DSS Launch Probe Keybind?

It is super simple, really. If you want to scan a thing, you point the scanner at the thing and hit the scan button. That is all there is to it. It boggles the mind when you think about it: mining got way more complex, and all the miners are happily mining. Combat pilots have all kinds of binds for ECM, chaff, heat sinks, SCB etc etc. "Yay!", they say, and learn how to play.

And then you have the explorers bumbling around in total frustration at literally every single thing. :D

Yeah I'd hazard a wild guess that's because the sole reference we have is a couple of streams which happened whilst I was at work, meaning I get to fast scan through hour-long youtube videos which are 95% Ed and co prattling on about unrelated things just to try to catch the moment where they say 'and now we use the thingy in whatsit mode to err no wait that's... oh yes, there we go' all without any kind of reference whatsoever to what keys they're pressing, or indeed to what what keys they bound the controls that we can't see in the keybinding screen which they never show us. It's hardly instructive.

Or alternately, wade through endless forum threads which invariably involve people, all of whom who are genuinely trying to help, providing information which is directly in contradiction to information which other people who are genuinely trying to help posted three posts earlier.

That's without even getting into the fact that exploration in general has basically been crapped on for me in this update with the FSS (and let's not get into a round of whether that's right or wrong and whether I'm a true explorer, a traveler or whatever, it's a subjective thing and that's my opinion of it)

As I said the other day, I was parked up about 10K outside the bubble on update day and so far I haven't even felt motivated to log in because unless I want to spend most of my game time farting around playing match the dots in an interface rather than flying a ship, I'm only ever going to see a system map again in the bubble or other previously explored systems. The prospect of spending the bulk of my time ing around twiddling knobs and pointlessly switching between display modes whose sole function seems to be to prevent you from being able to use some controls in each of them, only to end up with about six fully mapped systems full of tedious snowballs for an hour of gameplay leaves me incredulous to be honest, it seems the vast majority of players have a very different concept of what comprises satisfying gameplay than I do.

I feel duty bound to point out that we're still very much in the 'novelty' phase of this and a lot of the positive feedback I see is from people who are saying 'wow I never went exploring before this update but...' whilst I've seen comments from people who have previously done significant amounts of exploring since the game went live who are now pretty much where I am with it. It's a fantastic change for those players who would habitually scan everything in every system they visited, sadly I was never one of those. I'll be very surprised if the enthusiasm for it is as high in a couple of months though.

For those focused on the micro aspects such as scanning a single planet to find POIs etc, yeah it's clearly an improvement. I'm still seeing nothing that required the other changes to support that though, frankly they could have added all the planetary probing etc without needing to also add all this other pointless b.s. That's really all I wanted from an exploration update; some more stuff to find and some way to make finding stuff on planets possible without turning your graphics settings down and flying over one for hours. It's about as typical an FDev move as I can imagine that we got that, but made the process of getting to a point where you were ready to do it about 10x as convoluted in the process.
 
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Yeah I'd hazard a wild guess that's because the sole reference we have is a couple of streams which happened whilst I was at work, meaning I get to fast scan through hour-long youtube videos which are 95% Ed and co prattling on about unrelated things just to try to catch the moment where they say 'and now we use the thingy in whatsit mode to err no wait that's... oh yes, there we go' all without any kind of reference whatsoever to what keys they're pressing, or indeed to what what keys they bound the controls that we can't see in the keybinding screen which they never show us. It's hardly instructive.

Or alternately, wade through endless forum threads which invariably involve people, all of whom who are genuinely trying to help, providing information which is directly in contradiction to information which other people who are genuinely trying to help posted three posts earlier.

Personally I feel that any reasonable adult should be able to figure this out on their own in a few minutes. That doesn't excuse the almost non-existent info/manual/tutorials by the way, but when I hear some folks talk here you'd almost think they are tasked with building a real-life rocket, rather than bind a handful of keys for example.
 
............
As I said the other day, I was parked up about 10K outside the bubble on update day and so far I haven't even felt motivated to log in because unless I want to spend most of my game time farting around playing match the dots in an interface rather than flying a ship, I'm only ever going to see a system map again in the bubble or other previously explored systems. The prospect of spending the bulk of my time ing around twiddling knobs and pointlessly switching between display modes whose sole function seems to be to prevent you from being able to use some controls in each of them, only to end up with about six fully mapped systems full of tedious snowballs for an hour of gameplay leaves me incredulous to be honest, it seems the vast majority of players have a very different concept of what comprises satisfying gameplay than I do.

..........


That is complete and utter doo-doo.
corrected :eek:

Honestly, this system is so simple, complete nonsense to assert otherwise. Just because a honk doen't give you a pretty picture of the system doesn't make the process bad. You previously had to open a screen to see what the honk found (the system map) - now you still have to open a screen (the FSS), it doesn't give you images of the bodies but info is there at a glance.

In use - Honk the DiscoScanner - no of bodies returned, if only stars then you see them so know not to bother with the FSS - if bodies to check, open FSS screen, look at the blue line for signals - if all in the icy / rocky worlds area exit FSS and jump out - if signals in "interesting" areas then tune & sweep view to centre on solid circle - zoom in - voila a detailed surface scan EVEN MANY THOUSANDS OF LS AWAY - no need to travel to distant bodies to get the "tag" - only need to go to a body to map with probes if you want to find what those FSS-revealed surface features are.

Try it - if you need to see about binds etc I made a post that details these and the process (it is rough-and-ready 'cos I am no "content producer").


P.S. Just to be clear on something - I am not being a "fan boy" for the new system, I actually prefer the old honk-and-view-the-system-map - what I am saying is that the new system is nowhere near as bad as people say / think / assume.
 
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That is complete and utter doo-doo.

Honestly, this system is so simple, complete nonsense to assert otherwise. Just because a honk doen't give you a pretty picture of the system doesn't make the process bad. You previously had to open a screen to see what the honk found (the system map) - now you still have to open a screen (the FSS), it doesn't give you images of the bodies but info is there at a glance.

Dude I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful here, really I do, but the information that I want in order to decide whether to investigate a system further is not 'available at a glance' at all. My issue with the new system is not that I don't understand it. It's that understanding it, I don't like it. That does in fact make it bad, for me.

I did say very clearly that it makes the process of gaining all the information that you would previously have gained from a DSS scan faster, I know that. It is just not a trade-off for having ALL of the information that an ADS scan previously presented to me in the system map after about five seconds, in that clearly presented format, because in a majority of cases, that information would have told me that I had no interest in detail scanning anything in the system, meaning there is no time saving at all by the 'detail scanning' process being made faster. It's not all about finding earth-likes, or credits either so simply knowing what type of bodies are in a system is not the be-all and end-all of it.

It wouldn't matter if it only took one minute to fully scan a system with the new method because that is still one minute longer than not doing it and it's time spent farting about playing space pong instead of heading off somewhere else that may hold something of interest to me.

I'm not trying to convince you not to like it, I'm just saying that I don't, which as I said is an entirely subjective thing and therefore not really possible to argue about in the first place since the argument would be along the lines of 'you don't know what you like and what you don't like'. Which I'm sure you'll agree is actually the aforementioned doo-doo, since I'm perfectly capable of deciding whether I like something or not.

I really don't know what else I can add; I've seen other players say that aspects of previous updates have basically killed parts of the game off for them, this time round I guess it's just my turn in the barrel. It's unfortunate because exploration was the one thing that would keep me coming back to the game and I'm really not feeling that's going to be the case any more but when the game developers basically post that they considered the impact on players such as me and decided to go ahead anyway my choices are pretty much reduced to 'don't play and moan on the forums about it' or just 'don't play'. I try to avoid moaning on the forums too much (which is the main reason I've hardly been on here since the beta, because it's kind of hard to keep reading about how great this is and how I'm just too thick to understand it when that's not the case at all) and given what FDev said about it before beta it's obviously not going to change, so whatever. It is what it is and they're no doubt going to carry on making enough money from people who love it that those of us who don't will remain a complete irrelevance to them. Such is life.

Your post about keybindings is very good by the way, I saw it back when you made it.
 
Dude I appreciate that you're trying to be helpful here, really I do, but the information that I want in order to decide whether to investigate a system further is not 'available at a glance' at all. My issue with the new system is not that I don't understand it. It's that understanding it, I don't like it. That does in fact make it bad, for me.

.......

Your post about keybindings is very good by the way, I saw it back when you made it.

My P.S. in the previous post overlapped your reply here - yes the previous system was better and preferable to me too, however I doubt it will change back even though it could, just by making the FSS additional to the system map reveal - I didn't appreciate that you had given it a go, sorry.


(Thanks for that comment, that post was made without planning and it just did a Frankenstein. :eek: )


How exactly is it doo doo as you describe?

Nothing he said is factually incorrect because its his opinion of the system and you just happen to hold a differing opinion.

Yeah - covered that above and did an edit too. ta
 
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My issue with the new system is not that I don't understand it. It's that understanding it, I don't like it. That does in fact make it bad, for me.

The problem is that people who don't like it tend to describe their experiences in such a way that they are either 'being creative' or actually don't know how it works. Your 'after one hour I have six fully mapped systems with worthless iceballs' for example is simply not what happens when you understand the system. The real issue, which others are more reluctant to openly say, is:

It wouldn't matter if it only took one minute to fully scan a system with the new method because that is still one minute longer than not doing it and it's time spent farting about playing space pong instead of heading off somewhere else that may hold something of interest to me.

Here you basically say that any deviation from 'instant results', no matter how small, is too much and 'breaks' the game for you. And while everyone is of course entitled to whatever opinion they want to have, and the honesty is appreciated, you have to acknowledge yours is an extreme one to hold.
 
Yes, I have to target one of the actual gas vents

Well, I always thought that to target something you had to have it selected.
This new Complimentary Scanner doesn't target anything, you just have to point it at the thing you want to scan (as long as it's something that can be scanned).

So here's a video of me eating crow: "Yeah I was Wrong"

[video=youtube_share;yVu0wZclAi8]https://youtu.be/yVu0wZclAi8[/video]
 
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The problem is that people who don't like it tend to describe their experiences ..........


The problem surely is that people spent years asking for "exploration buff" and so...

"Be careful what you wish for" - seems rather appropriate. :)


(just edited-in the quote to distance my post from DNA's)
 
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The problem surely is that people spent years asking for "exploration buff" and so...

"Be careful what you wish for" - seems rather appropriate. :)


(just edited-in the quote to distance my post from DNA's)

I remember when Michael Brookes said 'the foundation of exploration is solid', and people lost their mind. "The ADS is a placeholder! It is absurd you get to see all that with one press of the button! Where are the scanning mechanics!". I can't remember anyone at the time saying anything else.

It doesnt mean people aren't entitled to be unhappy about this or that, but we're a difficult bunch to please. Especially when the complaints essentially become:"We want more depth and mechanics, but it shouldn't take any longer to get the info I want. And the info I want isn't something quantifiable or tied-in to any other game mechanic, but specifically stuff I just happen to find interesting on a personal level." In a nutshell people have become extremely attached to what is ultimately a side-effect of a placeholder mechanic, to the point that nothing else matters. Which isn't particularly easy to design around when you have other, and seemingly more common, concerns to deal with.
 
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Why?

You are firing a probe - so why not fire with a fire button?

Doesn't sound stupid.

It's just incredibly bad UI design.

The thing you map to the fire group is is labeled as DSS, and when you fire it you enter DSS Mode. It's not labeled "and also DSS Probe", and no other firegroup item in the game has a dual functionality like that.

There's no indication in the DSS UI that your ship's firegroup mappings are still relevant. It's an entirely different interface than my HUD, so why should I expect my HUD mappings to matter. When I dismiss a hired SLF pilot, I don't map them to a firegroup to "fire" them either.

It would have been trivial for them to just add a keybind for "launch probe", which would have been the sensible thing, given it's a new UI mode and everything. Yes, it's more keybinds, which is the exact thing people are complaining about, but greater than that is consistency: You don't create a new keybind for every single feature but then, with zero UI feedback, make one random feature have undocumented double-functionality.
 
Yeah do a video. I’ll do one too. I’m just jumping in game now.
We’ll compare tomorrow.

There’s a planet with Thargoid Barnies and Bark Mounds I haven’t done yet.

Glad you were able to check it. I tried making a video, and the GeForce Experience didn't want to cooperate.
 
It's just incredibly bad UI design.

..........

There's no indication in the DSS UI that your ship's firegroup mappings are still relevant. It's an entirely different interface than my HUD, so why should I expect my HUD mappings to matter. When I dismiss a hired SLF pilot, I don't map them to a firegroup to "fire" them either.

........

1 I agree it is not good UI design, the whole new exploration UI is not good UI design - I am not defending the design, joist pointing out how the probes are fired.

2. Yes there is an indication, I don't know why other people's systems are not showing what I see:

YDkZScJ.jpg



[hotas]
 
That's an indication of what button to press, not that it's mapped to a firegroup. I never said it didn't say what button to press. I said there's no indication that your ship's firegroup mappings are still relevant. Those are two different things.

Mine says I have to press "Delete" to fire. There is no indication your ship's firegroup mappings are relevant in the DSS UI.
 
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Here you basically say that any deviation from 'instant results', no matter how small, is too much and 'breaks' the game for you. And while everyone is of course entitled to whatever opinion they want to have, and the honesty is appreciated, you have to acknowledge yours is an extreme one to hold.

The thing you're perhaps missing Sleuty is the proportion of occasions upon which the 'result' (i.e a meaningful overview of the system) is essentially a nil return, which is often the case when you're looking for the beautiful and/or unusual as opposed to (for example) 'any random water world I can farm for credits' or are one of those players who doesn't care what they discover because every class 2 gas giant is just as exciting to them as the last almost-identical class 2 gas giant they found.

That's the thing; if I was flying around and every fifth system I dropped into had something that piqued my interest then yeah sure, a significant increase in the amount of time it takes to form that impression would be tolerable. When it's more like one in a hundred or more, you're looking at a few day's game time without finding jack. I value my time too much to spend a few day's game time without feeling any sense of achievement against my personal objectives.

Like I've said before this update is great for credit farmers, it's great for people who want to find surface POIs and it's great for people who enjoy completing a lovingly curated spreadsheet with details of the 8,576 slightly varied snowballs they've encountered. For simple souls like me who just want to find stuff to go 'oooh!' at, it's a bag of balls.

The problem surely is that people spent years asking for "exploration buff" and so...

"Be careful what you wish for" - seems rather appropriate. :)

That's the horrible irony here; I'd actually held off going out on another long trip for maybe six months because I knew the exploration update was coming. Stupidly I imagined an exploration update might focus on content (i.e. stuff to find) more than on adding layers of obfuscation onto the mechanics. I can only assume I temporarily forgot who made the game. My bad.
 
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