Fixing exploration once and for all

[Sysmon]

As Shakespeare once said: The best ideas come after a rough day at the office and slightly too many beers.

Let's fix exploration! The bones are there, but we need to get the actual discovery bits right.

Let's first accept that we are getting the idea of finding planets and stars right: Stars make up most of the mass of a solar system, and we can't really see effectively what's going on until they are resolved and we are in their system. Then we resolve other bodies by first resolving the gas giants and then their wee satellites. We could even forgive the simple subdivision of planets into metallic, rocky and icy bodies..

When we land on bodies, the simplicity of things get in the way: Life is crazily complicated even on the planet we are on at the moment, and we only have to deal with carbon-based organism! Yet we still don't quite understand the complexity even at a species level, and when we get into the fine detail, even then things fall apart. Add to that ecological preferences, and someone more omniscient than us might wonder what we were thinking when we thought we knew what was going on.

The main issue with exploration at the moment is that there is nothing new to be found. Yes, we have a multitude of new plants to find, but they are not actually new: The game knows what they are, so why do we really care? I f find that to be the most grinding aspect of the updated Odyssey exploration mechanics. I go can some pretty flower at planet X, and my gadget knows exactly where to place it in the Grand Scheme of Things. Even more annoying, it knows that but it doesn't know simple sample management and gets confused when trying to scan more than one species of specimen at the time.

Here is a new system:

Scrap the plant description when we first find them. Instead let the players catalog them themselves. When something is scanned, don't give us any information except for the weird and at the moment pointless marker pattern the hand-held scanner supplies when we left-click a new critter. Then give the player a field type a name into. That will be the sample name.

When enough of the same sample type has been collected, allow the player to "synthesize" a sample batch. That batch will be valuable if the player manage to group samples correctly and the result makes sense. If not, the player gets a smaller pay-out. The game itself will of course still know what each sample is supposed to belong to, but that information is not shared with the player.

When the player has shared some information with the genetic dudes, the tool may guess what a new sample may belong to. Or when it is basically something found before, show that this thing has already been described, but thanks for additional information about it. Low payout, yes, but still payout. If it is a new variant, that's more exciting.

It would make organic scanning into more of a puzzle, and actually make it more than just marginally interesting. It would also make the art of accurate labelling a game element. And trust me it is important - I worked as a curator for a long time and a lot of valuable samples have been lost due to the fact that people can't figure out how to label something descriptively and uniquely.

So get to it FD, make sampling great! If you want advice, you know how to contact me.

S

 

[Dragsham]

+1

 

[Rubbernuke]

The way to fix exploration is to make it actually relevant to the game. Link system scans to the BGS for expansions, have a reason to scan for life (shady corporations a la Wayland Yutani) etc.

Right now (like a lot of things) exploration is a lightweight hobby that needs to escape its butterfly collecting image in ED.

 

[Northpin]

I worked as a curator for a long time and a lot of valuable samples have been lost due to the fact that people can't figure out how to label something descriptively and uniquely.

This reminds me of this (last night i've just seen a BBC Earth documentary regarding that particular Ichthyosaurus fossil)

From wikipedia

Ichthyosaurus anningae, described in 2015 from a fossil found in the early 1980s in Dorset, England, was named after Mary Anning. The fossil was acquired by Doncaster Museum and Art Gallery, where it was misidentified as a plaster cast. In 2008, Dean Lomax, from the University of Manchester, recognised it as genuine and worked with Judy Massare, of the State University of New York, to establish it as a new species.

However, i guess your proposal will make Exobiology interesting for curators mostly and maybe not so much for the general population that is less interested in cataloguing stuff and more in finding stuff, stuff that pays well and maybe that can put their name in the codex.

 

[Nadreck]

I was hoping that bio sampling would get us involved in shady deals with pharmaceutical companies, or conservationists trying to stop them.

Maybe one day I'll be trying to capture a six-legged dinosaur on an Earthlike world.

 

[LKx]

 

[Sysmon]

This reminds me of this (last night i've just seen a BBC Earth documentary regarding that particular Ichthyosaurus fossil)

From wikipedia


However, i guess your proposal will make Exobiology interesting for curators mostly and maybe not so much for the general population that is less interested in cataloguing stuff and more in finding stuff, stuff that pays well and maybe that can put their name in the codex.

The elements are already there, though. The spinny thing when we scan have the look of a lockpicking puzzle (which FD oddly made into a twitch-based abomination before making it into its pointless current iteration). Take the spinning bit away from the scan an instead let a scan resolve a ring or part of a ring as a puzzle piece. Also give the player some sort of storage to keep these pieces in and a way to group them and combine them. After scanning a number of pieces, the player can the try to resolve different types and subspecies of organisms. If three pieces are put together that fit and are different enough to describe that particular organism suitably, the player is rewarded.

Of course, there is still the issue of this part of exploration having to fit with everything else. But so far that has not been resolved about pretty much everything else added to the game since the beginning (detached nature of Power Play, CQC, deep core mining, AX research, ...).

S

 

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

I think what you're fundamentally saying is make exobio a sort of slow-burn puzzle that the community is progressively piecing together, which I can get behind.

One thing about exobio that I don't like (don't have Odyssey but this is my impression), is its lack of extremely diverse variety and it's seeming ubiquity. To me, one of the most rewarding things about it should be that you actually found some. The same stuff but sprouting out of every other rock puts me off. If it was a relatively rare sighting, the lack of variety would both be less obvious (you don't see enough examples to exhaust it, each new one is a real find for the community) and more forgivable (just glad to find one, even if it's similar to some others).

With both the planets and the exobio there should be things that FDev themselves didn't know would exist. That would make a real discovery (seems to be possible with planets, not so much with current exobio?).

One detail - as soon as you give people a text box it'll be filled with things you wish it hadn't. Also, you want some kind of consistent taxonomy, which would presumably require some kind of hardwiring of possible names too (but with some creative freedom for the discoverer).

 

[Sysmon]

I think what you're fundamentally saying is make exobio a sort of slow-burn puzzle that the community is progressively piecing together, which I can get behind.

One thing about exobio that I don't like (don't have Odyssey but this is my impression), is its lack of extremely diverse variety and it's seeming ubiquity. To me, one of the most rewarding things about it should be that you actually found some. The same stuff but sprouting out of every other rock puts me off. If it was a relatively rare sighting, the lack of variety would both be less obvious (you don't see enough examples to exhaust it, each new one is a real find for the community) and more forgivable (just glad to find one, even if it's similar to some others).

With both the planets and the exobio there should be things that FDev themselves didn't know would exist. That would make a real discovery (seems to be possible with planets, not so much with current exobio?).

One detail - as soon as you give people a text box it'll be filled with things you wish it hadn't. Also, you want some kind of consistent taxonomy, which would presumably require some kind of hardwiring of possible names too (but with some creative freedom for the discoverer).

Yes the game very obviously knows everything there is to be found already. Collecting organic specimens is like collecting stamps: There is a finite pool of variability that is fully known by the writers of the CODEX. One could say that of course the game itself knows it all already. However, that can be hidden from the player better so we still get a feeling of finding new stuff, or helping to build a better picture of known stuff (which is the case for much modern science as well).

It is odd that the variability isn't that great, but possibly FD is trying to avoid going into the territory of the outright bizarre like what No Man's Sky ventured into. I role-play the reason away as that the organisms were spread by space-farers and most likely us humans. I see that as a fairly obvious reason, considering that every explored or unexplored system within a few 1000 LY of the bubble are littered with distress beacons and minor wreckage sites: We have been at it for more than 1000 years at the point of time the game takes place in, so our litter should be everywhere.

Another oddity is that no life seems to have been present for very long: There has so far been found no fossils or reef-like structures were skeletal material have been accumulating for millennia or millions (or billions!) of years. Especially on planets without tectonic activity, that could leave some spectacular organic mounds. Stromatolites the size of mountains or even continents could be possible.

S

 

[[VR] Bulbulunufus]

Yes the game very obviously knows everything there is to be found already. Collecting organic specimens is like collecting stamps: There is a finite pool of variability that is fully known by the writers of the CODEX. One could say that of course the game itself knows it all already. However, that can be hidden from the player better so we still get a feeling of finding new stuff, or helping to build a better picture of known stuff (which is the case for much modern science as well).

I wouldn't say "of course", because procedural generation with enough variables can throw up unexpected outliers (particularly in a sample of 400bn systems). Weird but spectacular geography is easier to accept than nonsensical organics though - it's hard to have both variety and constrain things to believability (something that Elite takes seriously).

It is odd that the variability isn't that great, but possibly FD is trying to avoid going into the territory of the outright bizarre like what No Man's Sky ventured into.

Yup. But that to me is about believability constraints, which have an effect of acting against variety.

I role-play the reason away as that the organisms were spread by space-farers and most likely us humans. I see that as a fairly obvious reason, considering that every explored or unexplored system within a few 1000 LY of the bubble are littered with distress beacons and minor wreckage sites: We have been at it for more than 1000 years at the point of time the game takes place in, so our litter should be everywhere.

My get-out at the moment is that those organisms that are hardy enough to live in these places can also survive the vaccuum and spread to other planets, and not many such organisms exist. Environmental harshness restricts variety to a very confined set of evolvable possibilities.

Another oddity is that no life seems to have been present for very long: There has so far been found no fossils or reef-like structures were skeletal material have been accumulating for millennia or millions (or billions!) of years. Especially on planets without tectonic activity, that could leave some spectacular organic mounds. Stromatolites the size of mountains or even continents could be possible.

S

And now do that procedurally along with everything else! Best not to think too hard about realism...!

 

[LKx]

I was hoping that bio sampling would get us involved in shady deals with pharmaceutical companies, or conservationists trying to stop them.

Maybe one day I'll be trying to capture a six-legged dinosaur on an Earthlike world.

Big game hunting!
Maybe for the 2030's expansion!

 

[Chrystoph]

TB/sec superluminal data transfer for telepresence yet you cannot do real time scanning back to the ship's computer over a distance of 2KM...

 

[Northpin]

TB/sec superluminal data transfer for telepresence yet you cannot do real time scanning back to the ship's computer over a distance of 2KM...

Telepresence is a stupid thing
And it ruins basically all the lore that lies the base of the game - there is no superluminal travel nor any superluminal data transfer except our own ships.
Data is transferred between systems by couriers.

Then someone had the bright idea of multicrew by telepresence...

 

[zikolach]

When enough of the same sample type has been collected, allow the player to "synthesize" a sample batch.

One would collect samples (as of now) from different planets/systems and then attempt to combine similar ones (in a way similar to how one has to crack asteroid core) to improve quality of a batch. Then you can sell samples and batches you are not interested in at Astra Genomics and buy samples sold by other commanders to continue improving your batch. At certain level it could provide you some quest - e.g. to fly in specific region and find/collect specific samples there. And so on and so forth until you discover origin of your batch, which will award you with rare decoration piece to put in your cocpit.

 

[Schmack]

I could just imagine some of the planet names...

 

[denispage]

Let's not forget... The best thing they could do to exploration is: MAKE MORE CONTENT (not only boring stoned plants and... plants).