24 Hours from now, we will witness the future of Exploration

Yeah this is what worries me too. Adding new tools to find stuff is great and all, but we do need stuff worth finding, or it all means nothing.

And so it begins....

FDev: We've seeded the game with new and exciting stuff to discover!
Players: Well, what is it?
FDev: What, the stuff your meant to discover?
Players: Yes, what is it?
Fdev:
300px-Paris_Tuileries_Garden_Facepalm_statue.jpg
 
And so it begins....

FDev: We've seeded the game with new and exciting stuff to discover!
Players: Well, what is it?
FDev: What, the stuff your meant to discover?
Players: Yes, what is it?
Fdev:

So true, bit like what happened when the exploration changes were released:

Players; FD we demand better tools for Engineers, we have been forgotten about for too long
FD: Yep true, so tell us what you want
Players: We want tools to make exploration exciting and worthwhile, not just jump/honk/scoop/jump
FD: Understand, here is what we have come up with
Players: FD you screwed up again, these changes are terrible, they will take too much of our precious time, where is the instant honk, we demand the honk come back
FD: Screw this, we will just stick to combat, at least that crowd will accept whatever we give them as long as something goes bang in the end.
 
I keep hoping I'll have a new machine by the time Chapter 4 drops (haven't been able to play since December last year) as I'm super-hyped about this one.

It's been a couple years since then, but even my laptop with Intel HD Graphics 5500 built in on the CPU and 8GB of RAM ran the game fairly well on the lower settings. I've since moved it over to Linux (Debian/KDE), so can't easily test it now without swapping drives, but I'm just mentioning it in case something like that might work well enough for you in the meantime.
 
For example I just read a very interesting article last night about how our solar system if far from the norm based on the Kepler information. I've said the stellar forge is dead wrong for the last 3 years now because of just that fact.

I'm not so sure. Stellar forge does have a physics-simulation side and does seem to have produced examples of the kind of systems that Kepler found (eg frequent gas giants crazy close to stars etc), and I haven't done any analysis but it has always seemed to me that the solar system is somewhat unusually spread out compared to the average Stellar Forge systems. Whether things turn out to be rarer or more common than they should be seems inherent in an approximation and non-problematic to me. Don't forget that the System Map is intentionally distorting things much like the London Tube Map does, so that systems look much more like the solar system than they are; even a system that looks just like Sol in the system map is usually wildly different if you look at it properly. (Keplar itself is also distorting because certain kinds of planets and orbits are much more visible to it than others, so you inevitably end up back at extrapolation.) At the end of the day, Stellar Forge will always be only an educated-guess approximation, but where to draw a line beyond which the approximation has become meaningfully wrong... that seems arbitrary to me. (If anything it bothers me more that the game simplifies the number of bodies in systems - it's rare for a system to exceed even a hundred bodies, and even accounting for a diameter cutoff the solar system blows that away)

How about finding 2 gas giants in the process of colliding? Or two stars? Or two planets POST collision? DREAM UP some things that will blow our mind. A little clouds and lightning is expected and hardly impressive. BLOW OUR MINDS.

Definitely!
Back in 1984 the original Elite had a super-nova event, so it wouldn't surprise me if someday at least that appeared in Elite Dangerous, though I image it would have a more scientific grounding, meaning the explosion would take place over weeks rather than seconds, with weeks of run-up as an ongoing Galnet story, the system would have CGs to evacuate residents (would the nova star be the jump-star?) and during the days of the explosion there would be lots of (risky) passenger missions to view it slowly unfolding for as long as your heat dissipation can manage... The follow weeks might involve more CGs as nearby systems also started to evacuate ahead of the shockwave. It might all be too slow and orderly to "blow our minds" but it would be fascinating and different, and once the nova infrastructure is in place, they can start happening more often :)

Speaking of blowing our minds, in general it works much better in VR. Monitors make all stars seem like the same size. Stars are still far too big for the binocular aspect of VR to help impart scale, but somehow it's still a lot easier in VR to see when a star is not like other stars. Stuff is also more visceral in VR.

(Vaguely related, there was one time with a super-giant where I switched to systems map and nearly jumped out of my chair - the star was so crazy massive that instead of seeing the planets arranged on a grid a few meters away it was like a burning wall inches from my nose!)
 
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It sounds good. I hope it's fun - ya know, the new stuff we can do, that it's fun. Not simply a more convoluted process.

But, yeah, am looking forward to it and am going to let optimism get the better of me.

Now I'm convinced the seals are broken. This is the seventh sign! D:
 
Is my understanding accurate that people who are currently out exploring are going to have to return to the bubble to continue their journeys because of equipment changes? I've heard something about exploration 'probes?'
 
Is my understanding accurate that people who are currently out exploring are going to have to return to the bubble to continue their journeys because of equipment changes? I've heard something about exploration 'probes?'

Allegedly no. It seems anyone out in the black will find themselves suitably equipped ..... but am sure this will be clarified further tomorrow
 
I've prepared myself months ago for disappointment when it comes to Exploration improvements.

Quite simply- either it's going to be what I hope it will be, or it won't.

To me, it's going to be the difference between Elite Dangerous becoming an immersive experience, or just a simply arcade cockpit shooter I fire up every 3 or 6 months for a couple of hours and put it back on the shelf to collect dust again.

Four years is adequate notice. Either Frontier "gets it" or they don't.
 
Four years is adequate notice. Either Frontier "gets it" or they don't.

3.3 is a very pivotal update for me and Elite as well. I've barely played the game at all this year, and the main reason is because I'm tired of exploration as it currently exists in the game. I've been tired of it for a very long time now.

Tomorrow is something I've been waiting a long time for: to see if the new exploration will be enough to rekindle my interest again. I hope it is.
 
It's probably going to be half-done like pretty much everything they do for Elite, I mean...just look at the npc crew feature for example. Permadeath should be removed and npc crew shouldn't eat your money the way they do when they're not even on your ship. A lot more people would play with npcs if those two things were fixed but Frontier is too busy making more half-done stuff and finding ways to make you grind for years so that your mind thinks the game has a lot of content. Do I want this update to be awesome? Yes but based on their track record since I backed the game, I can't say I'm excited for it. Let's wait and see.
 
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Is anyone sad for the placeholders?
There were a few huge threads about people who were actually yeah :)
I'd actually like to see links, this intrigues me...

I'm not so sure. Stellar forge does have a physics-simulation side and does seem to have produced examples of the kind of systems that Kepler found (eg frequent gas giants crazy close to stars etc), and I haven't done any analysis but it has always seemed to me that the solar system is somewhat unusually spread out compared to the average Stellar Forge systems. Whether things turn out to be rarer or more common than they should be seems inherent in an approximation and non-problematic to me. Don't forget that the System Map is intentionally distorting things much like the London Tube Map does, so that systems look much more like the solar system than they are; even a system that looks just like Sol in the system map is usually wildly different if you look at it properly. (Keplar itself is also distorting because certain kinds of planets and orbits are much more visible to it than others, so you inevitably end up back at extrapolation.)
+rep At the very least we need to wait for TESS all-sky survey and a greater sample size of systems that have been monitored for decades to even know that we've got it really wrong or really right. Jupiter is in an almost 12 year orbit, and Saturn nearly 30, hard to discover a transit or wobbles from only a few years.

At the end of the day, Stellar Forge will always be only an educated-guess approximation, but where to draw a line beyond which the approximation has become meaningfully wrong... that seems arbitrary to me.

(If anything it bothers me more that the game simplifies the number of bodies in systems - it's rare for a system to exceed even a hundred bodies, and even accounting for a diameter cutoff the solar system blows that away)
It's sad, cuz it's really easy to do a much more accurate, and yet more full and lively way to do a solar system. They even used the technique to build the previous galaxies of Elite. You have a bitmap that's wide enough to represent a system at a scale, and the values represent rock/ice numbers and sizes, etc. With a deterministic seed, you can produce a consistent system that's as varied and full as you can imagine. Rather than some silly signal sources for about 50 rocks in 9 patches.

But that ship has sailed long ago for this game. I just want to see custom waypoints/bookmarks/orbits. It would be so awesome to solve a puzzle that gets us real orbital elements to search. Or something...

Back in 1984 the original Elite had a super-nova event, so it wouldn't surprise me if someday at least that appeared in Elite Dangerous, though I image it would have a more scientific grounding, meaning the explosion would take place over weeks rather than seconds, with weeks of run-up as an ongoing Galnet story, the system would have CGs to evacuate residents (would the nova star be the jump-star?) and during the days of the explosion there would be lots of (risky) passenger missions to view it slowly unfolding for as long as your heat dissipation can manage... The follow weeks might involve more CGs as nearby systems also started to evacuate ahead of the shockwave. It might all be too slow and orderly to "blow our minds" but it would be fascinating and different, and once the nova infrastructure is in place, they can start happening more often :)
That would be pretty awesome, I vote yes! Though jets.... Neutron stars are the result of these events. The jets come after, sorry to nitpick :p

Speaking of blowing our minds, in general it works much better in VR. Monitors make all stars seem like the same size. Stars are still far too big for the binocular aspect of VR to help impart scale, but somehow it's still a lot easier in VR to see when a star is not like other stars. Stuff is also more visceral in VR.

(Vaguely related, there was one time with a super-giant where I switched to systems map and nearly jumped out of my chair - the star was so crazy massive that instead of seeing the planets arranged on a grid a few meters away it was like a burning wall inches from my nose!)
[woah]
 
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