The only reason im not complaining about the the terrible colours is that im focussed on the FSS problem atm. No point bothering about the colour problem until firstly i start playing again and secondly i have investigated what i can do about it from my end. I remember the light from stars as being a resonably good approximation of light that is unfiltered by atmosphere, it came over as such and imo was something to be praised. Being near a star now is like being in some kind of pinkish orange soup and the red background stars are just plain wrong.
FSS vs. ADS – and Alternative or Additional Options for Compelling Gameplay
- Thread starter WR3ND
- Start date
Oh, sorry, i was only really responding to your very first, outlandish statement there.
I’m sure that you’re ideas are very nice but until they’re in the ‘game’ they don’t answer anything
Hey, question for all you fss is fun people: is there any way to tell from a raw spectrum if a body is orbiting another body or the local star?
Ive been trying this evening in good faith to do it, and im thinking its not possible. I think what there is to go by possibly is the height and width of the ticks, and whatever is in the white rectangle showing the arrows, but from what ive seen that only shows if it has rings or not?
You can do a good percentage of them via elimination of gas giants but thats not certain. Course you can do it by panning around but and looking at the numbers after you resolve them but if you go that far its defeated the purpose of trying to read the spectrum.
Oh wait, its all about credits right.. yeah if all you care about is specific bodies yes it does that
damn.
Ive been trying this evening in good faith to do it, and im thinking its not possible. I think what there is to go by possibly is the height and width of the ticks, and whatever is in the white rectangle showing the arrows, but from what ive seen that only shows if it has rings or not?
You can do a good percentage of them via elimination of gas giants but thats not certain. Course you can do it by panning around but and looking at the numbers after you resolve them but if you go that far its defeated the purpose of trying to read the spectrum.
Oh wait, its all about credits right.. yeah if all you care about is specific bodies yes it does that
damn.![[Diplomacy] Carnegie](https://forums-cdn.zaonce.net/data/avatars/m/123/123809.jpg?1553527149){kind=avatar}
Wasn't FD's original plan for the FSS to be an actual module? IIRC they made it free when people pointed out that by tying it to the new USS mechanic they'd made it so EVERYONE would have to fit one, not just explorers.
This whole mess could have been avoided if they'd held a Focused Feedback when they intended to, rather than having to hack around with a 'completed' system just before it went to beta. Instead, they spent 30 minutes in a room somewhere coming up with their '12 exploration styles' rather than actually listening to explorers.
I like the tinted skybox it adds different character to different systems and makes the game feel more varied. Great addition to the game.
You can check what the signals are without travelling at all, that's how the FSS works. Are you another rage quitter repeating some inaccurate cobblers you read somewhere but can't fact check for yourself ?.
Rather than just ranting why not give it a try, presumably you do own the game.
I can't argue that it isn't true about you.
Know what the funniest thing about the fss is.. truly comical.. when you get into some of the "advanced" features, its hilarious how they've gone out of their way to encode information just to be cryptic. Its a hud interface. Instead of using letters, they've put in these elaborate arrangement of triangles... that are supposed to communicate information.
Its like if you went up to a person and started talking to them, but that person with a fully prepared response started waving their hands randomly and had an epileptic fit representing what they were trying to say. If the ships computer wanted to convey the information, they could have just said it.
Sorry late to the party i know. I still think that at least personally now the nav panel has direct links to detailed information it will be enough to get through it. If only i could convince myself that exploration is super awesome sitting at the star and credits are the only thing im after. A challenge.. i think i can i think i can
Its like if you went up to a person and started talking to them, but that person with a fully prepared response started waving their hands randomly and had an epileptic fit representing what they were trying to say. If the ships computer wanted to convey the information, they could have just said it.
Sorry late to the party i know. I still think that at least personally now the nav panel has direct links to detailed information it will be enough to get through it. If only i could convince myself that exploration is super awesome sitting at the star and credits are the only thing im after. A challenge.. i think i can i think i can
See, it doesn't. Let me remind you of an earlier reply of mine, to you. To quote it:
Oh, this has been repeated quite a lot of times, but let's do it one more time. The FSS does not have all the functionality of the ADS. There is information missing that we used to have at a glance, chief among them being the orbital hierarchy of the system and the visuals of the bodies in question. The FSS now hides such behind playing the mini-game, and in order to ascertain whether a system might be worth exploring, first you have to explore it in full. (The rest might only be mapping to reveal the exact location of POIs that you now know are there.)
One example of what's practically impossible to find now: a group of five bodies with shared barycenters. Very rare, but they do exist, and are quite curious. It took me 50,000 systems to find one, that being M36 Sector RI-T c3-5. Here's what it looked like after the ADS honk + system map combo:
It was of course immediately obvious that I found something extremely rare.
Thanks to Spaceman Si, here's how it looks like after the honk now:
You can no longer tell this special system apart from others, and to reveal that it would be worth stopping to scan this system of completely average body composition, you'd first have to scan the entire system.
You might not find such edge cases of the Stellar Forge important, but for those of us who do - or rather, did - the means of finding them are practically gone.
As I probably explained earlier all the information is there its just displayed differently. You wanting it at a glance doesn't equate to it being missing.
Know what the funniest thing about the fss is.. truly comical.. when you get into some of the "advanced" features, its hilarious how they've gone out of their way to encode information just to be cryptic. Its a hud interface. Instead of using letters, they've put in these elaborate arrangement of triangles... that are supposed to communicate information.
Its like if you went up to a person and started talking to them, but that person with a fully prepared response started waving their hands randomly and had an epileptic fit representing what they were trying to say. If the ships computer wanted to convey the information, they could have just said it.
Sorry late to the party i know. I still think that at least personally now the nav panel has direct links to detailed information it will be enough to get through it. If only i could convince myself that exploration is super awesome sitting at the star and credits are the only thing im after. A challenge.. i think i can i think i can
I like games that require me to know stuff.
No, you didn't. So, tell me: in the FSS, how can you tell the orbital hierarchy of the system?
What you need to do now is to scan the whole system, and then you... call up the system map. "The FSS now hides such behind playing the mini-game, and in order to ascertain whether a system might be worth exploring, first you have to explore it in full."
Don't get me wrong though. I don't think that the ADS was good: it was a placeholder mechanic. However, neither is the FSS: it was (and still is) a rushed job, a low-effort solution to tick off some boxes for management. I'd rather Frontier gave the FSS the ADS treatment, and ripped it out of the game completely in favour of something new. Honestly, I think they can do better than either the FSS or the ADS.
The only thing in the fss interface is once you’ve discovered a body, it’s number is displayed in the blue screen. As you go through it you can imagine it together but it’s useless since you often want that information before having to go through the dumb panning.
Yeah definitely feels like a first iteration. If you want to know what they were doing with it go back and rewatch the livestream where they introduced it. Once you’re familiar with using it everything they say becomes really obvious and well... frontier did achieve what they stated they were doing....
Scan the system then open the system map.
I think you are being unrealistic expecting a complete rewrite of exploration. It is what it is.
Sadly, the name alone isn't sufficient to tell the entire orbital hierarchy. Like you said, you have to get through the minigame if you want that information.
Which is exactly what I wrote. Or do you seriously want to imply that the system map is a part of the FSS interface?
There's also that from an average of 11-12 bodies per system, players scan an average of 4.5-5. (Source: EDSM numbers.) Sadly, we don't have the numbers for medians, or the percentage ratios of system bodies scanned. That number is down from its peak of 10 when DW2 started (and was a bit over 8 when Chapter Four launched), so we can certainly say that players are less and less interested in scanning whole systems.
Whatever information requires whole system scans now, is information that will most likely be lost.
See, I didn't say this.
Unless you think that designing and implementing a new body scanning mechanism and interface would be a "complete rewrite of exploration", which it factually wouldn't be. After all, neither was the FSS. It didn't bring new galaxy generation, it didn't bring new gameplay mechanics, and so on. It would probably as easy to be replaced as the ADS was, and as you know, there's precedent for this now.
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I did think it was odd that you asked how to do something you mentioned how to do yourself.
Alright. Since you ignored the question, I think I can safely assume then that you do think that the system map is a part of the FSS.
Certainly you can do that, but I'm going to say that is poor game design.
You should be given enough information by the game to know that the activity you are going to do is something you want to do, not just randomly thrash around hoping it's what you want to do. The FSS gives that for 'traditional' reward based exploration. You can tell as soon as you look at the spectrum that there's a valuable body present, so using the FSS is simply a natural process to engage in to 'discover' it, and the FSS scan revealing that there are POI's present leads a player to want to fly to it to probe it. There's a flow because one thing leads to another and the player isn't expected to waste their game time on results they are not looking for.
Of course, if a person likes using the FSS and the DSS in their own right, there's nothing to stop them doing that.
But to scan a system just in the hope that what you want is there is not good gameplay. I'll accept that as an argument only the day that FD remove the spectrum and give simply a body count on the screen. Then we'll see who likes the FSS.
Feel free, you'd be wrong though.
Certainly you can do that, but I'm going to say that is poor game design.
You should be given enough information by the game to know that the activity you are going to do is something you want to do, not just randomly thrash around hoping it's what you want to do. The FSS gives that for 'traditional' reward based exploration. You can tell as soon as you look at the spectrum that there's a valuable body present, so using the FSS is simply a natural process to engage in to 'discover' it, and the FSS scan revealing that there are POI's present leads a player to want to fly to it to probe it. There's a flow because one thing leads to another and the player isn't expected to waste their game time on results they are not looking for.
Of course, if a person likes using the FSS and the DSS in their own right, there's nothing to stop them doing that.
But to scan a system just in the hope that what you want is there is not good gameplay. I'll accept that as an argument only the day that FD remove the spectrum and give simply a body count on the screen. Then we'll see who likes the FSS.
If you don't scan the system you'll never know if what you want is there.
I don't get the problem with the system map. People groaned for years about wanting an orrery and they have one now along with it. Why would FDEV remove that ?, given how important some of the same people groaning about the FSS spent years saying it was.
Exactly.
There's proof that as players accumulate more experience with exploration, they don't do complete scans of every system they come across. It's a good idea to dissect why not. But for starters, it's mostly because not every system is interesting, as it should be - and the whole system scanning gameplay is not nearly fun enough to do hundreds and thousands of times.
On the other hand, does FD even care about players not scanning whole systems? It might be that all they want is for them to find the hand-crafted assets instead. The fact that you don't even need to call up the FSS to find NSPs, and what the Codex ended up being, certainly seem to point towards such a shift in focus. (Away from the generated galaxy and towards manually authored content.)
Right. To recap then: you said the FSS shows you everything. When asked about the overview of orbital hierarchies, you correctly said that you need to call up the system map to view them. Which isn't part of the FSS then, so the FSS doesn't show you everything.