Love the new scanning of asteroids and planet mapping that reveals location of geologic and biologic sites and planet compostition % and all that jazz.
As FD states 4.0 will be a big push to keep moving ED to be the most realistic, fun, etc. here is an idea for both realism and rule-of-cool, that can feed into game-play and internal game-consistency.
The current mechanic in SRV is vastly improved with geological and biological POI mapping; improved over only randomly driving around waiting on RNGesus to manifest some mats to collect. But still there is room to improve. Can Stellar Forge be leveraged to enable such creation of distribution maps of stuff along with height maps and what resource percentages planets have, etc.?To go BEYOND 3.3 mechanics and into the NEXT GENERATION of ED, we need additional COMPOSITION MAPPING of both geology and GASSES/ Atmospheres.
Example; the Player wanting Yttrium should be able to see in initial SCAN that a body has it, then when surface is MAPPED the locations of concentrated elements and chemicals that are needed for game-play should become available as a layer on the system map view that would translate into HUD mapping of targeted items as well (like the blue-sphere overlay of a body when launching probes to map it) - and note this could take more than one layer of map which of course doesn't mean it is EASY, but it should be possible.
For example, look online for any CO2 mapping project. When I need to scoop fuel I want the purest and most dense concentration of Hydrogen gas to be mapped and the game should require me to fly there and fly through the gas field to scoop it, possibly using some HUD composition filter highlighting the gas player has targeted, or bounding box animation for approach and optimal vector or similar guideposts.
And don't forget things like MAGNETIC ANOMALIES (see US magnetic map screenshot below), potentially cool for some planetary game-play but also intra-system travel where PvE really pits the Player (protagonist) against the Environment (antagonist).
I'm sure FD can do better in-game stuff than examples below. I don't have time to troll for fancier stuff at the moment or mock up anything. But this gives the basic idea.
CO2 Map animation (jump to the middle to see a bit of cool colored animation of CO2 emissions versus the early static map images): US Magnetic Anomalies:
US Mineral Resource maps: https://mrdata.usgs.gov/
As FD states 4.0 will be a big push to keep moving ED to be the most realistic, fun, etc. here is an idea for both realism and rule-of-cool, that can feed into game-play and internal game-consistency.
The current mechanic in SRV is vastly improved with geological and biological POI mapping; improved over only randomly driving around waiting on RNGesus to manifest some mats to collect. But still there is room to improve. Can Stellar Forge be leveraged to enable such creation of distribution maps of stuff along with height maps and what resource percentages planets have, etc.?To go BEYOND 3.3 mechanics and into the NEXT GENERATION of ED, we need additional COMPOSITION MAPPING of both geology and GASSES/ Atmospheres.
Example; the Player wanting Yttrium should be able to see in initial SCAN that a body has it, then when surface is MAPPED the locations of concentrated elements and chemicals that are needed for game-play should become available as a layer on the system map view that would translate into HUD mapping of targeted items as well (like the blue-sphere overlay of a body when launching probes to map it) - and note this could take more than one layer of map which of course doesn't mean it is EASY, but it should be possible.
For example, look online for any CO2 mapping project. When I need to scoop fuel I want the purest and most dense concentration of Hydrogen gas to be mapped and the game should require me to fly there and fly through the gas field to scoop it, possibly using some HUD composition filter highlighting the gas player has targeted, or bounding box animation for approach and optimal vector or similar guideposts.
And don't forget things like MAGNETIC ANOMALIES (see US magnetic map screenshot below), potentially cool for some planetary game-play but also intra-system travel where PvE really pits the Player (protagonist) against the Environment (antagonist).
I'm sure FD can do better in-game stuff than examples below. I don't have time to troll for fancier stuff at the moment or mock up anything. But this gives the basic idea.
CO2 Map animation (jump to the middle to see a bit of cool colored animation of CO2 emissions versus the early static map images): US Magnetic Anomalies:
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