If I wanted a 'radio-tuning' game I would have rather bought an old radio.
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Hesitant to get involved in this, but I’m finding it very difficult to see why the use of Elite as a teaching tool might go out the window due to the FSS.
The system map is still immediately available in just about every system in the bubble, so if it’s showing the system map and flying out to planets etc, then that can still be done.
I’m not sure what educational benefit pushing a button to find out what is in an unknown system has, so I’m not sure what benefit the ADS would have to education there (I don’t think the use of the FSS in new systems would be particularly educational in this regard either, to be fair.)
Finally, the new system also has the orrery, which is probably more use as an educational tool than a flat system map ever was.
Because very early on, circa 2.2, I wanted to set off into the void and see things all around the galaxy - nebula, known oddities, even the farthest edge of the galaxy itself. When it finally came time to make what would be my longest venture, a 5k trip to unlock Professor Palin, I thought I’d get a taste of what a really long trip would be, and I did, and I absolutely hated it. It was a 13 day trip, full of honk-scoop-point-and-wait.
I absolutely hated it.
I wouldn’t venture out any further until the night before the release of “The Return”, mostly as a goof, and even then I only made it out around 6400 ly, and wasn’t bothering to scan at all. It was beyond motonous - I’d come to refer to Exploring as “Exboring” because there was literally nothing at all to do.
I had reached the Rank of Elite in Exploration making trips to the Guardian Ruins, which I laughed at, given how far I had not traveled. In fact a solid 97% of the credits I’d made came from within the bubble.
I’d never made the trip to Colonia because the distance involved and the lack of any sort of activity was a complete put-off.
That all changed during the 3.3 beta. The new tools were interactive, they were something to actually use my hands to do. I figured out my key mappings, built a few ships for the task to decide what I’d take, and as soon as 3.3 went live and I was able to log in I bought a Krait Phantom and a Mamba, outfitted them and left them, still wrapped in plastic and set a course for the edge of the galaxy, intent to circumnavigate the whole thing, cross the center, and pass through Colonia on my way back.
Greatest thing ever? No, but as far as improvements go this is as vast as the distance I’ve traveled.
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Well you got me there. In a situation where the FSS isnt used im sure its all fine. The orrery....its very basic. Reminds me of the style of MOO3
Not to mention I can’t see any school kids going “Come on teacher, we don’t have all day for you to FSS this system. You’re slowing down our learning time.” At least not any from this dimension.
verminstar
Banned
Is the old honk system still available if ye can’t be bothered with the keybind hell on earth scenario?
I ask as someone who hasn’t had the pleasure of using it...seen it briefly while browsing through the Q4 changes, face planted hard with the bindings and just gave up. Even the idiot guide tutorials on YouTube have failed to convince me to try again...though that’s because I see it as merely a more efficient way of finding what was already there which was certainly needed and welcome...but the lack of new stuff to find...that’s where the motivation stopped entirely.
So nowadays I’m just a curious spectator casually browsing threads like this in an effort to wrap my head around the changes...damn I’d forgotten how mich hard work this place could be sometimes.
To me it looks ok but setting it up? Vexing and frustrating are two of the more sugar coated words that spring to mind ^
I ask as someone who hasn’t had the pleasure of using it...seen it briefly while browsing through the Q4 changes, face planted hard with the bindings and just gave up. Even the idiot guide tutorials on YouTube have failed to convince me to try again...though that’s because I see it as merely a more efficient way of finding what was already there which was certainly needed and welcome...but the lack of new stuff to find...that’s where the motivation stopped entirely.
So nowadays I’m just a curious spectator casually browsing threads like this in an effort to wrap my head around the changes...damn I’d forgotten how mich hard work this place could be sometimes.
To me it looks ok but setting it up? Vexing and frustrating are two of the more sugar coated words that spring to mind ^
This may not be so easy to implement. Keep in mind that the FSS view needs to be rendered in real time, just like (of course) the environment. Putting both renderings on top of each other in real time may be too much strain on the engine, at least without severely compromising performance.
Apart from that, as some have already noted: The FSS view is not the only one that gets us out of the cockpit view. We already had GalNet, the Galactic Powers, the system map and the galaxy map (the latter two might also be due to engine limitations). In these cases, players can handle it too, why not the FSS?
To be fair, I wouldn't mind if the radar was also displayed in the FSS, as well as the Wave Scanner in Discovery mode in the cockpit. That would be a great improvement.
If you remain in explored space you can map the honk to a firegroup as before & I think everything should still work without needing to enter the FSS Scanner Screen (I only say should in case I missed something). If you visit a system that hasn't been tagged already you'll need to use the FSS Scanner Screen or locate the body by eye.
Setting up the FSS Scanner Screen requires you to map a new key or button to enter (and exit, can be the same button), then you need to map up down left & right (I use the joystick), stepped zoom in & out (I use the yaw paddle on my throttle) and tuning (I use the radio dial on my throttle).
Moving around the screen is easy, the rest will require a bit of work to find a set of controls that are comfortable to use because it's unlike any other movement in the game.
If you want to map a body there is a completely separate set of controls to map with a completely separate user interface, but it is simpler. Just up/down/left/right. Pressing fire will enter the mode (assuming you map the DSS to a firegroup), and exiting the mode can be done in several ways, I press my target ahead button.
I guess you could just add the honk to a firegroup as before & see how you get on unless you are in an unexplored system.
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If I'm understanding this correctly, then for you the difference is that there is an 'activity' to perform in each system (where flying around doesn't count as an activity).
So as a hypothetical, if FDev had implemented the FSS such that you still had to fly to the body (at the range that the old DSS kicked in, rather than close orbit for probing) in order to scan it, but the scan required some activity similar to the tune-n-zoom behavior, where would that have ranked in comparison to the ADS and FSS?
There is new stuff to find.
I think you misunderstand him. The act of discovery is now interactive, when before all you did was press a button for 5 seconds and you had found every planet in the system. I don't think anyone complains about flying around a system and that hasn't gone away either. There are still reasons to fly around a system and it will be even more so when atmospheric planets become landable.
There is new stuff to find and we don't know if it has all been found by players yet either. We are still waiting to hear about some rumours in the codex. They have to be for something.
If the system has been previously explored, your honk will reveal the system map like it did before. If it has not been explored before, or not fully explored, the map will not show anything that hasn't been explored by someone before (e.g. new system = blank map).
If you are in previously explored system, while the map will display all the items, the navigation pane will still list all objects as unexplored (save for stars or anything your ship has strayed by). If you want to know the mineral concentrations of landable planets and/or get rid of the "unexplored" list in the nav pane you'll need to do the FSS scan (which reveals what the old DSS scan used to reveal). If the system has Nav beacon, you can drop down and scan that, and that will resolve all the signal sources and "unexplored" bodies in the Navigation pane; however, it will not reveal the mineral concentrations. You can always do an FSS scan later if you want that info.
The real conflict here is for those exploring new systems. Some hate the new system, others love it. I'm in the latter camp.
Anyone placing bets on what the page count will be when this thread ends (if ever)? [where is it]
This new thing - it is bad!
I've been playing Elite Dangerous since God was a baby, and before that I was playing older Elite games even before David Brabin was born. It's always been a source of fun and joy for me, and when I joined this game I thought at the time it was my home. But then they brought this new thing into the game. This new thing is going to completely break the game! In the past I used to do it in the old way, and that was fine. I did it like that, I was fine, and nothing ever went wrong. But then there was this new thing! WHY?
There are many reasons why this new thing will break the game.
1: The work we did will be easier or harder for subsequent people to do.
2: It is different.
3: It is not the same as it was before.
4: The way it was before is how I want it to remain.
5: It is new.
6: I don't like it.
With all of these factors in mind - and these are just the ones that come to me now, I would like to put forward a petition. Please, please can we stop this new thing now? And in the meantime can I also tell you how qualified I am not to like this new thing. I did that old thing a lot. I was better than anyone in the world at that old thing. I am the master of that old thing. The only master. This is not the reason I dislike this new thing, though. I am the master of this new thing too. Oh no don't get me wrong, I am better at this new thing than any of you, ever, and have been since before I was born. But that old thing was better, and this new thing is bad and wrong.
Please Devs - take notice of my cries. This new thing is going to make this game into a different game from how it was before. This cannot be allowed to happen. Stop now.
Anyway, I am not complaining. I just want to make it perfectly clear that I am uber, this new thing is bad, and that old thing is the only way that anything should be done.
I've been playing Elite Dangerous since God was a baby, and before that I was playing older Elite games even before David Brabin was born. It's always been a source of fun and joy for me, and when I joined this game I thought at the time it was my home. But then they brought this new thing into the game. This new thing is going to completely break the game! In the past I used to do it in the old way, and that was fine. I did it like that, I was fine, and nothing ever went wrong. But then there was this new thing! WHY?
There are many reasons why this new thing will break the game.
1: The work we did will be easier or harder for subsequent people to do.
2: It is different.
3: It is not the same as it was before.
4: The way it was before is how I want it to remain.
5: It is new.
6: I don't like it.
With all of these factors in mind - and these are just the ones that come to me now, I would like to put forward a petition. Please, please can we stop this new thing now? And in the meantime can I also tell you how qualified I am not to like this new thing. I did that old thing a lot. I was better than anyone in the world at that old thing. I am the master of that old thing. The only master. This is not the reason I dislike this new thing, though. I am the master of this new thing too. Oh no don't get me wrong, I am better at this new thing than any of you, ever, and have been since before I was born. But that old thing was better, and this new thing is bad and wrong.
Please Devs - take notice of my cries. This new thing is going to make this game into a different game from how it was before. This cannot be allowed to happen. Stop now.
Anyway, I am not complaining. I just want to make it perfectly clear that I am uber, this new thing is bad, and that old thing is the only way that anything should be done.
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My hypothetical is a bit rusty, so I might get my conjugations wrong but...
If I had to close the range between myself and an unknown body to complete the FSS scan, rather than completing it from basking range of a star... I’m unsure how I would be able to find said body first, or if I’d be doing this by parallax. If I had to, let’s say honk first, to populate a list of Undiscovered bodies, then fly to a particular range, and then scan them, and potentially fly closer still to map them... I would probably be campaigning to increase the range of my FSS to match the range of my honk, as I would find this model painfully tedious and silly. If I can find an Unknown at 300k ls, I should be able to tell what it is I found too.
I liken this to modern-day radio astronomy - where we are detecting and analyzing planets and stars outside of our own solar system - a feat Elite technology cannot compete with, because Elite is a game, and in dire need of “fun mechanics”, not tedious ones. It has those in spades already.
you need to add a button to swap hud mode, and a button to open the FSS. Then you need to map the FSS functions, of which there are 4 (zoom in, zoom out, move, and tune)
If you are finding this to be a supreme challenge, set your controls to default so the FSS stuff will be mapped, then put the other stuff back the way you had it.
I did a post (now a thread in guides) about setting-up and using FSS and DSS which people have been kind enough to say they found useful. It really isn't as bad as it was at first in the beta.
Sorry, yes, I meant that there would be some method of body location that wasn't parallax - potentially something like the FSS.
Anyway...
So any system that doesn't allow detection and analysis of a body from the same range you'd find 'tedious and silly'. Whereas I find any system that allows detection and analysis of a body from the same range to be 'pointless and silly'.
I guess there's no acceptable middle-ground system that works for both of us - so we're stuck with asking FDev for options.
Incidentally, modern-day radio astronomy doesn't allow us to completely determine mass, composition, orbital period and the presence of biological phenomena on planets outside our solar system, so I don't feel that this is a meaningful comparison - especially given that we don't even know exactly what is in OUR solar system, let alone a detailed analysis of all of it.
I did say “liken to” for a reason. No, they are not the same, especially when it comes to range. In terms of actual data collected, I should certainly think by the 34th century we would have made some advances. But more so in the terms of game playability, I don’t think more than a couple people would enjoy a round or two of Virtual Gas Chromatagraph/Mass Spectrometer either. So we really have to split differences here.
As for the ADS - I did not find any joy in the game play. I rarely looked at the system maps, unless I was bookmarking a specific planet, such as one with guardian ruins or pristine metallic rings. I still don’t use the system map much at all, outside of bookmarking or setting a course to a specific station. I don’t use the orrery at all.
In the old ADS system, I simply selected a body from my navigation panel and flew until within DSS range, dropping to 18% throttle at :10, so as not to overshoot while waiting for a scan to complete.
Now, under the FSS I am engaged in the process of scanning each planet, can select one to fly towards based on the presence of surface POI’s, or the appearance of the planet itself, or the interesting facts about it displayed on the FSS screen. And I can get right back to that same view simply by going back into it, should I forget if it was Somesystem A1B2 or A2B1 that caught my attention, with all the same data right there. Or I can remember and and set a new course from my Nav panel as before if I choose.
When I arrive I now have an interactive “game” of probing the planet to reveal map locations, mineral hotspots, and surface mapping the previous DSS either did not do, or did automatically, but in a very uninteresting manner. I still do not use the system map, except as before, to set bookmarks. I still don’t use the orrery.
Maybe this means I’m not a “real explorer”, just a “galactic tourist”, but I can live with that. It’s just vastly more active and enjoyable.
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You should have read enough of my posts by now to know that I don't do the 'real explorer' thing. We all have our own views on what exploration is, and nobody is a better or worse explorer based on how they play. You and I just have very different ideas on what it is - and luckily for you yours coincide with those of whoever designed the FSS. I just wish they'd left me the option to do what I consider to be exploration too.
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