KB+M works fine for me with the FSS.
Just out of curiosity....
- Thread starter Darth Wonko
- Start date
Yeah, you wouldn't have been in the early days though.
I'm still breathing and I'm loving every minute of it... breathing that is!
Give it time. You're gonna get tired of breathing as well.
Okay I should have said it gets monotonous more quickly than the old system.
With the old system you did at least spend most of your time flying your space ship, and only seconds in the system map. With the FSS it's the other way around.
I'd have liked their resources to have gone in to at least attempting to provide more stuff do do while exploring, rather than giving us the FSS which (averaging out comments on this forum) is neither better nor worse than the old system. Geo sites and probes don't do anything for me either.
a thread with ADS/FSS blah is already in the drinking game?
If not, it's still time for a drink to make it less boring
*cheers o7
If not, it's still time for a drink to make it less boring
*cheers o7
Well, to be fair, I do wish it was possible to use the FSS at speed (so I can look at the system WHILE traveling through it), so I'm not 100% happy with it either.
But by and large, combined with the DSS probing and the fact that now there are at least some things to find, I still think it's rather good,
Nope! I'd estimate well over half a billion so far and I ain't got the itch to stop yet!Give it time. You're gonna get tired of breathing as well.
Another problem is that the game was originally targeted for HOTAS, and VR support as well... and both flew out the window for the FSS. Especially the latter is glaringly bad when compared to previous interfaces in the game. With a gamepad or KB/M, the FSS is more usable than with a joystick (and throttle). A big part of the HOTAS in Elite though is how much better it feels to fly your ship - and that of course goes straight out the window when you have to use the FSS. It's slower, to boot - which is why I switch to using the mouse to move around, so at least I can get it over with quicker. That's hardly an example of good design.
"Now there are at least some things to find": most everything that there is to be found has been there for a long while. The only completely new things (as in, not palette swap variations of existing surface stuff) added in the Chapter Four update were NSPs, and ironically enough, using the FSS to find those is actually the worse way. Looking at the Navigations tab is faster, and it's much less difficult to miss NSPs there than it is on the FSS's barcode.
Of course, the problem with the new content (NSPs) is that not only they are badly implemented (both seriously buggy and badly distributed), but there's also little to do with them. Terrible rewards, too.
As has been mentioned: if you're just getting to Elite now having started exploring after the FSS was introduced, you wouldn't be anywhere close to Elite in terms of pre-FSS exploration.
There's a lot of gatekeeping when it comes to FSS discussions. I hit Elite in exploration long before the FSS arrived, and I love the FSS. On occasion it has been tiring and I've gone off to do other things instead, but it's never bored me the way the scanning systems pre-FSS did. With the advent of the FSS I'm much less likely to be watching videos on a second screen while I explore.
It did add a few seconds to my "honk-scoop-jump" routine (for times when I'm trying to cover ground but wouldn't mind picking up an odd ELW/WW/AW along the way). Pre FSS you could glance at the system map while the friendship drive spooled up, now I've got to add a 3 second pause between scoop and jump to glance at the barcode. I'm a numbers guy, so that 3 seconds really gets under my skin sometimes. That's 47 seconds between system arrivals vs. 44 seconds -- I guess that doesn't sound like much but it still rankles.
If I were going to improve anything about it, I'd make two changes:
1. FSS barcode appears on screen in flight the moment the honk completes, no need to open FSS unless you want a closer look
2. Instead of looking for pulses of light, all detected signals would be readily visible (maybe something like the concentric gravity rings we see in supercruise). Because hide and seek is ONLY a time sink, and exploration is already flush with time sinks.
When I started the journey from the bubble, I was at 78% Ranger. When I docked at AX, it took me to 24% Pioneer (I think). From there, I got halfway to Beagle Point and then headed to Colonia. That trip took me to 71% Pioneer (roughly). I didn't start from scratch.
Are you kidding? That adds up really quickly... I totally get it.
Having the bar code on the in-flight screen would be wonderful. That's a great idea!
I also like the idea of getting rid of the hide-and-seek. As you said, exploration itself is a time sink and anything unnecessary should be eliminated.