Game too big to be mapping on paper?

[pelthalas]

I've logged in a few times and just feel daunted by the sheer scale of the game. I'm not naive enough to think I could ever see it all. At 10 minutes per system it would take over 32 million years of full time work just to visit them, let alone explore. If there were a million players spread out and online at any one time and none of them were playing solo, there would only be a 1/400,000 chance of meeting one of them in the same system, let alone in range of scanners. The game is vast beyond comprehension, so why am I sitting with a pen and paper trying to map and log trade routes so that I have some way of keeping track of where I've been and what I've seen? My ship has a computer capable of solving the mindbogglingly complex equations that allow me to match speeds with anything in the universe but it can't keep track of the prices of items for sale at systems I've seen? It seems like the worst kind of nonsense to me and is completely ruining my sense of submersion. Can any of you imagine the crew of the Starship enterprise wandering around with sheets of paper to draw maps of the places they'd visited? Of course they wouldn't, then why should we?

When I played the original Elite (ZX Spectrum version) I was content to be doing this all by hand, there were less things to trade, far less objects to interact with and of course a lot less systems. I was also aware that the limitations of my computer at that time were being stretched almost to breaking point by the game as it was so I cut it some slack but none of those caveats apply any more. How about an upgraded trading computer that does all this for me? It could be fairly costly and I would be Ok with that, but I am really having trouble with the idea that in order to explore and record data I have to do it all on paper.

 

[Snakebite]

I was going to get the graph pad out, but after looking at the scale of it I realised it would take several rain forrests worth of graph paper, so I gave up on the idea....

 

[Andovar]

I thought I remember reading somewhere that a future feature was going to be a commanders log. Although I can't find it now (maybe somewhere in the DDA?)
I know it's something many want, myself included. Hopefully it makes it into the game at some point.

 

[steviebuk]

Frontier Elite game with the Galaxy Map for the main areas. Shame this doesn't have something similar but I think there are more stars in this one.

 

[Snakebite]

The map in Frontier FFE was 3d but was severely flattened out with the z-axis being very small, so it could be printed onto paper. This is not the case now that the map is fully 3-d

 

[Jackie Silver]

It isn't too big to map on paper.

Think of a town map; it doesn't show every blade of grass but it shows roads and buildings. An "M" dwarf is a blade of grass. A nebula is a park. An "O" star is a tower block.

It also helps that the galaxy is effectively flat. Sure and it's a thousand light years or more high disk but it's a hundred thousand light years across. A pancake.
(Well, except the middle is a bit bumpier, but whatever.)

 

[Amazing Mr. X]

I think the worst part of it is that any amount of drawn map would only be useful for a limited amount of time. The prices of all of tradable commodities change depending on the actions of other players, yourself, and the AI simulation as a whole. Just running the same route too many times would risk oversaturating the markets and limiting your profitability. If all of these values were static then the three page chart I worked out on launch day would at least have some value in the applicable systems, but these numbers haven't been relevant now for some time. You can chart out trade routes all you want, and map star systems till your heart's content, but even the positions of the celestial objects would change over the course of months or years. Drop the game for long enough, come back, and even systems you used to know like the back of your hand will be utterly unfamiliar and alien in their configuration. That's to say nothing of faction control, which can shift completely as well. A system can change from Federation to Independent when you're not even looking, or suddenly get conquered by The Empire.

The scale didn't daunt me at first, but the quick realization of just how utterly fluid everything actually was within that scale most definitely did.

The whole galaxy can change before your map even begins to take shape.