Is there even a reason for belt clusters to exist?

[Florenus]

Reality may work like that, but this is a game, if it is there someone implemented it. It once had a purpose, the game changed and the DEV's forgot about it. If there is something inside the game and it is outdated and has no use it should be reworked to relevancy. It would be much more emersive if the game use every single nook and cranny of it's fictional space.

You can, but I mean, why would you? You get only 7 or 8 of them per cluster, limited resources, no higher chance for higher pay out, once you mined them you have to fly to another one to get more useless stuff. Just go to a ring it has it all.

You can use asteroid clusters for mining, but because it's not as efficient as mining in a ring, you have a problem with that?

There's plenty of things in games - even in ED - that serve no other practical purpose than to be a backdrop, decoration.
F.ex in ED you have Gas Giants - what purpose do they serve in game? Other atmospheric planets that you can't land on? What purpose does Moon serve in game? What about Nebulas?
This list can go on, ending with small rocks on planet surfaces that don't even have collision boxes.
Speaking of collision boxes - maybe we should fly them, instead of those complicated 3d models that serve no purpose in game, because in the end we all shoot hit boxes.

 

[Jmanis]

They were put there by hand, yes they were.

Wrong.

On the update we got which placed distant outposts into the game, the outposts appearing during the Beta were in different nebula and locations, just like how exploration "things" such as NSM and surface biologicals were located differently in their respective beta. When that beta went live, some outposts were in the same general locations, some weren't, and some were in whole new locations.

This is because the seeding for both galaxies is different.

 

[Jmanis]

There's plenty of things in games - even in ED - that serve no other practical purpose than to be a backdrop, decoration.
F.ex in ED you have Gas Giants - what purpose do they serve in game? Other atmospheric planets that you can't land on? What purpose does Moon serve in game? What about Nebulas?

I can only imagine the Moon is placeholder.

As for gas giants and non-landables, diversity of targets for exploration would be my claim to their purpose. Meanwhile, asteroid belts have their pointlessness exacerbated by FD in the changes they've progressively made to how they function.

• 0 credit worth for exploration
• FSS, while reporting multiple contacts for multiple asteroid belts
• Minimizing the amount of notifications for Asteroid belt discoveries.
• A drastic shortage of gameplay activities which occur at Asteroid belts compared to celestial rings.

Nebulas, like the ship comment below, are key to making the surrouding galaxy skies look interesting, as they are constantly in the players background vision. Asteroid belts are not.

This list can go on, ending with small rocks on planet surfaces that don't even have collision boxes.

That's not really a valid comparison. The contacts list doesn't display a POI for "small rocks on planets" universal to identifying to players "there's activities here to do", unlike asteroid fields.

Speaking of collision boxes - maybe we should fly them, instead of those complicated 3d models that serve no purpose in game, because in the end we all shoot hit boxes.

Ships are center to almost any activities you do in the game, whether it's shooting them, approaching it in your SRV or taking bask-shots while exploring. They need to look good.

Asteroid belt clusters have no sane mechanics associated with them[1] and are on the utter peripherary of relevance to the game. You actually probably could change the collision box to just that in these locations, and a good portion of the player base wouldn't notice.

[1] Yes, you can mine, but it's not sane when there's such a high prevalence and ease of access to rings which are far more lucrative.[/QUOTE]

 

[myothershipisacobraiv]

asteroid belts can be a decent source of deep core rocks. but once you break one, it's broke. you can go back to that same belt and it will be broke. the same is true for a ring but in the rings it's unlikely to ever find your same rock. I have come across ones others have broken in rings.

 

[Florenus]

I can only imagine the Moon is placeholder.

As for gas giants and non-landables, diversity of targets for exploration would be my claim to their purpose. Meanwhile, asteroid belts have their pointlessness exacerbated by FD in the changes they've progressively made to how they function.

• 0 credit worth for exploration
• FSS, while reporting multiple contacts for multiple asteroid belts
• Minimizing the amount of notifications for Asteroid belt discoveries.
• A drastic shortage of gameplay activities which occur at Asteroid belts compared to celestial rings.

Nebulas, like the ship comment below, are key to making the surrouding galaxy skies look interesting, as they are constantly in the players background vision. Asteroid belts are not.


That's not really a valid comparison. The contacts list doesn't display a POI for "small rocks on planets" universal to identifying to players "there's activities here to do", unlike asteroid fields.


Ships are center to almost any activities you do in the game, whether it's shooting them, approaching it in your SRV or taking bask-shots while exploring. They need to look good.

Asteroid belt clusters have no sane mechanics associated with them[1] and are on the utter peripherary of relevance to the game. You actually probably could change the collision box to just that in these locations, and a good portion of the player base wouldn't notice.

[1] Yes, you can mine, but it's not sane when there's such a high prevalence and ease of access to rings which are far more lucrative.

[/QUOTE]
What I ment was that not everything needs to have it's optimal game purpose, especially in game like Elite. It's not a game like Rock, Scissors, Paper + Asteroid, where Asteroid is kind of like Rock, but weaker and can be chipped away with scissors, so nobody uses it.

I wouldn't mind more activities being centered around those asteroid clusters - there seems to be a lot of unused potential there - maybe they're just an empty canvas for future content, like the Moon, but even if they will remain devoid of any more meaningfull gameplay, for me their existence is justified simply by being representation of RL thing. They're also another place I can go to, which is a gameplay on it's own, with all kinds of emergent gameplay that might follow.

That being said, if base building will ever be a thing I can imagine them to be pretty good place to build a base. Same with Fleet Carriers. Parking your FC there could present a nice option, especially if it would mean your FC will remain undetected.

As for mining, the fact that it's not as good choice as ring mining doesn't matter. It is there as an option if nothing else. Always close to the star, instead of rings, thousand of Ls away.

And yes, multiple notifications in FSS are annoying like hell. One notification with number of clusters discovered would suffice.

asteroid belts can be a decent source of deep core rocks. but once you break one, it's broke. you can go back to that same belt and it will be broke. the same is true for a ring but in the rings it's unlikely to ever find your same rock. I have come across ones others have broken in rings.

Core asteroids respawn after 6 days. I'm not sure about those in clusters, but I suppose all work just the same.

 

[Vetinari]

How do you know they all have nothing in them already? Maybe some do and we just haven't found them yet, not surprising for me as I ignore them now anyway apart from the one that needs resolving through the FSS to trigger them found. Would be a great place to hide things as few people ever check them out.

Didn't someone find an installation in one recently?

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

There is no real need for them apart.from making the simulation more complete. But they may be used in the future for secret bases, player housing etc.

 

[Kissamies]

Maybe we could think of some sort of mission-related activities to make them at least somewhat relevant occasionally. Lowlifes could use them as impromptu nav beacons. A smuggler drop-off point for cargo and a place for the pirates to parley. In missions where you got to find some guy who tells you where the actual target is, he might use the rocks as a rendezvous. You might be asked to go pick up some illegal cargo in a cluster, or ambush a pirate. Could be a nice backdrop for those.

 

[varonica]

When I said outpost I really meant installations, just got the name wrong. I know player minor factions need to be put by hand. Do you think installation were put by hand as well?

Why yes, yes they were. Everything that's not part of the procedural generation of the galaxy is by definition hand placed. Even the instanced surface occurrences of crashed ships are be definition hand placed because they aren't placed as part of the procedural generation of the galaxy. You want an ELW in a particular place you need to put it there, you want an installation you need to put it there, the reason for this is, every solar system is identical for every player according to the rules of procedural generation, but if something is not part of that procedural generation then it needs to be manually coded in, stored in a database somewhere, the assets need to be created and modeled, and it needs to be linked to its location so that it will appear in the same place for every player for a permanent asset, such as a station, outpost or ground base, or programmed to randomly appear in the players instance "according to the players location and rules of that encounter."

So by defintion anything that's not part of the procedural generation algorithm is hand placed, including factions, the BGS, any Human, Guardian or Thargoid ship or installation, stations, outposts, instanced mining camps, crashed ships and etc.

And as I said earlier I have no problem with them creating hand coded events and assets to be placed in asteroid fields and used for player interaction, but such things would have to be hand placed and would apply to only a vanishgly small number of the total count of asteroid fields, probably numbering in the trillions, in the galaxy, because you couldn't have the same thing happening in every single asteroid field, that would be silly.

 

[znôrt]

So by defintion anything that's not part of the procedural generation algorithm is hand placed

that's not a definition, but a tautology

the vast majority of objects in the game are procedurally generated including most installations. some of them have been hand placed for whatever reason. a fraction.

 

[[PS4 Pro - PC] earthtone99]

Who said asteroid clusters are boring!?!?

Source: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=c8deRYotdng


There’s so many different, cool things that could be programmed into ELITE in these clusters.

C3PO COVAS too please, while we’re at it.

 

[Jmanis]

What I ment was that not everything needs to have it's optimal game purpose, especially in game like Elite. It's not a game like Rock, Scissors, Paper + Asteroid, where Asteroid is kind of like Rock, but weaker and can be chipped away with scissors, so nobody uses it.

I wouldn't mind more activities being centered around those asteroid clusters - there seems to be a lot of unused potential there - maybe they're just an empty canvas for future content, like the Moon, but even if they will remain devoid of any more meaningfull gameplay, for me their existence is justified simply by being representation of RL thing. They're also another place I can go to, which is a gameplay on it's own, with all kinds of emergent gameplay that might follow.
[/QUOTE]
Can absolutely get behind that. If it was a case of arguing for it to be optimal, then there's a host of other "problems" to deal with before even getting to that.

But there's nothing going at them. I tried bounty hunting at one once.. one pirate showed and that was basically it. I tried mining.. accidentally flew completely out of the belt because there were so few roids to check out. No RES, NSPs, no credit reward for discovery, and mechanics which seek to minimize the amount of time you have to spend "dealing with" these, mostly arising from play complaint about them being so annoying (heh, maybe that's why they exist; to annoy players).

How do you know they all have nothing in them already? Maybe some do and we just haven't found them yet, not surprising for me as I ignore them now anyway apart from the one that needs resolving through the FSS to trigger them found. Would be a great place to hide things as few people ever check them out.

How do you know there is something out there? Occams razor exists for these sorts of arguments... nothing significant has been found in Asteroids because either:

• There's nothing to be found; or
• There's something to be found, and we haven't found it.

In a world of billions of stars, we've found plenty of things "of significance" in planetary rings (all of which have been marked with POI markers e.g NSP's), and the FSS also tells us if things of interest are nearby or not (as mundane as tourist beacons, or as interesting as Thargoid structures). Heck, even Jaques got found through dumb luck, and the chances of that are incredibly slim.

To expand, nobody has ever found anything in Asteroid Clusters, a highly common galactic feature, which is either because either:

• There's nothing to be found; or
• There's something which exists at a frequency far lower than things which have been discovered in planetary rings, has no POI markings, and does not appear on FSS... essentially breaking every single rule about how things are currently presented to the player in the game (noting this is exactly the problem the FSS was designed to fix).

I know what my money is on. Either way, if there is something, and it's designed in such a way that 5 years after inception, it has never been discovered, that's simply bad game design and wasted dev effort on something which nobody is realistically going to find

So unless you've got a smoking gun saying "There is definitely something in these, here it is."... even if there is one cluster out there with something in it that nobody knows about...functionally, there's nothing in them.

 

[Deleted member 38366]

I miss the old times where I could mine in a rare "super cluster" that spanned over some 80km size and contained tens of thousands of Asteroids.

Fun fact : out of curiosity I later returned to the very System that had a few of those - and they were missing. Gone. The number count of the Belt Clusters literally missed a few in-between entries.

I guess I'll try again with the FSS, maybe I can find them again when I'm back in the bubble...

 

[varonica]

that's not a definition, but a tautology

the vast majority of objects in the game are procedurally generated including most installations. some of them have been hand placed for whatever reason. a fraction.

No they aren't! Go and look up procedural generation, really, look it up. Instanced Installations on a planet surface that you encounter and interact with won't be in the same place or even there at all for a different player, they are by their very definition not procedural, they are keyed to your presence. Oh they may all be made from the same model and look the same, but if they were procedural they would always be in the same place for everybody, and they aren't. Any other assets that remain in the same place are hand placed, they have to be, because procedural generation can't be used to predict where something will be in advance, or be told to put something in a certain place, the assets in a procedural generation system will only appear after the algorithm is run, and no-one can predict where they will be.

Fdev themselves can't predict in advance whether planets and moons in a solar system will be volcanic, or have bio, the same would apply to any other assets, so they can't possibly say we will have a minor faction appear here because that's where the installations will be, they simply don't know, no-one knows until the algorithm is finished and the results displayed. what you are talking about there is not procedural generation, it's just standard hard building of a games assets over layed on a proceduraly generated galaxy.

 

[MK Regular]

Can you not use mining lasers on them? I haven’t been to one in a while, when you say no resources what exactly do you mean?

The asteroids are all minable. The belt clusters come in two varieties iirc, one with fewer (~7) rocks and one with more (~11) rocks. In my (rather limited) experience, the belt clusters with more rocks will always have exactly ONE core asteroid while those with fewer rocks will not have any. Both types will have asteroids that can be mined with the abrasion blaster and sub-surface displacement missile though.

Overall, mining asteroid belt clusters isn't particularly efficient, but it may be possible to hit a large amount of core asteroids in a short period of time if you record their locations and come back every so often.

 

[varonica]

Wrong.

On the update we got which placed distant outposts into the game, the outposts appearing during the Beta were in different nebula and locations, just like how exploration "things" such as NSM and surface biologicals were located differently in their respective beta. When that beta went live, some outposts were in the same general locations, some weren't, and some were in whole new locations.

This is because the seeding for both galaxies is different.

Thee are no "both galaxies". To run the stellar forge from the beginning to recreate the galaxy with a different seed means, everything, not just a couple of things, would be different. Beta's, as has been stated by FDEV many times, are run from a snapshot of the game state at a given moment in the past. Bio and Volcanics on bodies are part of the planetary generation system and only run once you scan the planet with a FSS or get close enough in space, whether a planet has bio or geo or not is entirely dependent on this process not the procedural generation of the stellar forge, that only gives us the information about the planets but not what's on them.

Outposts and stations aren't necessarily placed in the same location in beta and live so that they aren't all located and revealed during the Beta. Lagrange Clouds, as far as I am aware, only appeared in one area in the galaxy during the beta, this is most likely because they are overlayed on the galaxy map using an algorithm that's not part of the stellar forge, hence NSP and other types of bio are sometimes limited by region names and other factors that FDEV decides to use. This operates the same way instanced crashed ship and other such things work, there's an instance bubble around populated areas where you will see lots of them on all bodies, once a certain distance away they start to drop off and eventually stop appearing altogether, this also is overlayed on the proceduraly generated galaxy. These things are all added to the galaxy after it is finished evolving through the stellar forge, none of it is part of the procedural generation of the galaxy.

FDEV have stated in the past that to change the seed and rerun the galaxy from scratch is a last resort action because it will essentially wipe the galaxy clean, all discovered tags, mapped tags, all exploration POI's, everything would be wiped because changing the seed means everything changes.

You are confusing hand written algorithms and processes overlayed on the proceduraly generated galaxy for procedural generation, it simply isn't!

 

[znôrt]

No they aren't! Go and look up procedural generation, really, look it up. Instanced Installations on a planet surface that you encounter and interact with won't be in the same place or even there at all for a different player, they are by their very definition not procedural, they are keyed to your presence. Oh they may all be made from the same model and look the same, but if they were procedural they would always be in the same place for everybody, and they aren't.

purism. while it is true that randomization is essentially not procedural, nothing prevents adding some random noise to procedural generated data, or randomly generating objects around the player in the procedurally generated space. i considered all of this part of the broad procedural generation process, as opposed to specifically hand crafting and hand placing something somewhere.

Any other assets that remain in the same place are hand placed, they have to be, because procedural generation can't be used to predict where something will be in advance, or be told to put something in a certain place, the assets in a procedural generation system will only appear after the algorithm is run, and no-one can predict where they will be.

of course it could. just like part of the algorithm decides if there is going to be, say, an elw in a system, another part of the algorithm can describe its exact position at time 0 and orbit. same is true of any object you could imagine and any attribute of that object.

Fdev themselves can't predict in advance whether planets and moons in a solar system will be volcanic, or have bio, the same would apply to any other assets, so they can't possibly say we will have a minor faction appear here because that's where the installations will be, they simply don't know, no-one knows until the algorithm is finished and the results displayed. what you are talking about there is not procedural generation, it's just standard hard building of a games assets over layed on a proceduraly generated galaxy.

they have stated (and it's fairly obvious) that they can inject any hand crafted content into the simulation. for that of course that part of the simulation must have been previously generated and selected for them to hook on. my point is that these are exceptions, not the rule.

how frontier exactly mixed these different techniques in different parts of the galaxy i have no detailed info about, if you have some official source that would be interesting, but i can't hardly imagine that they have hand crafted more than a few hundred elements in the whole galaxy.

 

[Jmanis]

Thee are no "both galaxies". To run the stellar forge from the beginning to recreate the galaxy with a different seed means, everything, not just a couple of things, would be different.

Beta's, as has been stated by FDEV many times, are run from a snapshot of the game state at a given moment in the past. Bio and Volcanics on bodies are part of the planetary generation system and only run once you scan the planet with a FSS or get close enough in space, whether a planet has bio or geo or not is entirely dependent on this process not the procedural generation of the stellar forge, that only gives us the information about the planets but not what's on them.

Outposts and stations aren't necessarily placed in the same location in beta and live so that they aren't all located and revealed during the Beta. Lagrange Clouds, as far as I am aware, only appeared in one area in the galaxy during the beta, this is most likely because they are overlayed on the galaxy map using an algorithm that's not part of the stellar forge, hence NSP and other types of bio are sometimes limited by region names and other factors that FDEV decides to use. This operates the same way instanced crashed ship and other such things work, there's an instance bubble around populated areas where you will see lots of them on all bodies, once a certain distance away they start to drop off and eventually stop appearing altogether, this also is overlayed on the proceduraly generated galaxy. These things are all added to the galaxy after it is finished evolving through the stellar forge, none of it is part of the procedural generation of the galaxy.

FDEV have stated in the past that to change the seed and rerun the galaxy from scratch is a last resort action because it will essentially wipe the galaxy clean, all discovered tags, mapped tags, all exploration POI's, everything would be wiped because changing the seed means everything changes.

You are confusing hand written algorithms and processes overlayed on the proceduraly generated galaxy for procedural generation, it simply isn't!

Meanwhile, none of this precludes interesting mechanics being hung off asteroid clusters.

 

[Vetinari]

How do you know there is something out there? Occams razor exists for these sorts of arguments... nothing significant has been found in Asteroids because either:

• There's nothing to be found; or
• There's something to be found, and we haven't found it.

In a world of billions of stars, we've found plenty of things "of significance" in planetary rings (all of which have been marked with POI markers e.g NSP's), and the FSS also tells us if things of interest are nearby or not (as mundane as tourist beacons, or as interesting as Thargoid structures). Heck, even Jaques got found through dumb luck, and the chances of that are incredibly slim.


So unless you've got a smoking gun saying "There is definitely something in these, here it is."... even if there is one cluster out there with something in it that nobody knows about...functionally, there's nothing in them.

Theres nothing to be found / FSS scanner shows POIs - my point exactly. I personally scan with the FSS 1 asteroid field, it that usually resolves them all, maybe 1 maybe 14-20 different ones. I then completely ignore the others, never visit, never scan, never FSS to see if anything there or not. Do you? Coz I'm only scanning approx. 5-10% of the asteroid fields in the first place. So if 10% contain something and I only check 10% that gives me about 1% chance of finding something if I actually wait for it to resolve properly, very easy with those maths to miss everything, and it wont be 10%.

Not saying there is, not saying there isn't. Saying I don't know and I don't believe you can either. We can both have very strong opinions and both may agree. But I don't know. I do know the imagineer of this game has a history of doing exactly that though, which is another reason I dont rule it out.

Functionally there may be nothing in them, functionally.

 

[Vetinari]

I know what my money is on. Either way, if there is something, and it's designed in such a way that 5 years after inception, it has never been discovered, that's simply bad game design and wasted dev effort on something which nobody is realistically going to find

I personally find that a game which spoon-feeds you all the info or is automatic almost is bad game design. I much prefer the treat you like an adult, have consequences and hidden features that may take years to uncover or never be found, that's what makes it interesting. I am a bit bored of the finish in a week type games and theres plenty of those.

In your version we should have expected a 'Listen to me' sign attached to the UAs in the first place or similar.

DW held his secrets for well over 2 years each time until Salome mystery was solved, was that wasted effort on his part that it wasn't discovered and resolved in 2 days? I think it would have gone on forever until stumbled across but FD wanted to bring a close to it before DW went his own way (pure speculation) so they created the closure COR CG. Don't remember anybody annoyed it wasn't revealed on day 1, rather it created quite an interest when found.