DSS Overlay Map - Make it Better!

What colour does it change to if there is a specific location instead of all over as you say? Or does it?
It goes to blue patches where there is a liklihood of finding that particlar bio.
If luck is with you, there will be different bio types on the same hotspot, and the remaining adjacent to it.
 
What colour does it change to if there is a specific location instead of all over as you say? Or does it?
The screen shots you posted were set to show all geologicals present so anywhere in the blue region should contain them, if you swap to a particular signal the areas in blue could change depending on how many of them overlap. However with geological locations I don't recall seeing any where all the signals on one planet weren't all in the same areas.

The colour doesn't change depending on what is selected just the area.
 
The screen shots you posted were set to show all geologicals present so anywhere in the blue region should contain them, if you swap to a particular signal the areas in blue could change depending on how many of them overlap. However with geological locations I don't recall seeing any where all the signals on one planet weren't all in the same areas.

The colour doesn't change depending on what is selected just the area.
Thank you, that is exactly what I needed.
 
So, what colour am I supposed to be looking for? Despite looking around, all I can find are vague references to blue but to me, the whole screen looks blue. See below.

Yes, I am fairly colourblind and I have no idea what I am looking at. Cycling through the filters, I do not see anything change. I really would appreciate some help. Sorry if this is thread hijack. This is both sides of the same planet.


Ah ok, you are looking at geo, nearly all geo will be found in the same locations so the map will be identical no matter what sort of geo it says, fumaroles, vents etc, this is because there is only one condition for geo, for the area to be volcanically active, if it is you will find all the geo features there. Bio will show different areas, so look for a body with bio to see how it works rather than geo.
 
I feel like someone is going to point out key binding, but is it normal for all the text channels to open when you activate the DSS?
 
I think I'm stating the obvious. And yep, I'm sure this got talked about ad nauseam when Odyssey came out. But I quit the game back then because of other issues. So I missed that.


1. Give it a proper name.
Can FDev please officially call this something so we can stop calling it a "heatmap". Blue Overlay Map sounds good.
Biological Area Potential Signature System?

2. Decouple the Blue Overlay Map from the DSS.
Let us look at it regardless if we are in supercruise. Once the planet is scanned... we have the data. We don't need to rescan the planet... so why do we need to be in supercruise to see it ??? Let us keybind a key to toggle on/off the Blue Overlay Map.


3.Changing the filter.
Allow us to change the filter.without being in DSS mode.
This is something I wished for also. I think the Orrery would be a good way to refer back to it, and give the option of cycling through the different bio signatures. Speaking of Orrery..

No, the worst thing about it is

a) It defaults the view to the primary star, not your ship's position.

b) It doesn't remember what you were looking at. So every time you open the orrery view you must re-position the view in 3D space. If you are interested in the secondary star system... this just sucks.
I agree that the orrery navigation could be simpler, though I wonder if it couldn't be resolved with improved bindings. The galactic map also does not 'remember' positions, if you find a star and check the system map, when you back out it will go straight back to your starting position. It would be nice if it reverted back to the place you were when you clicked the system map. Once you back out of the galactic map, then that's fine, though maybe it wouldn't be a bad idea to keep that persistent as well, there's always the home button to take you back to the system you are in.

The other thing about the Orrery that I would like to see, and have mentioned before, is that it works like it did in Frontier: Elite II, where you could fast forward & rewind time to see the orbits and rotation. That would be useful for exploration IMO.
 
How is it working "better" now? There are still plenty of times that I land on a very large blue zone and there's nothing there. Not a single sign of life for miles and miles around.
Yeah. I'm on Horizon (so no biologicals.) I found a tiny planet that had a pretty good geology with lots of sulphur and I thought "well, since it's a small planet, I can maybe make a sensible dent in this debate at last because it's small enough to actually drive across degrees of latitude" thinking that might take the luck out of it a little bit.

The scan was probably about 60% blue and the shape of it was kind of like oceans and seas (so I guess they were igneous intrusions under the yellow and presumably very stinky crust) so I drove around across both the small patches and the big patches for long enough to run out of fuel and found a whole two piceous cobble in all that time.

I flew round to the antipodes and landed in the tiniest of blue patches in the middle of nothing and there were a whole bunch of geysers with crystalline whatnots immediately.

So I don't know what the blue actually means but it certainly doesn't correlate well with "drive around here to find a bunch of shizzle." Which makes geology essentially impossible in Horizons.

I mean "anywhere in the blue area" is fine and makes some kind of sense, so you still have to do some prospecting, but when there's one decent site in an entire hemisphere of blue, that does feel a bit unbalanced!

And by the time I'd spent that hour driving around under a yellow sun on a sulfur planet I was hallucinating the actual stench of those geysers...
 
In many ways the orrery map is a classic example of be careful what you wish for.

The best thing about it is that it is done to scale.
The worst thing about it is that it is done to scale.

No, the worst thing about it is

a) It defaults the view to the primary star, not your ship's position.

b) It doesn't remember what you were looking at. So every time you open the orrery view you must re-position the view in 3D space. If you are interested in the secondary star system... this just sucks.

If done properly the orrery view would definitely be my preferred system view. Instead it is frustrating and I never use it. Whoever gave the approval for this quite clearly does not play the game and just doesn't care about delivering useful game features. It is a shame because time and effort went into a feature that is almost good.
My understanding is this version of the map was developed first, and I can understand why as this view is the physics-first, logic-first, engine-first thing you would use. The system view with the planets laid out the way a human can grok them all in one glance came later and should be the view with all the user-centric design, except of course it doesn't have that, because you still can't easily go "which station had that materials trader I noticed earlier?" It's prettier, and it's a better basis for what could be a very strong UX and UI, but as ever, FDev's idea of 80/20 is not a pilot's idea of 80/20.
I use the orrery in big systems if I am doing some in-system trading and want to fit another hop in, or stacking missions in a similar way, or if there are three landables out of 20 bodies and I want to scan them all. Otherwise nope.

Which is a shame because in both FFE and the Archimedes' Dark Angel, watching your ship and the planets baz around the interplanetary space was a game all by itself.
 
I'd imagine that game doesn't spawn the individual bios until you are very close, so possibly hard to show exactly where they are from space. Thus the reason that it indicates where it might be found, not where it is to be found.
I'm assuming that too, which means it's actually showing you the weighted probabilities of spawning anything, which means it is, yes, that's right, a goddam heat map.
 
Yeah. I'm on Horizon (so no biologicals.)

There are biologicals in Horizons, visit a nebula to find Brain Trees and Bark Mounds (if you are on the south side of the bubble) nearer the core and north for tubers, and just about anywhere for crystaline shards. Of course B class stars will give you anemones as well just abut anywhere, you just can't get the atmospheric biologicals.
 
I'm assuming that too, which means it's actually showing you the weighted probabilities of spawning anything, which means it is, yes, that's right, a goddam heat map.

No it isn't, it doesn't show the possibility of bio at all really, it shows the ecological potential of an area, ie for instance there could be plant X in this location because the temperature, atmosphere and star type is correct. There are no weighted probabilities, it's a yes or no map, "Yes" they could be in this blue area somewhere, and "No" they can't be in the non-blue area at all.
 
No it isn't, it doesn't show the possibility of bio at all really, it shows the ecological potential of an area, ie for instance there could be plant X in this location because the temperature, atmosphere and star type is correct. There are no weighted probabilities, it's a yes or no map, "Yes" they could be in this blue area somewhere, and "No" they can't be in the non-blue area at all.
Oo ok, I hadn't appreciated the way "biologicals" has been defined and implemented, thank you. What I said about "Horizon so no biologicals" doesn't make any sense now so please disregard and I'll ask it a different way.

When I wrote the second comment about heat maps, I was talking about geology (but I didn't say so, and it wasn't clear the way I wrote it, because I misunderstood what counted as biologicals). So, if crystalline shards are actually generated the biology way, please ignore those and assume I am talking about fumeroles, geysers, etc.

So on Horizons, if you go to a likely-looking world, you scan it, and 60% of the planet is blue, does that mean:
a) Land anywhere, drive around for 30 minutes, you'll find a metal or two;
b) Land in a specific place, drive around for 30 minutes, you'll find All The Things;
c) Same as you explained for biology: this world is 9% nickel, but only if you drive around in the blue bits.

and if it's b, but the DSS map is all the same shade of blue, how do I know where the good spot is?

[As for biologicals I get the point and I saw upthread that some people were complaining about it, which seems like a silly complaint, because the way it is now, where you need a genuine understanding of what might grow where, is the way it should be, otherwise it ain't biology, it's just more dice-rolling.]
 
and if it's b, but the DSS map is all the same shade of blue, how do I know where the good spot is?

Basically the answer is, experience, by knowing what sort of landscapes support what sort of feature, be it bio or geo, that's really the only way. I can expound on it more later if you want more detail, but I am out of time at the moment.
 
Thanks - that is actually what I thought and again I like that you have to do geology to do geology, I just wondered if I was missing a shortcut. Seems not. Now I wish SC would let you put the ship in a much lower, powered orbit (or lock your altitude, which is the same thing)
 
IME (even though I'm not a big explorer), geologicals are easier to find close to what I'd call stress or fracture points, like craters, in ravines, etc.

The old system would send you to a few specific points where it was all laid out like a banquet table.
 
Yep, I think that's why the Wave Scanner shows you outcrops. It's a good clue something outcropped and has other somethings near it. :)

Still not sure if the outcrops are instance based or procedural at the moment, they used to be entirely instance based, and if they still are then they really don't indicate anything else. The outcrops show up on the wave scanner due to mat content, just like the horizons bio's will due to having mat content. Used to be we could find old crashed satellites and broken up SRV's using the wave scanner but they stopped appearing a long time ago, but then again farming using SRV is lot less common now, I rarely use it to do that sort of thing so maybe they still exist but I doubt it. I suppose we could test if outcrops are instance or procedural by locating one and recording the position, leaving the instance and then returning to see if it appeared in the exact same location. I will do that next time I get a chance.
 
So, what colour am I supposed to be looking for? Despite looking around, all I can find are vague references to blue but to me, the whole screen looks blue. See below.
The colour that denotes the highest probability is called "Gasoline Green"; ie it is more green/turqoise, not any shade of blue.
-i have marked some of the areas with said colour on the attached screenshot.

"Green is good = GG"
gg.png



Do feel free to ask if anything needs clarification; if i need to adjust the colours to make it more visible lmk.


cheers
 
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