no. we can learn more from hubble than you seem to think we should have on the galmap. exploring would be finished because nobody could get to beagle point due to never being able to find a route to it. the gaps between galaxy arms WILL be impassable under your level 2 proposal. and if you cant get your scanner cheaper and in the bubble for level 3 there wont BE any exploring at all.
Explorers : would you consider giving up on the infinite honk for...?
- Thread starter Godsailsaqueen
- Start date
Except that with the technology we have today we can determine the atmosphere and surface composition of a planet from earth, through our own atmosphere. I'm sure that 1300 years from now we wont have forgotten how to let a computer tell us all of this as well. Having a general idea of the locations of planetary bodies but nothing else is not only bad gameplay design, but also bad scientific accuracy.
The current BDS/IDS/ADS ping system does not actually tell us as much as what our current earth tech can tell us.
We get returned by the ping:-
- Long distance image of the planetoid
- Nominal order of orbital procession and distance from system entry point
- Whether it has an atmosphere or not
- (Maybe - not got time to check this now) Orbital period and some other generic stuff
Until we actually DSS scan the bodies we can not tell even some of the basic details about the body in question - most of the truly relevant information is obfuscated up until that point.
The image of the planetoid tells us very little (it is not an unambiguous indication of specific planetary type) and I see no real good reason for this image to be obfuscated given it is only obtained by pinging with-in the given system.
Overall though, while the information returned by the discovery ping is pretty basic it is still essential to have this information available IMO and the range of the ADS is actually limited to the bounds of the particular system (so notionally no more than 1Ly).
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Thanks for posting this.
Please, we have probably the biggest and most beautiful map in gaming history but the gameplay...
The gameplay mechanics have no name. I remember the DDA of exploration and mining! Thats why I bought this game. I imagined me there DOING STUFF! and not pressing 1 button HOOOOONK [where is it]. This is a space ship game, we NEED to manage our systems and equipment to do stuff, don't make everything so automated and simplistic.![[SI] Bobdelion](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/35/35943.jpg?1553527109){kind=avatar}
There have been plenty of times that I've reminisced about the need to actually _search_ a system to uncover every planetary body of interest, but even though my memory is of this activity being more fulfilling I wouldn't currently give up the infinite honk because the reality is all it would end up doing is add busy work to my game. Now, if scanning a system was a more involved activity that required you to engage in a real process of investigation then yes, I probably would sacrifice the 'honk and go' if the result was a richer suite of exploration mechanics. Having said that I think this would need to happen in conjunct6ion with adding more variation to stellar systems so that the process of searching had the pay-off of there being a wider range of unique and interesting things to find in each system. In other words I don't think this is in any way pressing until planets, etc get their long awaited lick of paint.
Thanks for posting this.
Please, we have probably the biggest and most beautiful map in gaming history but the gameplay...
Agreed 1000%. Hopefully Season 3 will finally give exploration the love and attention it's lacked for the past two and a half years.
Amen to that...
Thanks for posting this.
Please, we have probably the biggest and most beautiful map in gaming history but the gameplay...
It's obvious that exploration game play needs to be fleshed out.
But you don't do that by turning body discovery into some time-consuming thing - that would worsen the game for everyone, not just explorers. No. You keep the body discovery honk because there is no compelling gameplay idea which would not increase the amount of time, just to find all the spinning balls in a system. None.
The real gains would be made in the body surveying and exploration mechanics - currently, this amounts to pointing your ship at a body and the surface scanner chews over the aforementioned for a bit, then you get data. This is the bit that needs expanded into all sorts of new and interesting gameplay.
Then there're all sorts of things you could add to exploring on a planet's surface - hopefully using more than just the Mk.1 Eyeball, hopefully including adding QoL stuff like just being able to mark a waypoint on a planet, for example.
But what you don't do, is mess around with the ADS - it's not just for explorers - there are so many other player types this would affect, and anything other than instant honk and discovery-of-spinning-balls would be the result of a clique of particularly snobbish explorers we have in this game, just wanting some drudgery-gameplay for the body discovery mechanic - stuff the rest of the playerbase, eh?
Agreed. Again.
I'm sick of reading proposals on how to turn convenient body discovery into something dull and drawn-out which would add nothing to exploration except the time taken to discover a spinning ball in space. God these forums are depressing reading
For me is depressing to Honk and have everything served. Some people want to play and have something to do with the game instead of using 1 button.
Personally, I think most of the orbital mechanics information should be obfuscated. ADS would reveal where bodies are RIGHT NOW. Atmosphere, chemical composition...? Sure, that too. And that's it.
Oh, and another thing. Line-of-sight would affect body discovery. You can't see a planet that's behind a star, let alone an asteroid. You can't see a moon that's behind a planet.
What a split-second snapshot of a stellar body of any sort DOESN'T tell you, however, is where it will be in a week, let alone what its entire orbit is.
Making this change would instantly create a reason for people to re-visit systems that had already been scanned once, and encourage people to fly around at least a little out of the ecliptic plane of a system before doing a honk.
People would still get instant discovery of bodies from the ADS, as well as some additional info that the DSS provides, but there would be other information left for further investigation. Specific geological activity, confirmation of native life, rotational and orbital period, detailed surface map /of the entire planet/--not just the side facing you when you honked, including /where/ on the planet deposits of those chemicals are...
Oh, and another thing. Line-of-sight would affect body discovery. You can't see a planet that's behind a star, let alone an asteroid. You can't see a moon that's behind a planet.
What a split-second snapshot of a stellar body of any sort DOESN'T tell you, however, is where it will be in a week, let alone what its entire orbit is.
Making this change would instantly create a reason for people to re-visit systems that had already been scanned once, and encourage people to fly around at least a little out of the ecliptic plane of a system before doing a honk.
People would still get instant discovery of bodies from the ADS, as well as some additional info that the DSS provides, but there would be other information left for further investigation. Specific geological activity, confirmation of native life, rotational and orbital period, detailed surface map /of the entire planet/--not just the side facing you when you honked, including /where/ on the planet deposits of those chemicals are...
Basic discovery scanner. Go play fetch. Let me guess, that's not a reasonable suggestion, even though it technically solves that concern. You have to go hunt for the bodies. The problem with this mindset, is that your idea of a good time, automatically becomes everyone else's game experience.
One of the powerful things this game still does, is provides choice. Removal of choice does not automatically improve things. Providing more ways to use what we have, and extending the mechanics to make them more meaningful improves things.
Again, play fetch with the BDS. You have to orbit in ever expanding circles, hunting for bodies. It's fun. For the first five systems. Then it gets really boring. I know, I've done it. It's not rewarding, it just increases the time taken. Which is what most of these ideas boil down to.
"How can I take an essentially droll experience, and extend it out to take glacial time frames, because this is then suddenly very exciting and highly immersive experiences."
Except it isn't, it's just stalling for time. I'd rather there were more layers, more things with more engaging mechanics and more pockets of interest. It's not that we are fundimentally short of things to do - it's just they just aren't rewarding. We essentially have to invent ways to make it engaging.
Also just because we can't see a thing, doesn't mean it isn't there. We have found all manner of things because predictive mathematics and physics calculations tell us *something* is there. So whilst you could just reinvent black planets again, it's not adding anything and is just stalling for time.
There are a bajillion things out existing exploration probes and rovers do for us, on a daily basis, and have done so for several decades at this point. So why can't we incorporate a lot of that into exploration? Rolling the process back to the functional equivalent of Neanderthals banging cosmic rocks together to see if something is there, and then repeating that experiment 3 times over, doesn't really improve anything.
I see a lot of suggestions, and they are mostly all just "stalling the inevitable". Rather than actually looking at what we do now. We have ample real-world example, and a fair amount of it is both fascinating and actually quite exciting. I don't think frontier are short of solutions, it's more I believe they just don't know how to incorporate them.
I don't think line-of-sight would need to turn exploration into a slow process; simply venture a bit away from the star before doing a honk. And while we can use predictive mathematics and physics calculations to figure out if something is there but not visible, it's never derivable purely from a single snapshot--it needs multiple data points that take time, usually months, to collect in real life. So there's that.
Probes would be neat, though.
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The one button press is ONLY PART of the overall process, I do not believe any of us are objecting to detail and interesting mechanics being ADDED to the rest of the process without taking anything we currently have away.
It seems strange to me how some seem to be ignoring that simple fact.
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Jeez. I refer you to the post I gave which you completely ignored - it was even the last one before yours....
No. It's not an either or choice.
Maybe the infinity honk just reveals that there are or are not celestial bodies other than the primary star present in the system.
Probes / gravity locators can reveal their positions. The results would largely indicate if the object is a gas giant or tiny moon based on its gravitational displacement.
After that probes launched into the atmosphere or planet surface could bring back telemetry on the planet and provide the pilot with further details like Metal rich, rocky body etc. that in turn would determine if they wish to examine the planet further where there would be a suite of deep scan tools that could reveal resource maps, geographical detail, topography, right down to obtaining a soil sample.
Each level of scan reveals more and is worth more once handed in. For something like a 'terraforming candidate' planet the rewards should be very high but then again you wouldn't necessarily know its a candidate for terraforming until you've done most of the detailed scanning.
Probes / gravity locators can reveal their positions. The results would largely indicate if the object is a gas giant or tiny moon based on its gravitational displacement.
After that probes launched into the atmosphere or planet surface could bring back telemetry on the planet and provide the pilot with further details like Metal rich, rocky body etc. that in turn would determine if they wish to examine the planet further where there would be a suite of deep scan tools that could reveal resource maps, geographical detail, topography, right down to obtaining a soil sample.
Each level of scan reveals more and is worth more once handed in. For something like a 'terraforming candidate' planet the rewards should be very high but then again you wouldn't necessarily know its a candidate for terraforming until you've done most of the detailed scanning.
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