That won't solve the problem. Currently planetary exploration is heavily discouraged by the fact, that player is very unlikely find anything at all on planet but a same boring craters and uneven ground of sandy colour, not to mention something interesting or unique. If we simply add scanner, that scans, lets say in 10 or even 100 km radius, how many planets would you be willing to sweep-scan manually before it get old and boring? Then it is back to waiting until something gets announced somewhere and there will be coordinates to fly to. To make planetary exploration both interesting and adequate in terms of time-effort-result ratio, we do need some sort of scanner that will be able to scan entire planet from orbit in one go, and at the very least hint us on whether there is something worth looking for, or we can continue to the next planetoid.
They just cannot offer the required texture resolution at such a long range. 4km at max on a high end machine will allow you to see the ruins. You can go up further but everything drops out of the draw distance. a hazy vague shape at best. That is less resolution than the human eye. So in order to do that a device for scanning for anomolies will need to be created. Nobody said it had to be like an instant honk.
It might require you to drop beacons/satellites at specific points around the planet outside of SC. Then initiate the scan. Either way. Unless the feature/structure is the size of mount Everest we will never be able to see it without being within a few km of it.
They just cannot offer the required texture resolution at such a long range. 4km at max on a high end machine will allow you to see the ruins. You can go up further but everything drops out of the draw distance. a hazy vague shape at best. That is less resolution than the human eye. So in order to do that a device for scanning for anomolies will need to be created. Nobody said it had to be like an instant honk.
It might require you to drop beacons/satellites at specific points around the planet outside of SC. Then initiate the scan. Either way. Unless the feature/structure is the size of mount Everest we will never be able to see it without being within a few km of it.
Instead of just pinging the planet and having the game tell you if there's something there or not maybe Frontier could create some sort of ship version of the wave scanner that could be used while in orbital cruise that will allow you to scan from a very high altitude? If a contact appears on the wave scanner you can drop out of orbital cruise in the general location of the contact and begin your search in that area. This ship mounted wave scanner would only pick up persistent locations like settlements or the ruins/crashed alien ships or important locations. That way you know your not wasting time looking for random POI's like crates and crashed nav beacons. It would allow you to search a good portion of the planet in a reasonable amount of time.
If you look at the mini map while landing at the ruins you'll notice the shape and all the details of the ruins and the ground around it will show on the mini map. What if frontier were to create some sort of high altitude topography scanner that puts the minimap into that mode from a much higher altitude. So that once you drop out of orbital cruise you can view the topography in a circle around you while your flying and you can watch out for any strange or irregular details. You can use this topography scanner to help search the area you found with the ship mounted wave scanner.
I think this would add a bit more gameplay to it, rather than just pinging the planet, without making it too tedious.
EDIT: Or while in orbital cruise you could have a scanner that scans the composition of elements in the ground below you. Like it could tell you in real time that the ground below you contains 60% Rock, 10% Iron etc. If you are near something interesting it could show up as 5% Unknown Element. Or something like that.
They just cannot offer the required texture resolution at such a long range. 4km at max on a high end machine will allow you to see the ruins. You can go up further but everything drops out of the draw distance. a hazy vague shape at best. That is less resolution than the human eye. So in order to do that a device for scanning for anomolies will need to be created. Nobody said it had to be like an instant honk.
It might require you to drop beacons/satellites at specific points around the planet outside of SC. Then initiate the scan. Either way. Unless the feature/structure is the size of mount Everest we will never be able to see it without being within a few km of it.
My point was that in order for game feature to be interesting and useful in a long run, it should offer a reasonable balance between time investment, player effort and an end result. If we get something that will require us to spend too much time and effort while not getting anything for that, which is very likely considering how many planetoids there are and only few of them have something worth of notice (like alien ruins, or ship wrecks), then simply adding a scanner with limited radius is pointless, because it is still taking too much time and effort for no gain, and flying for hours over empty planet surface isn't much fun in itself either, so it will be the same story we have now - nobody will bother spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours doing planetary sweeps, because chances to find anything will be practically what we have now - around 0. Thats why some form of full planetary scan is needed, that at the very least will hint players that there is something on the surface to look for. I really like a finely illustrated idea about science laboratory module, different type of scans and specialized scientists, posted by dynamicbob. At least then there will be some fun and point in ingame exploring, instead of it being purely a forum metagame.
My point was that in order for game feature to be interesting and useful in a long run, it should offer a reasonable balance between time investment, player effort and an end result. If we get something that will require us to spend too much time and effort while not getting anything for that, which is very likely considering how many planetoids there are and only few of them have something worth of notice (like alien ruins, or ship wrecks), then simply adding a scanner with limited radius is pointless, because it is still taking too much time and effort for no gain, and flying for hours over empty planet surface isn't much fun in itself either, so it will be the same story we have now - nobody will bother spend hundreds upon hundreds of hours doing planetary sweeps, because chances to find anything will be practically what we have now - around 0. Thats why some form of full planetary scan is needed, that at the very least will hint players that there is something on the surface to look for. I really like a finely illustrated idea about science laboratory module, different type of scans and specialized scientists, posted by dynamicbob. At least then there will be some fun and point in ingame exploring, instead of it being purely a forum metagame.
Well thats fine as well. I dont mind what they do as long as we can scan the planet from orbit for anomolies. Check out my post that I listed above. It has a bunch of details I think you would like if you liked dynamic bobs. I went into greater detail on how it might work.
No need for meta gaming if we get something like my proposed Idea. All of the tools would be in game.
I would notice it silently, there is some very basic search method in game. Wartime surface target scan missions, when you near the target planet, a mission target pop up, and you need to search that point. When you descending the search point marker moves around, and need 4-6 turn around to the end point. Yes it's very basic, and not the most satisfying, but can be the base of future things. Maybe a scanner, when you ping a planet from close orbit, and something is on the surface, a "target" show up, and you can select and it bring you down to a searching area, where you need to find in "x" km. The base is in the game already, just need to "improve" it.
heres an idea for exploration and science based mechanics not alrady ingame http://imgur.com/a/rMKSZ (and it would be useful across all the mysteries so far) as well as giving Fdev more ways to introduce innovative storyline mechanisms
Think it's clear this community goal was hastily put together when Frontier realized we have ZERO HOPE of finding the other ruin sites as they never gave us clues to find any in the first place.
The original hunt for data was accidentally launched in GalNet last year, before the patch with the data was in place. Then they launched the mission with no GalNet post. Now they realise we havn't got a hope of completing all the datasets with only one ruins location, so have created this CG to point us in the right direction.
Such a shame they are always fire-fighting and playing catchup with this stuff. I've deleted hundreds of Alpha to Gamma data packets while working on the ruins puzzle.
I don't think so, I think the CG was always planned. Why? Because cashing in the data uses a new screen in the station services UI and that probably had to be coded. If it was coded then it went in to the same release as the ruins data mystery itself.
That won't solve the problem. Currently planetary exploration is heavily discouraged by the fact, that player is very unlikely find anything at all on planet but a same boring craters and uneven ground of sandy colour, not to mention something interesting or unique. If we simply add scanner, that scans, lets say in 10 or even 100 km radius, how many planets would you be willing to sweep-scan manually before it get old and boring? Then it is back to waiting until something gets announced somewhere and there will be coordinates to fly to. To make planetary exploration both interesting and adequate in terms of time-effort-result ratio, we do need some sort of scanner that will be able to scan entire planet from orbit in one go, and at the very least hint us on whether there is something worth looking for, or we can continue to the next planetoid.
Agreed. A scanner should realistically be able to pick up a bunch of power sources like the site has from 100.000 Light Seconds or maybe a little more. This is a transmitter on a huge scale. Even though the site is sort of dormant without players there, there is still a large power source that controls the whole thing.
In my idea of a scanner you would have a window that shows frequency's from low to high and a small bump as the power source's frequency. First you would drop in and see quite a lot of signals showing up on the display window from the star next to you. Once you get away from the star you would see the noise from the star drop and start to see other signal sources like the transmitter. Now you look for anything out of the ordinary on the spectrum display. You see an odd signal pattern that is very low and the ships computer confirms it is very likely not a natural pattern of signals.
You then mark the peak of the signal and the hud's ship display would show what general direction it is coming from. point the nose of the ship in that direction and follow the signal. It would rise in amplitude until you get close, then the signal would start to go near the top of the window and the noise floor would rise so much it mask the signal you are looking for. When you get say a few hundred km depending on the signal's strength it would start to be difficult to trace the source. once you get to about 100km the signals are all around you forcing you to land and track the same frequency of the signal with a SRV that has a similar scanner.
With this being a transmitting and receiving hub you could do an active sweep through all frequency's and likely get it to ping back at you and give you the precise location via the coordinates and become a target able location like a normal base. Yet to get this to work, the transmitter would have to be in your line of sight and be within a certain distance.
For me, I would find this type of scanner to be interactive and interesting to work with.
I don't think so, I think the CG was always planned. Why? Because cashing in the data uses a new screen in the station services UI and that probably had to be coded. If it was coded then it went in to the same release as the ruins data mystery itself.
The new ability to have more refined community goals that require data or resources was publicised before this latest patch, where it has clearly been put in. If this CG was planned, it would have gone live with the patch, and would have made sense to run it before the current mission given to gather the data packets from the sites (multiple). Not instead after we've spent a week or two looking at ley lines, circles and heavenly alignments trying to figure out where the other sites are.
Seems backward to me, but I guess we'll never know how it ran at Frontier, as they don't seem to communicate much recently.
No, I'm not really inferring anything from the icosahedron as yet. It could be a football for all I know! It would be 12 vertices. When I'm searching for comms network candidate systems I'm looking for shapes that tesselate in 2D at the moment.
Ouch. That's a painfully early start on a Saturday!
Yeah, it would be a lot of sites. It would actually make the search I've been doing easier though. I've been looking for 2 systems which would form key shapes (parts of 2d tessellating shapes). The obvious thing to look for is two systems that form an equilateral triangle with the ruins. But there is just waaaaay too many. If on the other hand it's a geometric pattern that needs to be found, the data search is a bit more complicated, but it would cut down the list of candidate system to something manageable.
In a way though, both versions are completely compatible. If there is a wider set of sites/nodes than just 3, there's nothing to say that any of the other sites would have scannable obelisks.
True, but you don't really believe that do you? FD reuse objects so I'm fairly confident that the other sites will also have scannable obelisks.
I think homeworld plus 3 arc ship destinations will be arranged geometrically, could be a square but I suspect more likely a tetrahedron. I think the clues to homeworld are either in the message content (not read them all yet, but red & green skins sounds like a clue), the glyphs on the sides of the pillars, or the pattern of flashing lights (which may be similar to braille).
Had a bit more sleep last night. Another 2 coffees & my brain will be operating, but limited time today
I think FD are pretty clued up technically. A few of us onthis thread are familiar with spectral analysis; planet & space noise maybe fewer, though we have had input from people at NASA! But this is a game so any noise element will be simplified.
Here was my idea for the rest of the science stuff. It got lost because everyone was complaining about combat logging that week. It was off of the first page in about 1 minute. Nobody really paid attention to it.
I had an idea about onship laboratories back at the beginning of December. 2016
Excellent ideas, have some rep. I´d like to fire science probes or drop auto-labs on the surface instead of finding already existing ones, though. Is there a thread of yours, discussing this topic?
While I don't diagree about the need for better scanners, I'd like to remind you that the initial ruin was found based on ONE image from the trailer (if I'm not mistaken).
Any improvements to exploration have to be considered carefully not to become instant unintentional overkill.
Agree fully with this, but then he had a clue that he was looking at the right planet & could tie down the search area a bit from the sky background angles. Most of the time we don't even know if there is anything on a whole planet!
FD will have to balance any new scanner capability against making it too easy, but Personally I would be happy if that focused their attention away from constantly rebalancing weapons etc-every update things change & that is annoyingly immersion breaking
heres an idea for exploration and science based mechanics not alrady ingame http://imgur.com/a/rMKSZ (and it would be useful across all the mysteries so far) as well as giving Fdev more ways to introduce innovative storyline mechanisms[/QUOTE]
+1 from me. Seriously FDEV! exploration without a mass spec and a telescope ...........
Well it has been a fun morning. I have been waiting for this time for three days now. Note I have not been to the candidate systems yet, but I wanted to get this out while the Sagittarius A* alignment is still usable.
I believe the site does show or at least point to the locations of the other sites, using a combination of the correct time, and visual orientation of the pyramids and the beacons. For what is worth, I think there are at least three, possibly six sites. I have worked out based on the layout of the ruins site some candidate systems.
The correct time universal time for the site is a tricky one, but I think the only universally agreed constant in our galaxy would be Sagittarius A*. Using that as a guide, the site has a line that aligns with Sagittarius A* once per day:
To sum up the candidate systems are:
a) Visible from the surface of the ruins site (Candidate stars are O to K)
b) Aligned at the time when Sagittarius A* is on the horizon
c) The candidate systems are:
HIP 21820
WREGOE NX-L D7-66 - Visited, has candidate landing bodies.
SYNUEFE XR-H D11-74
WREGOE CW-E D11-161
I have not visited these systems yet to check if there are suitable landing moons or planets. I will have to follow that up in a later post.
PS: Is it really hard to select the right system from the galactic map. I wish I could just point to the star visible on the screen and say "That One!"
PPS: I have not tried to do star alignments OH1 -> B2 and OH1 -> B3 as I am not feeling well enough to go on this morning... for medical reasons best left undescribed. I might get a chance next week, but I doubt it as it would be Sunday 8:00am my time, and that is not convenient most times.
Here is a link to the GIMP file I made, with layers, so anyone with a bit more know how than me can do a better job of it. I used the base images available in this very threadnought.
This would link up to FD's statement ages ago that the UP is the key (word was coloured green) in a newsletter, and the structure around the large circle looks to me exactly like a key, but where does this lead?
Agreed. A scanner should realistically be able to pick up a bunch of power sources like the site has from 100.000 Light Seconds or maybe a little more. This is a transmitter on a huge scale. Even though the site is sort of dormant without players there, there is still a large power source that controls the whole thing.
In my idea of a scanner you would have a window that shows frequency's from high to low and a small bump as the power source's frequency. First you would drop in and see quite a lot of signals showing up on the display window from the star next to you. Once you get away from the star you would see the noise from the star drop and start to see other signal sources like the transmitter. Now you look for anything out of the ordinary on the spectrum display. You see an odd signal pattern that is very low and the ships computer confirms it is very likely not a natural pattern of signals.
You then mark the peak of the signal and the hud's ship display would show what general direction it is coming from. point the nose of the ship in that direction and follow the signal. It would rise in amplitude until you get close, then the signal would start to go near the top of the window and the noise floor would rise so much it mask the signal you are looking for. When you get say a few hundred km depending on the signal's strength it would start to be difficult to trace the source. once you get to about 100km the signals are all around you forcing you to land and track the same frequency of the signal with a SRV that has a similar scanner.
With this being a transmitting and receiving hub you could do an active sweep through all frequency's and likely get it to ping back at you and give you the precise location via the coordinates and become a target able location like a normal base. Yet to get this to work, the transmitter would have to be in your line of sight and be within a certain distance.
For me, I would find this type of scanner to be interactive and interesting to work with.
Hey, dont complain about the complex level of this. I actually don´t want to be in the position of having to design thos type of "quests". When it´s too easy, it will be solved by bruteforce (10 k players just trying everything etc), and when it´s too hard noone will find the solution.
I've just noticed, there is a bit of a spoiler in the player journal...
I only just started running EDDiscovery, when you collect materials in this case data the game writes it to your player journal which is the API the tools use.
The Journal doesn't list them as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, whatever it logs them as "Encoded, ancientxxxxxxxdata, 3 items" with the xxxxx being the usual History, Tech, Culture, bio and language.
This means we can confirm which in game item relates to which data type.
Has anyone done this yet?
Regarding the discussion about scanners: Maybe they could introduce a second level of surface scanning (call it surface mapping for example), where you are able to scan from the orbit. You have to be in an orbit and you have a scanner-cone with a certain diameter.
Something like this:
When you find a persistant POI, like the ruins -> "Bing"
You need a third scanner type, and the progress is being showed in "%". And the size of the scanner-cone is engineerable. Payout is slightly higher than for surface scans. Could push exploration to a new level, and could help us finding stuff, it could also help FD making things more complicated for us to find.
It would be 12 vertices. When I'm searching for comms network candidate systems I'm looking for shapes that tesselate in 2D at the moment.![[VR] Frank_G](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/59/59394.jpg?1553527111){kind=avatar}
