What the heck kind of heat map is this?!

[varonica]

The technological progress seems weird in ED. "Last year" the scanner could point you to, say, geysers. "This year" the "new and improved" scanner can't.

The geysers were based on an unrealistic model that basically placed virtual pin points of vulcanism scattered around a planet, maybe even just 1 for an entire planet, they changed the planetary tech so they could have a more realistic distribution of vulcanism that no longer appeared as virtual pin points, so there are no longer virtual points they can mark. The old vulcanism was a roughly circular feature a couple of kilometers across, the new vulcanism can spread across an area of hundreds or even thousands of square kilometers, at which point in that thousands of square kilometers of vulcanism should they place the pin point? Or maybe they do what they did and just colour it all in and say "here be volcanoes".

The technological progress in ED is to more realistic planets, sometimes this makes things harder because it's more realistic and less gamey without the arrows to point people at stuff.

 

[dipperside]

Having been on several expeditions in real life, yeah it's generally how things go down. You have a vague idea of where a species is, and you wander around until you stumble on it.

But you did it with the old methods of ground reconnaissance/research. But in the game we have a supposedly 'high-tech' (ha-ha three times!) orbital scanning method. I wrote about the modern possibilities of exploring the Earth from space in the post above.

 

[Rochester]

Heat mapping and hot spot mapping are commonly confused.

Heat maps can be used as a reference to measure how close together certain points maybe. Heat colour increases by where the density is the highest, these layers are redrawn every time you zoom in/out.

Hot spot maps measure statistical confidence. These are a fixed so don’t alter if you zoom in and out, they represent actual known locations and activity, these may look like heat maps at a certain distance because they can show high concentrations of points, but zoom in and you can see more data and see a fixed point.

Within game it’s obvious they are using a heat map to indicate ‘generally’ where certain things may be, based I would presume on averages, built procedurally, eg height map / atmosphere/ chemistry density etc = more of x.

Fly into area and the map becomes meaningless and just means, statistically whatever it is is somewhere around here/there but your going to have to actually ‘explore’.

The SRV radar ought to then be used to ping a location, logically but I don’t engage with this game method so can’t confirm if it works as intended.

If these points are all known (by FD) and maybe hand placed then a hot spot map ought to be utilised.

To be honest this is a missed opportunity, we have probes which we shoot at stuff, to assess the probability of where certain stuff could be, in reality we do this with satellites and data harvesting (eg Census data, social media data, government/ public records), this then is viewed from a regional point, to zoom in and assess the street level, before resources are deployed.

FD are essentially skipping the middle section and letting player roam around looking for stuff, but in reality we could sit in orbit, choose a certain location and just look at thsurface with an enhanced scanner.

Likely this is just too complex for FD to undertake.

One could argue there’s no need to actually visit said system at all, as such a scan could be done with advanced optics from another system, no need to send a person, maybe a drone to collect samples.

In the early days of 1st Alpha FD did propose something of this scale, which if I recall included hyperspace way point mapping, but like many of its more cooler ideas, it was moth balled for the more hands on approach we have now.

 

[WeComeInPeace]

The geysers were based on an unrealistic model that basically placed virtual pin points of vulcanism scattered around a planet, maybe even just 1 for an entire planet, they changed the planetary tech so they could have a more realistic distribution of vulcanism that no longer appeared as virtual pin points, so there are no longer virtual points they can mark. The old vulcanism was a roughly circular feature a couple of kilometers across, the new vulcanism can spread across an area of hundreds or even thousands of square kilometers, at which point in that thousands of square kilometers of vulcanism should they place the pin point? Or maybe they do what they did and just colour it all in and say "here be volcanoes".

The technological progress in ED is to more realistic planets, sometimes this makes things harder because it's more realistic and less gamey without the arrows to point people at stuff.

I get that, so when I was looking (for days) for geysers, I first tried to figure out where it would be most probable to find those. At the poles or at equator? In shadows in craters like water, or on the dark side of the planet. I'm not a geologist, so I just started searching flying low and using my eyes, but still nothing. When I finally found them, they seemed as clumped together as the crystalline shards were in Horizons. Just like in the image you posted earlier.

What the heck kind of heat map is this?!

Honestly, F-dev, I just can't. There enough other reference implementations for what a heat map should look like out there. Go watch the Predator, for example. I'm sick and tired of going down to the surface to find brain trees and I don't see anything for literally 20 minutes while I'm in...

forums.frontier.co.uk

That one seems pretty much like something that would have shown up in my left screen as a "point of interest" in Horizons.

Maybe I'm just disappointed that they weren't powerful enough to get me into orbit, but I think there's "ways to deal with that".

 

[Agema]

I wouldn't mind if the game was much more realistic. Superluminal travel speed seems to break the laws of physics, but it's actually possible. The problem is that accelerating to the speed of light demands infinite energy

A common SF explanation is that technology "bends" space between two points so that the ship is actually travelling a very short distance. Like, imagine you need to get from one end of a piece of paper to another, but you can instead fold the paper so the two points are next to each other. Hyperspace is a version of this.

Another is a theorised mechanism using an energy field to create a sort of super-vaccuum with negative pressure (like, less than a total vaccum) in front of the ship and a positive pressure behind, and the ship is pushed along. In this theory, the ship inside the energy field would be in a "warp bubble" that doesn't experience a sense of acceleration or deceleration: so G-forces would not be a problem and there is no need to accerelate mass to the speed of light, so it is theoretically energetically feasible. Supercruise is clearly based on this. It would, however, require some form of energy or matter we in 2021 haven't found, and may not exist.

 

[Ian Skippy]

A (somehow related) question:
Are those features actually displayed when flying in a ship?
Because the last time I flew over a planet I’ve already scanned the plants on (so I knew it existed and that “grass” was everywhere), I couldn’t see any from my cockpit. And I flew really, really low ... I mean, sparks from the undercarriage low.

Is this a general effect so you have to disembark to find anything?
Was the grass just too small to be displayed and larger plants are actually rendered?
Or was I merely unlucky and simply didn’t fly over the right spots?

Yes, you can see it (unless it's bacterial patches and such). Poor performance might mean your pc struggles to load in time though given the relatively high speed of a ship.

 

[Ian Skippy]

Honestly, F-dev, I just can't. There enough other reference implementations for what a heat map should look like out there. Go watch the Predator, for example.

I'm sick and tired of going down to the surface to find brain trees and I don't see anything for literally 20 minutes while I'm in the blue. This is garbage!

And why the heck doesn't my radar do anything to show bio/geo sites like it did in Horizons. So frustrating.

And another thing - why can't I bring up any type of heat map or change a filter when I'm closer to the surface? I have to remember the areas that were covered from space?

Layer on the fact that draw distance for trees has been dramatically reduced in Odyssey where you can only see trees when you're practically on top of them. This makes it difficult to find them.

So let me sum it up:

• Near worthless heat map
• Can't see heatmap near the surface
  • Can't set different geo/biology filters for heatmap while on surface
• Limited draw distance and can't see anything until on top of it
• Removed / worthless surface radar for POIs
• I am just getting more and more irritated playing this game.
  • Exploring is like hide and seek in the dark without a flashlight

If the whole planet is blue, use the filter go lock on types more sparsely distributed. Some types are 'everywhee' but most are not. In Alpha it was a real heatmap, but it was badly bugged. Apparantly the solution was to greatly reduce it to a binary 'heatmap'. Hope they put the original idea back in, wouldnt be surprised if it's related to bugs in plantech.

 

[varonica]

I get that, so when I was looking (for days) for geysers, I first tried to figure out where it would be most probable to find those. At the poles or at equator? In shadows in craters like water, or on the dark side of the planet. I'm not a geologist, so I just started searching flying low and using my eyes, but still nothing. When I finally found them, they seemed as clumped together as the crystalline shards were in Horizons. Just like in the image you posted earlier.

What the heck kind of heat map is this?!

Honestly, F-dev, I just can't. There enough other reference implementations for what a heat map should look like out there. Go watch the Predator, for example. I'm sick and tired of going down to the surface to find brain trees and I don't see anything for literally 20 minutes while I'm in...

forums.frontier.co.uk

That one seems pretty much like something that would have shown up in my left screen as a "point of interest" in Horizons.

Maybe I'm just disappointed that they weren't powerful enough to get me into orbit, but I think there's "ways to deal with that".

The image I posted earlier was one in the middle of a valley maybe hundreds of kilometers long, no matter how far I flew in either direction there was the same intensity of volcanic activity, but there's a distance limit where the features start to fade out, sometimes many don't become active until you have been close for a while. While it looked a small area it was much larger than what you see there.

Some of us spent months or a year and more manually hunting down vulcanism on the old Horizons, pre-POI marker system, so you don't need to tell me how hard they were to find even with the blue circles. The current crop are ludicrously easy to locate using eyeballs compared to the pre-POI system, I am sure they put in the POI system just to placate the many, many people who were complaining they were hard to find, I wasn't one of those, with a couple of hours on a planet even without the POI's I could reliably find a few volcanic sites, we had a spreadsheet with bodies and planetary coordinates for people who didn't want to look for themselves.

Vulcanism now covers huge areas and the old system is no longer relevant because it's pretty pointless putting a marker in the middle of a volcanic area hundreds of kilometers across, if you can't spot it by eye with the blue map as a guide it's not the games problem.

 

[varonica]

If the whole planet is blue, use the filter go lock on types more sparsely distributed. Some types are 'everywhee' but most are not. In Alpha it was a real heatmap, but it was badly bugged. Apparantly the solution was to greatly reduce it to a binary 'heatmap'. Hope they put the original idea back in, wouldnt be surprised if it's related to bugs in plantech.

I always drop in on the rarer stuff first, usually you can find two or three other types in close proximity if not all types. I always hunt bacteria from the ship now, I used SRV and foot for a while in the alpha but find I can locate 3 suitable bacteria in a few minutes from the ship.

 

[Burstar1]

All this "muh, you need to explore", and "L2 plant preferred habitat" is missing the point. The Heat Map lies to you. There are examples of planets where the ENTIRE thing is both covered in blue, for say bacteria, but it also us covered in a rough/spiky terrain. You can 'explore' (read wander aimlessly looking at the same 4 shades of brown) for hours and never see a single colony because of the mismatch. It's unreliable and arguably useless in way too many situations. This post shows the problem in better detail.

I don't think anyone here wants pixel perfect indicators for each individual lifeform, but, because you can't really be sure of the terrain from SC the blue should filter out invalid terrain instead of only using that flora's seed value the way it currently does. A small deviation to force a little 'time wasting exploring' is fine but really unnecessary when you consider you still need to run around to get 3 samples at a time.

 

[WeComeInPeace]

A common SF explanation is that technology "bends" space between two points so that the ship is actually travelling a very short distance. Like, imagine you need to get from one end of a piece of paper to another, but you can instead fold the paper so the two points are next to each other. Hyperspace is a version of this.

Another is a theorised mechanism using an energy field to create a sort of super-vaccuum with negative pressure (like, less than a total vaccum) in front of the ship and a positive pressure behind, and the ship is pushed along. In this theory, the ship inside the energy field would be in a "warp bubble" that doesn't experience a sense of acceleration or deceleration: so G-forces would not be a problem and there is no need to accerelate mass to the speed of light, so it is theoretically energetically feasible. Supercruise is clearly based on this. It would, however, require some form of energy or matter we in 2021 haven't found, and may not exist.

Many years ago, I was lying in the Sun on a beach at the Mediterranean reading an issue of Wired they had in the local kiosk. There was a very interesting article in the magazine.

Everybody knew back then, that interstellar travel was "impossible", but some people at NASA (AFAIR) were given the task, that assuming they would have an infinite energy source, how would they solve the problem.

One suggestion included creating a worm hole, and then shooting the astronaut through that using a cannon. With the astronaut facing head first and with arms along the body, the amount of energy needed to keep the worm hole open long enough for the astronaut to pass, would equal to the mass of Jupiter converted into pure energy. Not very practical, and I like Jupiter.

It might sound crazy (and it is), but if you calculate the consequence of Moore's Law and energy consumption flipping bits, a few hundred years from now, if current development in IT kept going, we would then need energy equaling the mass of the observable Universe, just to run our IT. As Albert Bartlett said: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

 

[Raliel]

My concern is that it never worked properly in the first place, so how was a complex heat map too confusing for some players? Alpha tester would like to know (what we were actually promised was that the horrible green ball of goo was simply an early version that was not fully implemented)

 

[Raliel]

The green ball was a bug and it was fixed. It’s now blue.

sorry, yes, that is true

 

[Raliel]

The green ball was a bug and it was fixed. It’s now blue.

I know now why they were so keen to not let us go back through the Alpha forum for ammunition

 

[Belandriel]

So you would prefer a map that didn't actually show where the plants are you are looking for, just a couple of little tiny spot where you can find them and ignore the rest of them all over the planet? How is that even a map? You know that's just a request to have the old POI system back right? You know that thing we just got away from, that completely unrealistic idea that on an entire planet millions of square kilometers in area there will be just one patch of grass? So an arrow if you will, pointing directly at what you are after so you can just fly there and do nothing else.

That's not what I said, actually. I did say, that I like the general idea of a heatmap though.

It’s not 3307 you know, it’s 2021…

It’s a game, almost everything about it is unrealistic. Flying our own ships, seriously? The moon landing didn’t even have a fully manual flight system.
Exo has an entire Elite rank dedicated to it, learning where certain species like to hand out is the skill associated with it.

Huh? As a matter of fact you are giving the exact reason, why we should have much better and progressive technologies in the game than flying 100 feet above ground and scanning the surroundings with our mere eyes. Or do you think our eyes work better than the science fiction technology then? Plus we should at least be able to use the heatmap properly (i.e. with distinguishable colors) and without having to fly to orbit every time we want to look for something else. That is ridiculous! Also I want to be able to set waypoints, so I can set may own POIs.

Exo may keep its entire rank, but that has nothing to do with DSS being absolutely useless in its actual state. Except if you like to paint your planets blue, of course!

 

[varonica]

All this "muh, you need to explore", and "L2 plant preferred habitat" is missing the point. The Heat Map lies to you. There are examples of planets where the ENTIRE thing is both covered in blue, for say bacteria, but it also us covered in a rough/spiky terrain. You can 'explore' (read wander aimlessly looking at the same 4 shades of brown) for hours and never see a single colony because of the mismatch. It's unreliable and arguably useless in way too many situations. This post shows the problem in better detail.

Nope, doesn't happen, I have always found bacteria where indicated on the heat map, sure sometimes I can't land because the ground is to rough and I have to fly on to find flatter terrain, but it's always there, there is no mismatch, if it's blue, it's there!

 

[varonica]

That's not what I said, actually. I did say, that I like the general idea of a heatmap though.




Huh? As a matter of fact you are giving the exact reason, why we should have much better and progressive technologies in the game than flying 100 feet above ground and scanning the surroundings with our mere eyes. Or do you think our eyes work better than the science fiction technology then? Plus we should at least be able to use the heatmap properly (i.e. with distinguishable colors) and without having to fly to orbit every time we want to look for something else. That is ridiculous! Also I want to be able to set waypoints, so I can set may own POIs.

Exo may keep its entire rank, but that has nothing to do with DSS being absolutely useless in its actual state. Except if you like to paint your planets blue, of course!

No, that's exactly what you said, that a blue map that covers the entire planet is useless, but if the bio covers the entire planet and the distrubtion doesn't then it isn't an actual map of the bio distribution at all is it?

I find the DSS works fine in its current state, the fact that some people seem unable to use it properly isn't the games problem. If a bio life form covers the entire planet then so should the blue of the distribution map.

If you are meaning to say something else maybe you had better explain exactly what it is you are meaning to say!

 

[Bob McBobblehead]

It's not a heat or distribution map. It just a height map set to a specific altitude. The plants are probably set to spawn on certain terrains at certain alitudes.

 

[Walter2]

If the whole planet is blue, use the filter go lock on types more sparsely distributed. Some types are 'everywhee' but most are not. In Alpha it was a real heatmap, but it was badly bugged. Apparantly the solution was to greatly reduce it to a binary 'heatmap'. Hope they put the original idea back in, wouldnt be surprised if it's related to bugs in plantech.

One of our problems is that FD designed the colouration as a heat map and then discovered the inherent problems in using different colours to show data.
What we have now is a colour map that shows not heat, but the likelihood of something being found in a certain area: it's a map of probabilities.
Given the homogenised nature of the planets we're allowed to land on, it's not surprising that the colour map covers so much of the surface.

 

[Crank Larson]

Not only have I found the heatmap useless, anytime I want to DSS a planet I need to switch to Horizons because the DSS is broken in Odyssey. I thought I'd compare a Guardian site (on a planet with brain trees) between Horizons and Odyssey over the weekend. In Odyssey, the brain trees are now all around the guardian site (which is on a flat plain instead of really rough terrain where it was difficult to find a landing spot). I couldn't work out the heatmap to be able to find the geo sites on the planet, though.

The Horizons guardian site was atmospheric and creepy. The Odyssey version wasn't atmospheric at all (even at night!). The guardian sentinels also don't seem to fire missiles in Odyssey.

Exploring in Odyssey is simply broken. Unless you are only interested in the new foot mechanics.

Every time I play Odyssey I come across so many issues that I am testing it less and less...