at which a specific signature value can resolve a contact
    • As they are deployable they take up a valuable hard point on the ship
    • Passive sensors like these don’t affect the ship’s current signature to other ships sensors other than the potential heat increase through power used
  • Advanced Active Sensors
    • These are deployable sensors that actively search for contacts using strong EM pulses and other forms of detection that dramatically increase the ship’s own signature as a result
    • They are extremely powerful in that potential contacts within their sensor range can be validated instantly at the cost of also lighting the ship up to everyone else
    • They come in both forward facing only and in fully spherical configurations
      • Forward facing typically operate to much larger ranges and are quicker than the all around types
    • Activating an active sensor will “ping” the area and instantly reveal any potential contacts that the sensor is able to detect
      • The further away a contact is the less likely it will be able to be detected
    • After activating a contact will be told they have been “pinged” and can then look out for possible new sensor contacts that have just resolved to find the likely suspect

I'm guessing this just hasn't been implemented yet...actually I think there are a lot of things like this that hasn't been put into the game yet. As mentioned above there seems to be a lot of space left to present information (like distance) even if we can't see it yet.
 
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