Exploration upgrades and improvements

[Troopi]

Hi there Mates.
Here's a post about Exploration, and what could make it outstanding.

First, a small improvement that I think is needed, for performance issues and visual aesthetics: instead of progressively filling the galactic map with blue lines to every star that a ship can jump to in one go, use a different icon to mark these stars on the map. Players will be able to look at the map cleanly, without so many lines obstructing the view, and reducing game performance. The need to quickly jump to a close star, or to the furthest possible in a specific direction will still be possible by looking at the stars icons.

Second, create an interstellar scanner module, allowing pilots to scan an area of space in the galactic map (around it's position or long range directional), to locate anomalies. Being these anything out of the ordinary, with unusual energy/composition spectrums. It would be a great way for players to search for wrecks, lost structures, lost ships floating in space, etc...
The scanner would pin-point a specific system on proximity. After that, upon reaching the system, this scanner could work with the fss to speed up planetary scans (geological scans are specially slow), and with the discovery honk locate the direction of the detected anomaly and it's location (planet, nebula, area of space) before the need for surface detail probes.

Hope this helps to make Elite better.
Cheers.

 

[Ian Doncaster]

First, a small improvement that I think is needed, for performance issues and visual aesthetics: instead of progressively filling the galactic map with blue lines to every star that a ship can jump to in one go, use a different icon to mark these stars on the map. Players will be able to look at the map cleanly, without so many lines obstructing the view, and reducing game performance. The need to quickly jump to a close star, or to the furthest possible in a specific direction will still be possible by looking at the stars icons.

With exploration-class jump ranges and fastest routing the blue lines are a bit pointless, especially around the core ... with beginner-class FSDs (or even unengineered combat ship) or economic routing they provide a good way of determining how to get from A to B especially in sparser locations.

You can achieve this already by poking the map settings, though:
1) Click on the "fastest routing" checkbox again. This will disable the blue lines, but leave the routing algorithm at fastest. (A slightly more obvious way to do this would be nice, but it works)
2) Stars within jump range of your currently hovered star will have a little hat on them, which is easier to see now the blue lines are gone.

 

[varonica]

Hi there Mates.
Here's a post about Exploration, and what could make it outstanding.

First, a small improvement that I think is needed, for performance issues and visual aesthetics: instead of progressively filling the galactic map with blue lines to every star that a ship can jump to in one go, use a different icon to mark these stars on the map.

They also do the second, select any star and all stars within your ships jump range will have a little orange hat.

Hmm, maybe I should read to the end of the thread before commenting! Hi Ian

 

[Troopi]

I don't think the orange hat thingie is accurate. I've seen a lot of stars around my position, clearly out of bounds of my jump range, and they still had an orange hat. I think the orange hat has to do with the selected system, not your current system, but I'll need to check further. I'll post the results.

 

[varonica]

I don't think the orange hat thingie is accurate. I've seen a lot of stars around my position, clearly out of bounds of my jump range, and they still had an orange hat. I think the orange hat has to do with the selected system, not your current system, but I'll need to check further. I'll post the results.

That's exactly what we said, any star within jump range of the selected star, not your current location. So if you select a star on the galaxy map, no matter how far away from you current location, you will see all stars in your jump range from that star, will have on orange hat. Using that you can plot a route through a sparsely populated region by following orange hats.

 

[Troopi]

So, basically, we can already do without the route lines? All that is needed is a proper toggle button for it.