Geo/bio POI scanning changes in the next update

[Mengy]

Thinking about stellar phenomenon for example. When finding one, there's no indication of what it might be, we still need to go investigate. Why should planets be any different?

Because with stellar phenomena we know for a fact that SOMETHING is there, thus it gives us a reason to go and investigate.

FD's new proposed changes to the FSS would only give us vague probabilities, not knowledge, that something might be there.

That vagueness makes for a huge difference, and not a good one. Especially given the time needed to fly and probe JUST to see if anything of interest is really there. It would add a huge time wasting mechanic into exploration, and it simply does not need any more time wasting mechanics added to it.

 

[CMDR Eryn Liamson]

Because with stellar phenomena we know for a fact that SOMETHING is there, thus it gives us a reason to go and investigate.

FD's new proposed changes to the FSS would only give us vague probabilities, not knowledge, that something might be there.

That vagueness makes for a huge difference, and not a good one. Especially given the time needed to fly and probe JUST to see if anything of interest is really there. It would add a huge time wasting mechanic into exploration, and it simply does not need any more time wasting mechanics added to it.

Ok, valid point. So for consistency, the FSS scan would need to confirm that something was there. Type or number of sites could still be hidden until a surface scan is done?

 

[iain666]

the time needed to fly and probe JUST to see if anything of interest is really there

If it's better than 50/50 I'd still rather get that quickly and decide to fly than sit watching a blue blob spin in the FSS to find it out with greater certainty and then fly there anyway.

If "very likely" turns out to be "7% chance or greater" then that would be a pile of poo, but if "very likely" means a probability that does not stretch the English language beyond the point of destruction then it would just be moving the time spent from the FSS to the cockpit and that's a good thing, IMO.

 

[Valije]

Ok, valid point. So for consistency, the FSS scan would need to confirm that something was there. Type or number of sites could still be hidden until a surface scan is done?

I think this is the way it should work. FSS detect if there is volcanism, its type and if the planet is landable almost instantly right now (and all the planets I found with those characteristics had geological POIs). Just changing the "scanning" thing for "geo/bio detected" without giving more information is not a big change and will save us a lot of time.

Do we really need to know the amount of sites with the FSS? If someone wants to visit one of those planets, will it change anything having more or less places? I never thought "oh, it only has 4 geo sites, if it had 20 i would go there, but 4 is too low".

 

[varonica]

Sounds more like 100 steps backwards to me. So now if there's a body 450kls away that might have biology I have to fly there and probe it, and there's still a slim chance I might find nothing there. It's the, "we can't be 100% sure" that's the issue here. With the current system we can indeed be 100% sure, and save 20 minutes of travel time with around 10 seconds scan, which I don't sit and watch anyway.

Now this is the way I used to do it before the FSS, I would jump into the system and honk to get the object data. Then I would examine orbital periods, body sizes and rotation to determine the likelihood of geo sites, remarkably 99% of the time I was correct when I flew up to scan a body. So what they are doing for geo sites is, essentially, exactly what I was doing before the FSS, examining the data and deciding the likelihood of geo sites based on that data, well done they've gone backwards to my already established and working method!

Now that was before bio sites, but bio sites seem to show instantly anyway as long as there aren't geo sites on the same body, so I guess body generation doesn't affect them in the same way, and bio sites are more important than geo sites because lets be honesty there are shedloads of geo sites everywhere. So just show the Bio sites right away as it does and as Valije says, just tell us if there is geo there, we don't need to know the locations of them.

 

[LifesAJourney]

In my opinion the changes go in the wrong direction.

I'd rather leave current scanner as it is but add relevant icons to the list of bodies displayed in left hand side menu. So I could zoom in/zoom out quickly, no need to wait for scan process to complete. And then go to the left hand side menu and look for bodies marked as "24 geo sites detected" and/or "3 bio sites detected".

Simple, informative and would provide all data necessary to decide whather I want to visit the body or not. And such a change can most likely be done during one day of dev work, even before the lunch.

 

[varonica]

In my opinion the changes go in the wrong direction.

I'd rather leave current scanner as it is but add relevant icons to the list of bodies displayed in left hand side menu. So I could zoom in/zoom out quickly, no need to wait for scan process to complete. And then go to the left hand side menu and look for bodies marked as "24 geo sites detected" and/or "3 bio sites detected".

Simple, informative and would provide all data necessary to decide whather I want to visit the body or not. And such a change can most likely be done during one day of dev work, even before the lunch.

That's another reasonable option, just let us scan them all quickly and generate the data in the background and display it in a quick and easy way to see on the system map.

 

[Old Duck]

Bring back the ADS!!!

(Sorry, couldn't help myself)

 

[Para Handy]

... As I stated elsewhere, this suggestion is nonsense and it totally avoids addressing the actual cause of the problem - tying the scan time to your frame-rate. Can't they actually sort the coding out rather than introduce this game of two-up?

 

[MattG]

Bring back the ADS!!!

If only.

... As I stated elsewhere, this suggestion is nonsense and it totally avoids addressing the actual cause of the problem - tying the scan time to your frame-rate. Can't they actually sort the coding out rather than introduce this game of two-up?

If only.


That said, broadly in favour of the change. Makes no sense that space telescope can tell you there's exactly 3 biological sites, much better that it says "yeh probably biological and almost definitely volcanic sites over there, go check". Even better if they include the likelihood, and the actual number of sites when DSS'd in the journal.

 

[Shnyrik]

much better that it says "yeh probably biological and almost definitely volcanic sites over there, go check"

If it says "there is for sure something volcanic and maybe something biological" -- than it is kind of OK. If it says only "well yeah, there may be something over there on the planet 0,1 light years away or may be not" -- that definitely won't do.

And that would be super cool if DSS could give some more info about each site.

 

[MattG]

If it says "there is for sure something volcanic and maybe something biological" -- than it is kind of OK. If it says only "well yeah, there may be something over there on the planet 0,1 light years away or may be not" -- that definitely won't do.

I think it'll come down to sensible rates for their ‘Unlikely’, ‘Likely’, or ‘Very Likely’ identifiers. If "Very likely" was, say, 90%+ and "Likely" was maybe 60%+, I don't think it would be terrible. Also, if the information was in the Journal then tool writers might be able to give better odds on the likelihood anyway.

And that would be super cool if DSS could give some more info about each site.

Absolutely. As a compromise to having to DSS for the results, the sites should show you the (abundant) type of volcanism or whatever the biological entity is without the requirement for landing.

 

[Old Duck]

... As I stated elsewhere, this suggestion is nonsense and it totally avoids addressing the actual cause of the problem - tying the scan time to your frame-rate. Can't they actually sort the coding out rather than introduce this game of two-up?

I made the same argument in the past (scan time being locked to frame rate), but now I do wonder if this might be unavoidable. According to Frontier, they have to render the planet in order to determine if it has POIs or not. If this is the case, then it's likely GPU bound, and that could by why it's framerate bound. I'm not saying this is the right way for Frontier to have done POIs, but like anything Stellar Forge related, it may be too late to change it without Thanos-snapping all current POIs out of existence.

 

[Rudi Raumkraut]

Thought they try to fix things with the coming update, not just provide simple workarounds...

This btw shows that all the talking about code renew'ing is just Braben-blathering.

FD should be ashamed of what they are offering their community.

Well, Frontier ruined the brand "Elite" once.
The backers put it (and FD) back on track.
And now FD is killing it again...

Fly safe as long as you still can o7

 

[Edelgard von Rhein]

The initial FSS scan already reveals not only whether there is volcanism but what type it is. The issue is the waiting time for the numbers. For geological sites, the numbers don't actually matter that much - I'll seldom visit more than one. I understand the journal gives a description of major or minor volcanism and that would be enough to add, for me, to make a decision to visit rather than generating the whole surface.

In practice, for the kind of exploration I do, on bodies with geological sites, it's not the geological sites that interest me: it's the other things that might be there. I'm interested in finding Guardians or Thargoid locations, INRA bases and abandoned settlements. Biological sites are helpful in determining if Guardians locations might be nearby. If I want to find these things, then at present I have to wait for the geological scan to resolve. That adds minutes to the survey of some systems, especially those where there are gas giants with close-orbiting moons or substantial high-metal-content worlds. If the scan was as fast as it was without geological sites and just told me major/minor volcanism, then that's improvement enough and if I do want to visit it just for the geologicals (e.g. if there are materials I'm interested in), then I'll map it and get the number and locations of them anyway.

 

[marx]

... As I stated elsewhere, this suggestion is nonsense and it totally avoids addressing the actual cause of the problem - tying the scan time to your frame-rate. Can't they actually sort the coding out rather than introduce this game of two-up?

In theory, not only they could, but they should. In practice, the FSS was rushed together, and it doesn't look like management is interested in assigning the necessary time / people to the live game's team to fix its problems. (Unless the patch notes will include a proper fix for this POI scanning, a proper fix for multicrew member scans, VR orbit lines, and so on.)

There's also the possibility that they'll have to do a larger rework of the FSS for whatever the next expansion will be anyway, and then would rather just slap a quick band-aid on the current one than have to make FSS 1.5 alongside FSS 2.0.

In any case, a common complaint about the long scan times was that "I might have missed interesting stuff because I didn't want to wait a lot for the scans to finish", and this change will at least mean that the non-geo&bio sites will show up instantly in all cases. For most people, the Guardian / Thargoid / Human POIs are what's more interesting and what they hope to find.
A pity that those only exist in the handful of small designated plot areas, though, so that hope is mostly in vain.

 

[Orvidius]

To me it's still a step in the right direction, simply because I don't even look at the FSS results currently. I can't sit there and wait for each one of these scans to resolve, nor can I remember the entire list of bodies in the FSS that had slow scans, to circle back and check on. So I just ignore it entirely, unless I'm looking for something specific. And I know this isn't want they intended for us to do-- ignore the feature completely and move on. Not everyone does this, of course, but to me it's pretty useless currently.

 

[Troopi]

Guys, I have to ask this.
I've visited a lot of planets with bio and geo sites. I don't anymore. What exactly is the fuss about this change? Is it so important to locate bio/geo sites? If the FSS automatically detects guardian, thargoid and unknown sites and leaves Geo/bio as "possible", that's good enough for me, cause I won't bother anymore with such recurrent and common locations that spawn everywhere in the galaxy.

 

[Mengy]

Guys, I have to ask this.
I've visited a lot of planets with bio and geo sites. I don't anymore. What exactly is the fuss about this change? Is it so important to locate bio/geo sites? If the FSS automatically detects guardian, thargoid and unknown sites and leaves Geo/bio as "possible", that's good enough for me, cause I won't bother anymore with such recurrent and common locations that spawn everywhere in the galaxy.

For the explorers who do still bother, especially bio hunters, it's a bad change.

 

[varonica]

... As I stated elsewhere, this suggestion is nonsense and it totally avoids addressing the actual cause of the problem - tying the scan time to your frame-rate. Can't they actually sort the coding out rather than introduce this game of two-up?

From what FDEV posted it's not actually tied to the frame rate, it's tied to the planet generation, which is processed by the video card, and the video card sits idle for a portion of the time if you cap your frame rate to a lower speed than the card is capable of outputting, so by setting frame rate to 60fps when your card is capable of outputting 100fps you are actually reducing the performance of your card by nearly 50%, which slows down planet surface generation which means that sites take longer to be placed because they can't load until the surface is fully generated.

So it's a matter of correlation, not causation. Capping the frame rate is correlated with longer POI generation, but the cause is the slower vid card performance caused by capping the frame rate. It's a complicated process, but roughly and more simply than actually happens, if you cap the frame rate to a slower rate than the card is capable of outputting then the frame buffers fill and sit idle waiting for the next refresh cycle to come around. With the frame buffers full and waiting the execution paths fill and the GPU stops processing until the execution paths are free, it sits idle and unable to continue planet generation. With the frame rate uncapped any extra frames generated that can't be displayed are discarded, so if your display can only run at 60fps and you are actually outputting 120fps those 60 extra frames are dumped, but as a result the execution paths are flushed when the frames are discarded and the GPU is free to continue processing the planet data.

So it's not tied to frame rate, it's tied to card performance that is artificially hobbled when you restrict frame rate. Not FDEV's fault and not something they have control over.