If they made it realistic then it would be completely boring, Never get close enough to see a star, or an emy ship. all you would ever see is stations and all else.
Stars are no where near hot or dangerous enough.
- Thread starter GraXXoR
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The problem with all of this comes to the fact that FDev took an aproach to the game that doesn't fit with realism and inmersion: ship and pilot are the same thing (and at the start there wasn't even a pilot in there). There won't be much realism in all of these issues untill they start separating them and making each react to everything in it's own way (as in that other game coughcoughSCcoughcough), 'cause you know, heat should affect your pilot in a different way that it affects your ship, and overheating weapons should not be treated as the whole ship getting overheated, only the module that overheats and the surrounding areas of the ship should receive damage... Lots of stuff to be done yet, I trust all of these issues will be solved with time, just a couple of seasons more I think.
Are you exploring as a job to sell your data, or for the jiy of finding something new and overcoming the obstacles? With no challenge or danger (or thargoids... just you wait...) exploration becomes nothing more than "jump, honk, scoop, rinse and repeat" (as I've heard many explorers complain). It's only really those "heart in the mouth moments" when you're risking it all and getting out by the skin of your teeth that break the routine.
Having said that, nobody wants to see exploration become unfeasable. If they DID make stars & scooping more interesting they'd of course have to make sure didn't make things like exploration unfeasable. That might be something as simple as a tweaking the arrival point for twins so that it's still a "heart in the mouth" moment but also still survivable. After all, if exporation were completely safe very few people would do it... overcoming the challenge is half the fun.
See that sounds perfectly reasonable. If you're in a "world" where death means teleportation back to a station, it would make sense that exploration data might remain in a "black box" with a simple navigation system to bring it back toward the same civilisation (so it didn't fall into the same star you did). Of course that would mean you'd have to go looking for it, it wouldn't be where you'd left it (coz it's trying to "get home"), and someone else might find it, pick it up, and sell it. It might also have to be a "probe" or "beacon" that you have to DECIDE to launch before you die, meaning that you'd have to chase it down if you managed to survive. I imagine it'd have some sort of tracing system on it so you (AND others) could locate it.
Yeah sure, some of that wouldn't make sense in a real world... why for instance wouldn't the probe carry a COPY of the data? Why would you have to MANUALLY launch it? Well I could say that you're chasing it down and manually launching it was to avoid others finding/selling your data, or.to avoid it falling into thargoid hands (claws?), but the real answer is "because game". The whole point to asking for more environmental danger (possibly pointlessly, though sometimes the devs DO take ideas from these threads even if they don't comment) is to add "more game" to the game... but it DOES have to be playable... challenging but survivable. That's what beta testing's for, right?
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So the solution ISN'T to prevent stars & scooping being more challenging/interesting/fun, the solution is to also introduce a challenging/interesting/fun mechanism to safeguard/regain the lost data, yah? Let's make the game MORE fun for EVERYONE, rather than keeping it safe and boring for everyone because that a small number don't want increased risk.
I don't think we're ignoring any main roles. Sure noone (till it was brought up - surprise) actually addressed the issue but noone's saying "stuff the explorers, we must have lethal stars at any cost!"
The way ANY change affects EVERYONE must be examined carefully and either moderated, or a way of compensating developped... or even the changes just accepted in the name of better game balance.
You mentioned reflective armour as a possible method, someone else suggesteded the ability to repair (gives much more purpose to taking an SRV and landing on planets as an explorer). Another would be a new.form of shield generator (or an engineer shield modification?) producing "thermal shields" which would offer improved thermal protection, but less damage protection. There's lots of ways to use this to IMPROVE the game, rather than railing against any possible change because you fear your gameplay might be disadvantaged or rebalanced.
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Yes having a choice between slow and safe and fast and risky is a good addendum, player choice between risk and reward is good.
I think you might have missed my other contributions to this thread if you think I want stars nerfed or something. I'm just saying that I fully understand why some explorers consider the current implementation of stars and scooping to be a greater cumulative "risk" to their profession than that of someone who sticks close to civilisation, if you define "risk" only in terms of loss of potential earnings plus insurance.
I agree...
I lost a potential few million in exploration data just a couple of weeks ago because I had a momentary lapse of brain function and boosted my Asp into a moon. (Moons are much more dangerous than stars, especially if you try to scoop from them which is pretty much what I accidentally did). At some point I plan to sprint back to the fatal system just so I can take a screenshot of my ship's grave site*, and because it'll be a good launch point for starting a second exploration trek. Maybe I'll even rediscover some of the ELWs I'd scanned but not noted their locations.
But if I could also fit a modified ADS that could detect explorer black box beacons across whole systems, how fantastic would that be? Not only might I get my own data back, I might stumble upon other black boxes in other systems where fellow explorers have suffered a ship-planet interface malfunction. Equally I could get to my own crash site and find the black box empty, with its data already uploaded by another CMDR who passed through the system and found it first.
That sneak peek concept a couple of weeks ago, with an SRV approaching a data cache at a crash site, gives me great hope that this is ultimately where FD are trying to get with exploration. Having said that, FD have stated on multiple occasions that unsold exploration data cannot be retrieved from the server in the event of a crash (in either sense of the word) and is lost forever. If that's still the case (is it stored client-side? Seems exploitable) then maybe this is all a non-starter and the only exploration data we'll ever be able to salvage is the NPC RNG stuff we can already find in Salvageable Wreckage sites. That would be a shame.
I'd love for the ultimate implementation of this to be database entries for every lost PC explorer ship, similar to the first discovery database, that could be used by every player with an ADS to locate the black boxes -- and maybe even the shipwrecks -- of other less fortunate explorers. But I appreciate that the sheer volume of data involved might make this impractical.
[SUP]*I know there won't be an actual crash site rendered in the game, just in case anyone interprets it that way. But wouldn't it be cool if there was? (see last paragraph).[/SUP]
Realistic ? Really ? Well that immediately eliminates faster-then-light travel - so "realistically" there are only a few suns to worry about and, after days/weeks/months/years of travelling between them, if they get much more than a blip on your screen, you burn up. I'm not convinced that more realism would make the game more fun for many players.
Biggest problem I can see with this (otherwise very good and thoroughly enjoyable) idea is a technical one. While it's easy enough to generate a single random or mission site with a data package that you could pick up, keeping track of black boxes from every crashed explorer would put a HUGE toll on the servers, and that's even assuming that it only had to keep track of the ones who bought "special" ADS's. If it WERE to be implemented they'd have to include some sort of rapid decay system so you'd only have a few hours to go and get it or the game would come to a grinding halt in short order. Otherwise it's an idea that would really add to the (currently very limited) gameplay available to explorers.
Yeah. Why don't they make the entire ship out of that stuff?
The whole exploration data thing is too opaque. We know roughly (from the PG video) how First Discovery data is held in the S3 database, but we don't know how pending and unsold scan data is held. Is it client-side or server-side? FD's supposed inability to recover lost exploration data suggests the former, but that's a very uninformed guess. It looks to me as though scanned systems are held locally, perhaps as encrypted pointers to places "within" the PG galaxy that the player has scanned, and then "expanded" during the UC selling process into those text fields we see in the S3 database (after comparing to make sure no other player has claimed a given system first). Again, mostly speculation.
So in theory, losing a ship with exploration data on board could trigger a process very similar to selling data. The relevant fields would be added to the First Discovery database but with a "lost data" flag that would prevent First Discovery tags from appearing in the system map, and would allow the data to be overwritten if another player sold data before the black box was retrieved. This way, uncovered black box data would take up little more server resources than sold data does already.
(There would definitely be some overhead, since there is only one set of First Discovery data for any given body but potentially dozens or more "lost data" entries for multiple players in the same system. But as the database has theoretically been designed to be scalable enough to hold First Discovery data for billions of systems over the 10+ years of the game's life, it would hopefully take an insane number of black boxes being generated in a very short space of time to break the system).
There are a couple of obvious potential problems with this though.
- Selling data takes time and stresses the servers.
We know that selling data takes significant time and involves a lot of data transfer between client and server. In the event of a "lost data" dump we obviously wouldn't need the Universal Cartographics UI or any scrolling First Discovery info, but nonetheless we could be looking at several seconds to several minutes of delay after ship destruction while the "lost data" is uploaded. This might introduce a delay before the insurance screen that would be unacceptable to some players, or indeed some developers.
- It's unclear how and at what point the credit value of scanned bodies is determined.
In the case of a UC sale I'd hazard a guess that it's a relatively simple cross-reference during the upload. Get the UID of the scanned body, interrogate the server to find out its composition, assign a value accordingly, add 50% if it's undiscovered, update the database, discard the UID data as we don't need it any more. In the case of "lost data" it's more difficult as those UIDs all have to be stored somewhere until a player retrieves the black box. If there was an efficient reverse lookup feature on the First Discovered database this wouldn't be a problem; we could store it there temporarily and get it back when the black box was retrieved. But if an efficient reverse lookup was available I'd assume FD would already have used it for the often wished for "show me all my First Discoveries" feature. Does that mean it can't be done? We just don't know. That's the real rub.
There's still time for FD to do something with this; exploration has always been something of a poor cousin to the other activities in ED so the idea that FD are sitting on mid-term plans that might take another season or more before we start to see them doesn't really bother me. After all, the DDA is full of FD-originated ideas for exploration features, many of which overlap with those of the community. What does concern me is the nagging feeling that FD may have somehow written themselves into a corner with the exploration database implementation and will struggle to introduce any features that might rely upon two-way realtime interaction with it.
Probably for the same reason as they don't make planes out of the same stuff as they make black boxes... coz they're only really interested in protecting the stuff inside the well protected bit.
...and it must be pointed out the black boxes (they're actually orange, by the way) are unable to fly, which might have some bearing on this not entirely serious sidetrack discussion....
Linden labs of second life fame keep track of millions upon millions of user generated assets on crusty servers that haven't been updated in years. Sure their resource popping is extreme (I.e assets generate right in front of your eyes,) but still it is possible and had been for years. Remember, in the case of ED, you only need the location/orientation, the ship type/owner and the value of data stored (if applicable). The rest would be generated in client. No need for anything heavy to be stored on the server since none of the assets are user created. Now this could be a used by "lemmings" who want to spam a crash site with hundreds of ships to see if they can crash an instance. Then simply implement a FIFO and remove the older ships. You'll only need a few ships to make things feel more realistic and persistent, not hundreds.
You could even have a pirate/scavenger mechanic that scavenges ships in busy areas giving them a "lifespan" of a couple of months whatever. Heck it could even be a new game mode along the lines of mining. Instead you fill your hold will alloys and whatnot using your collector/scavenger drones. This sort of mechanic makes things feel lived in and persistent.
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It's a little more complex than that, because until exploration data is sold it has no value. What you'd actually have to store would include the locations (either as galactic coordinates or more likely some sort of pointer into the PG engine) of every body the player had scanned prior to crashing. As it stands such data is lost, irretrievably so according to responses from FD, when a ship is destroyed or something goes badly wrong with the client/server communication, which is thankfully very rare and hasn't happened in a while. Where this data is normally held, or in what format, or why it should be so volatile, is not clear.
It still feels to me as though this should be fundamentally doable though. It would definitely add a storage overhead to the system, but each black box generated is basically the equivalent of adding a player. And the system already scales to cope with that. Yes, people would probably try to break the system by repeatedly crashing ships but most of those ships would have little if any data on board, so each crash would at most be the equivalent of adding a newbie player. Ships that are destroyed with no unsold scan data (the majority of those in the bubble, I'd wager) wouldn't even need a black box of course.
If even that proves too much, do as you suggest and limit the number of black boxes per player. Worst case scenario it's one each, which means even if everyone has one black box on file that's the equivalent of doubling the number of players. If the system can't cope with that then we're in trouble.
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Technology so advanced so i can get to 40Km distance from black hole and not be stuck in time-space dilatation? Goodbye time-travel
Sorry, I was mainly talking about the crashed vehicle location persisting, not so much the data aboard. However, if the data is stored then the pointers to the systems would need to be transfered to the finder's computer. If it's a database, it's possible, but it might just be easier to represent the data as simply an averaged value (i.e. 10k per system or something) and let the data "die". THere are so many star systems, who cares if one commander's scans worth are "lost"
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Technology so advanced so i can get to 40Km distance from black hole and not be stuck in time-space dilatation? Goodbye time-travel
Yes, I always chuckle when someone brings up the SATIM (Sufficiently advanced technology is magic).
Totally agree, stars should give gameplay that difficulty varies from the type of star age etc with solar flares that you have to take caution with while scooping etc.
Right now all the stars feel the same without any danger whatsoever.
This would tremendously improve the boring gameplay of travelling far distances, as in the player would now have to be focused on what star he encounters and how to proceed. For explorers you could choose to go fuel scoop on a safe star or risk in a very dangerous one.
FD pls
Right now all the stars feel the same without any danger whatsoever.
This would tremendously improve the boring gameplay of travelling far distances, as in the player would now have to be focused on what star he encounters and how to proceed. For explorers you could choose to go fuel scoop on a safe star or risk in a very dangerous one.
FD pls
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Personally I think this is actually a minor glitch more then anything else, as others point out, it used to be more dangerous but now our ships are able to handle heat better, and the the heat stars generate hasn't entirely kept up.
That said, this really depends on ship, older ships, say python and such, even with best power supply, still can get scorched.
So tweak heat handling of 'old' ships (in terms of heat management) and scale up star heat accordingly.
That said, this really depends on ship, older ships, say python and such, even with best power supply, still can get scorched.
So tweak heat handling of 'old' ships (in terms of heat management) and scale up star heat accordingly.
I must ask. Why do suns look so dim? Do our windshields auto polarize or adjust to the brightness somehow? And if they do realistically everything else other then the sun shouldn't be visible while we're near it.