News Chapter Four - Exploration Reveal

[Noogillim]

Maybe if people are so concerned about making it easy for them to quickly navigate to a system with a feature, then someone is a bit altruistic and heads back to a station and uploads their cartographic data?

Once you know the system find by forum it'll now be so much quicker than before even if the data isn't in game as you won't be Mark one eyeballing the planet for the site, you'll have the tools to help you locate it. With the current system any finds I have made simply don't get uploaded as poi's and you have to update people via external sources.

Now the mapping data will be available to all once the federation database is updated.

You have always been able to buy a registered discovered systems data, people seem to ignore that though.

This is where the information on the Internet spoils the game, someone locates stuff it doesn't get put into the system data stream yet everyone hops on yt and heads on over for the shinies! Effectively circumventing the game structure, and then moaning about it. We'll if people have to spend another five minutes scanning and locating something sobeit.

But and there is always a but, there are lots of things gamey things like telepresence where I can sit in a ship instantly on the other side of the galaxy that ruin other concepts in the game like why cartographic data can't be transmitted over the ether and sold or data caches saved.

For instance could I be out in the black, join a ship in the bubble, Dock and then sell my data, with a portion going to said ships owner? There are some silly things in this game.

I simply don't get to heated about them though. Its a game not a hard core sim.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

What "worth" do you mean here?

Biological, technological and volcanic POI's at a guess. There maybe more that they are adding. Hopefullly there will be a way to interact with these items by either scanning for information and maybe sample collection.

Would be a nice to get a first discovered from those places too.

 

[Trickylion]

looks cool
can you map non-landable bodies like ELW and gas giants?

race is on to map earth and the moon and get the tag!

wait a minute, if you haven't visited a system before and are on a bubble type journey, perhaps a mission chased by assassins, will you see the planets or stations after the honk or have to mess around first, that might be a pain

 

[rootsrat]

I can't see why we can't have both.

If the devs went this way with everything, the game would lost it's character IMHO. Plus, implementing switches to cater for every player expectations would be an absolute waste of money and dev time.

There are a ton of things that I don't like in Elite and that could be potentially adapted to be "toggle'able", but I came to conclusion that I'd rather have a game that is SOMETHING rather than tries to be EVERYTHING (and TBH Elite unfortunately does try to be everything in too many aspects already).

If it was up to me, I'd love for ED to be a hard-core realistic sim, but I guess lots of players would just quit

 

[gooddoc]

All well and good for those players who choose to fly with orbital lines enabled. What about those who prefer not to? Once again "play the game as you want to - by which we mean, as we intend - or suffer".

This is one of FD's major headaches.

Producing stuff for the pewpew side is relatively easy.....New guns, New Ships, New stuff to shoot at...done.

Once players move away from mainstream playing into something at bit different, like exploration, this quickly becomes a nightmare to write for.
EVERY player will consider exploration in their own unique way to all others. FD have no chance of appeasing every explorers demands.

 

[Old Duck]

If I picked it up correctly in the stream last night then we will only be able to travel system to system and will have to scan the nav beacon to locate our target planet, station, whatever. That seems unfair if true.

I could be wrong, but I thought they said that stations and outposts would automatically show in our Nav Panel when we entered a populated system... It's a little confusing, because they also mention dropping at a Nav beacon as a replacement for ADS, but if I'm just running missions and need to get from Station A to Station B, I won't bother with the beacon if what I say about the Nav Panel is true. Can anyone else confirm this?

 

[drkaii]

This is all I could have dreamed of. Shame its way too late for me. I've seen everything 1000 times over, so I can't imagine enjoying this very much now. I wish exploration had been treated like this since day 1.

Seriously, almost in tears, this sounds so good, wish I had had this when I still had the excitement and freshness of exploration.

To all the people who have replied, reassuring me that if FDev add new stellar body types to find, then my sadness will turn to joy, I would like to say that you are 100% right. Not only that, but atmospheric landing, ELW/AW landing etc will also bring this home in a great way. So thanks for that and I am looking forward!

Well, to atmosphere/ELW/AW landing. If anyone can point me to a reassuring post/stream from FDev that they are planning on adding new stellar bodies, then I'll be more optimistic, but right now my optimism on that front is worn out. I don't think that's high priority enough for them, if they do it they will just get attacked by all the 100s of pew pewers who are suffering from thousands of bugs, balance problems and massive game breaking issues that really do need to be sorted out sooner rather than later.

And even if they decide to go ahead, there are massive technical problems. The stellar forge had to be pretty much set in stone after gamma, as tinkering with a procedural engine can change everything. Every time Space Engine updates, all my bookmarks become "unfound", for example. It's possible to make changes to the engine without mucking things up too seriously (player tags lost would be a big no no), but still, take a look at what happens to a landable when you switch between Horizons and Base game. It's completely different. Can you imagine your home world, your favourite discoveries, your universe changing beyond recognition? I don't think some would be happy with that at all (for me it's a sacrifice worth making though, but that's just me). ADDING new things is pretty much impossible too, unless the coders are pure savant geniuses at understanding the procedural algorithms. Then again, I haven't got any experience with procedural programming, so maybe it is possible.

What is certainly possible is creating more variation is what's already there. Brown dwarves could use an overhaul. From T9s that are pitch black, to T5s that start to faintly glow at the equator, to L9s that are starting to glow red, to L0s that are really bright, that would be a fantastic thing to add and give us what to do with the new exploration mechanics. Giving all the planets an overhaul in terms of variation would be pure bliss and go perfectly well hand in hand with this. But alas, I again state I have zero optimism that that will happen any time soon. Happy to be proven wrong though.

I think I am just being impatient. I know atmospheric and ELW landings are coming one day. I think all I really want is the final game. And nobody has ever tried to fool me into believing that it's anything less than 10 years off.

So I shall wait, and try not to get too optimistic or pessimistic, and let it all come together in its own time.

I just don't know if I can make it through another 3 years of explorers being completely ignored before the next offering...

 

[gooddoc]

If the devs went this way with everything, the game would lost it's character IMHO. Plus, implementing switches to cater for every player expectations would be an absolute waste of money and dev time.

There are a ton of things that I don't like in Elite and that could be potentially adapted to be "toggle'able", but I came to conclusion that I'd rather have a game that is SOMETHING rather than tries to be EVERYTHING (and TBH Elite unfortunately does try to be everything in too many aspects already).

If it was up to me, I'd love for ED to be a hard-core realistic sim, but I guess lots of players would just quit

Maybe so, but replacing something that's quick with what appears to be a more long winded way to get the same INITIAL information, that will only put off players, SOME of which claim the game is too grindy as it stands now.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Spot on CMDR + Rep

Except he is already wrong in the first sentence. The DS honk and subsequent scan before you even get to the planet will do what the old ADS and DSS did, so no flying to and scanning to get the first discovered tag for a start.

So you get all that information and first discovered by tag without having to travel there. All those planets that were 100,000ls away will now be in easy reach to scan and get first discovered by, and if the scan comes up with something worth investigating like biological or technology detected on a landable, it will give you a reason to fly that distance to investigate instead of flying there and hoping that something is there and possibly wasting all that time.

Sure while the initial scan would be quicker in the old way, getting all the information would be much much longer. So while the new way has some cons there are a whole load of pros. I much prefer the new way myself.

 

[LeoBartlet]

Maybe so, but replacing something that's quick with what appears to be a more long winded way to get the same INITIAL information, that will only put off players, SOME of which claim the game is too grindy as it stands now.

It seems the only solutions frontier has to placeholder gameplay is to replace it with grind.

It was only inevitable that exploration would fall prey to grinding.

 

[Genar-Hofoen]

I'm just glad I managed to get them to address two questions in the stream:

Q: One of the benefits of the current ADS mechanic is you can make a snap decision on whether to explore the system further - how does the new ADS mechanic keep this benefit?

and

Q: Under the new ADS mechanic, will we have to manually build the system map in order to know if a star system we have entered has been tagged or not?

The first question was answered by basically "tune into Planet Radio and watch the signals" - which is vague and implies that it's no longer going to be possible under the new system to have that snap decision benefit the current system offers.

The answer to the second question, concerns me a bit. It was basically "Don't know." They did acknowledge that both questions raise important points and it's something for them to consider.

But the answer to the second question gives me the impression that they haven't considered all possible implications of their new ADS minigame. This is what I feared - a kind of blindness to the Cool New Shiny Clever Thing; $whoever comes up with an ADS minigame for body discovery, so they start toying with art and code and come up with the sort of thing which they've announced - but no one thought to pause and consider the implications for the various different types of explorer.

The ADS body discovery minigame appeals to certain types of player - that much is apparent. And for them, this looks very much like Science!, which it does on first look. I totally understand why it appeals.

For those other types of explorer, like Ziggy and myself, yes, the ADS body discovery minigame looks really cool and shiny, and it even looks a bit like Science!. But ultimately, it is removing some benefits of the current ADS mechanic in ways important to us, and for myself anyway, a couple of rather important benefits.

I outlined those benefits in the two questions above. What I'm getting sick and tired of reading in these forums are posts from people who haven't bothered to read through the evolution of the topic thread, and instead declare that we want the current ADS mechanic to stay because we farm exploration credits. This is insulting to say the least, and completely ignorant at best. It's frustrating.

Another frustrating thing is to be accused of "not being an explorer because you like the insta-ADS." This is despite having cited various reasons such as above. It's also a No True Scotsman fallacy. Annoying.

And finally, in my opinion, discovery and exploration are two different things. They are related, but ultimately different.

You discover there's a mountain. Then you go explore the mountain.

No one puts a blindfold over their eyes to go see if there's a mountain. No one plays a little game to slowly uncover that blindfold in order to see more of the mountain. Instead, the mountain is either there, or it is not. <---- this is what essentially the ADS body discovery minigame is - it's a little game to slowly uncover the blindfold. Oh and by the way, there are 400 billion mountains. It just seems like insanity to me to have 400 billion time-walls, just to see if the mountain is there or not.

What is exploration to me, is going onto the mountain and finding out what's there and what it's made of and what you can do with it. It seemed eminently more sensible to me to concentrate on this aspect of the game, as it's the more important aspect. The new DSS/probes gameplay looks brilliant in that respect. And if Frontier have also seeded more things to discover on planets, all the better.

 

[gooddoc]

I think, reading through nearly all of this thread from the original post.

This was probably why we SHOULD have had the Exploration Focus Feedback back in June!

Our concerns could have been given back then, probably giving FD time to tweak here & there.

I think we are stuck with this now, whether we like it or not....

....Doc out!!

 

[Marc_Hicks]

Based on the OP & my own thoughts on exploration, this is how I would like to see things working from Q4 onwards:

1. You jump into an unexplored system, passive sensors reveals presence of all objects within about 10-20 light seconds of your current position.

2. Perform the FSS honk, that reveals the primary star & objects within the aforementioned 10-20 light second radius.

2a. FSS Honk also reveals all the Emission/Gravity data, which can be displayed as a HUD overlay off to one side of your viewscreen, which a player can resolve whilst in-flight (albeit with some difficulty). As well as a number of "target reticules" whose size is determined by the approximate size/distance of the stellar objects in this system

3. Players can now choose one of two options-to either use the emissions data to resolve the full details of each planet immediately, or to use the reticules to begin flying in the general direction of each stellar object. Once within a certain range, players can re-use the FSS to get a partially resolved image of the planet, minus surface details & material content (obviously worth less in credits & experience though).

4. However a player chooses to resolve the planets, they can then choose to do a detailed surface scan-either using a probe, or by sling-shooting their own ship along a similar trajectory (dangerous.....but potentially fun? ) However players proceeded in step 3, step 4 will reveal all the details of that planet.

Unlikely as it might be to happen, I'd also like to see a Step 2b, where a science module can be used to convert the emission/gravity data into construct a crude system map-one that consists only of varying sized Silhouettes, similar to what we got during exploration in the 2.2 Beta. Underneath each silhouette would be data about the percent likelihood that each shape was a particular type of planet......like "Ice World 85% Prob.; Rocky World 5% Prob."

 

[Spacegamejunkie]

From the sound of it you basically seem to be interested in exploring as an income generator. The philosophy behind, while still being a grind, it's lesser grind as long as it's only fast enough and provides some good money. But how dull is that? With this in mind you effectively write off any future interesting gameplay.

I hope tonight's stream will reveal some more details. Maybe some of your concerns will vanish afterwards. Nope, not going to happen. No videos about the new stuff at least.

NO, but if yes, so what? Either way a valeted play style :

But Let me see, Before we get all this cool new stuff, They have to POKE YOUR EYES OUT,
as in Honk upon entering a system but you are Blind to what is there.

I would prefer to have the HONK work the same and give us a Basic map of the system, with less info on the bodies,
that would require the new system to obtain, but still give enough info to make a decision.

IN other words, Place the New Stuff over the existing method, so that those that HONK can choose to either JUMP,
OR Explore More of the System.

But Understand that You have to have some Info in order to MAKE A CHOICE, Being Blind with nothing to see is at best a GRIND/TIME SINK,
with no Choice at all.

 

[Marc_Hicks]

I think, reading through nearly all of this thread from the original post.

This was probably why we SHOULD have had the Exploration Focus Feedback back in June!

Our concerns could have been given back then, probably giving FD time to tweak here & there.

I think we are stuck with this now, whether we like it or not....

....Doc out!!

Not necessarily. I've been doing the Beta thing since before FFF's were even a thing, & they've made pretty big changes to certain game mechanics even just a week or so before live release. I think this *is* our FFF.....kind of....& they have indicated that they are following this thread very carefully. I suspect there are many things not yet set in stone.

 

[-VR- Max Factor]

Let me see, Before we get all this cool new stuff, They have to POKE YOUR EYES OUT, Honk upon entering a system but you are Blind to what is there.

I would prefer to have the HONK work same and give us a Basic map of the system, with less info on the bodies, that would require the new system to obtain.
IN other words, Place the New Stuff over the existing method, so that those that HONK can choose to either JUMP, OR Explore More of the System.

But Understand that You have to have some Info in order to choose, Being Blind with nothing to see is at best a GRIND/TIME SINK.

Looks more like a gameplay sink to me which I much prefer. Each to their own.

 

[rootsrat]

Well I would suggest to wait for the actual beta before you label anything with "grind", "awesome" etc. All we have now is some written description and 2 screenshots

 

[Marc_Hicks]

Well I would suggest to wait for the actual beta before you label anything with "grind", "awesome" etc. All we have now is some written description and 2 screenshots

Yep, I think I am done for now. I'll hold off any further comment until we see the pre-Beta reveal live-streams.

 

[who?]

Yeah, I would like that too. Assuming it's a graphical processing issue - or at least have it as a display option for systems that can handle it. I'd love to see the galaxy map overlayed within my cockpit view.

(although, I'd even settle for a graphical effect that shows your view dissolve into orange triangles like on our various HUDS as it shifts to the sensor or map, to show a virtual visor taking up the your view... but that's just the artistic side of me talking)

Indeed. If the fullscreen views (System Map, Galaxy Map, and now 'Sensor View') are projected internally on your visor, you'd just need a short animation of your visor coming down, the hologram flickering on and then the fullscreen view appearing.

Incidentally, has it been stated anywhere that you ship can be moving while scanning? Seems dangerous if so (no more so than the other fullscreen views, though you might spend some time in the sensor view).

 

[Spaceman Si]

Except he is already wrong in the first sentence. The DS honk and subsequent scan before you even get to the planet will do what the old ADS and DSS did, so no flying to and scanning to get the first discovered tag for a start.

So you get all that information and first discovered by tag without having to travel there. All those planets that were 100,000ls away will now be in easy reach to scan and get first discovered by, and if the scan comes up with something worth investigating like biological or technology detected on a landable, it will give you a reason to fly that distance to investigate instead of flying there and hoping that something is there and possibly wasting all that time.

Sure while the initial scan would be quicker in the old way, getting all the information would be much much longer. So while the new way has some cons there are a whole load of pros. I much prefer the new way myself.

It was my third sentence, and what I was driving at was that to reveal the system map would seem to require far more time to achieve with the new ADS.

As for getting the tag and the landables information, certainly it seems to be quicker to get that from the new mechanism, but that is not my point. Currently, the ADS scan and system map population provides the framework for further travel to scan items of interest with the DSS, which is an optional process (and one which involves actually going to the object of interest to reveal it). The proposed ADS scan provides no initial information about the system layout at all, and discourages travel to objects to obtain details about them, because it appears to be possible to gain all the information about any object you wish by staying in one place.

I always have the greatest of respect for commanders who tag 300Kls distant objects at the moment, because I know they have made a conscious decision to go there to scan and obtain the tag. There would appear to be little merit in obtaining a first discovered tag on a distant object from the vicinity of the arrival star, but that is just my view. Perhaps the more meritorious tag in future will be seen to be the "first mapped" one instead.