LaveCon 2018 QA quick recap
- Thread starter Cmdr Eagleboy
- Start date
Agreed...
My three hopes are:-
- The micro-mining mechanics are interesting: ie: Mining individual asteroids has new mechancis that are interesting, and can ideally involve physics too.
- The macro-mining mechanics give stateful resources, at least in the form of rare find: ie: You can find a rich mining location and as you mine it it will reduce down.
- The exploration additions give at least a new set of interesting things/graphics that can be encountered.
We'll see in six months how good all this is... But fingers crossed!
Also last thing we need is aspects having to be taken out of play a couple of weeks after release because major components of it aren't working/well balanced. Can never get it perfect, but the level of delivery has to be better.
One thing that always puzzled me how to resolve; Players encouraged to prospect in deep space possibly extract precious materials. Takes along time to get there and back etc to actually do anything with them. Seems a very slow way to actually get on with the game.
I'm not advocating easy gold rush type scenarios in the bubble but think there needs to be alot more independent/faction etc bases scattered around beyond the run to the galaxy core.
I'm not advocating easy gold rush type scenarios in the bubble but think there needs to be alot more independent/faction etc bases scattered around beyond the run to the galaxy core.
On a more serious note, it seems FD are at least trying to do some interesting things with ED. Hopefully Exploration will have a whole host of things to find now rather than just 'lightning storm in space'. Hoping comets makes it in to Q4 as well.
Have to say though, I think that Ice shader doesn't look great, really dont like the look of that. Seems way off to me, also something needs to be done generally regarding planet surfaces as they still look silly imo, regarding the general terrain (not just ice worlds).
Laveconnists aren't exactly a big community either...
As long as it's not the current peek-a-boo blue POIs...
Being literally in the room I can say it was 100% unvetted and the panel didnt know any questions in advance.
That being said on the spot people dont always ask the smarter questions. Also face to face people are nicer and also these are the people that are spending money and a weekend for an irl elite event. Its always going to be more tame than anonymous people on the internwts.
It may be an unpopular opinion, but....I like the peek-a-boo blue POIs.
I understand why FD designed them that way. They want us to use our ships to locate the general vicinity of a POI but then need to land and get the SRV out to narrow it down with the wavescanner, and honestly I like this mechanic. And truthfully if the POI is a big one I usually see it from the ship anyway.
What I hope is that the new probes will guide us in the general direction of the blue POIs by highlighting a reasonable search zone, so that we don't have to scour entire planet surfaces with our eyeballs any longer. If the Q4 update accomplishes this then I'll be very happy.
True. During Frontier Expo last year I asked five questions, none of them where in any public QAs or elsewhere. FD devs always answer if they can, they happy to do so. I hope there's some another lineup of questions in Lave Radio interviews.
What exactly wrong about indicated mission POIs?
Laveconnists aren't exactly a big community either...
As long as it's not the current peek-a-boo blue POIs...
The problem isn't the blue circles IMHO. The problem was always the fact that they were 100% random, & lacked persistence. In combination with the suggested changes to exploration, the blue circles could actually work very well.
I would prefer a ship based wave scanner for stuff like that. Make it consistent.
Plus they know its being recorded, and probably watched and discussed by thousands of people. For many people speaking up in a room is already intimidating, doubly so here. When you add in that people probably where caught off guard with the reveals, it make sense they focus on asking questions mostly related to mining/exploration/visuals as that is on the front of their mind at that time. I bet that a few hours afterwards at least some of them wondered why they didnt think to ask about atmo/spacelegs/pp though!
Unfortunate that no one asking questions in the Q&A panel asked about the premium content we've heard nothing about yet...
It may be an unpopular opinion, but....I like the peek-a-boo blue POIs.
I understand why FD designed them that way. They want us to use our ships to locate the general vicinity of a POI but then need to land and get the SRV out to narrow it down with the wavescanner, and honestly I like this mechanic. And truthfully if the POI is a big one I usually see it from the ship anyway.
What I hope is that the new probes will guide us in the general direction of the blue POIs by highlighting a reasonable search zone, so that we don't have to scour entire planet surfaces with our eyeballs any longer. If the Q4 update accomplishes this then I'll be very happy.
I hate the blue POIs. I hate having to go into the SRV for "reasons" to be able to find stuff that should on all accounts be able to search from my ship. Why on earth would a crashed ship, or settlement, of any kind of large, unnatural construct be hidden from a spaceship, but visible/searchable by a dune buggy? And why is a "discoverable" seen as the exact same blue circle, regardless of being a huge crashed ship, an artificial construct, or some mineral rock? Am I really to be expected to follow a peek-a-boo POI, land, hop into the dune buggy, and follow blips on the wave scanner, just to find a mineral rock at the end?
Instead of blue circles (I get the shakes just for mentioning them), why not some kind of reading that we could at least do some kind of educated guesstimation on what kind of thing it might be. Something that at least distinguishes between "holy smokes" kind of discoverable, from "oh, just a stupid rock". In fact, the very fist time I followed a bluie circle, set down and landed, hopped into the SRV, and painfully treaded along following the blips and finally found a worthless rock, was the very last time I ever followed a blue circle at all. If exploration probes end up being just a way to show me blue circles, then for me might as well not have them at all.
On top of it, it makes absolutely no sense at all. Here you are, searching for some thing at the surface of a barren wasteland., yet instead of being able to use your airborne vehicle, you need, for "reasons", to drop into a dune buggy and follow blips... wot? At least, let us follow the damn blips in the damn ship.
The SRV should have always been an auxiliary vehicle, a way to go to places and interact with things that could not be done in the ship. Pick up things, enter gound installations, maybe even do surface drills for prospection/science reasons. It should not be the source of it's own self-contained gameplay. And by all means it should not impair the ship gameplay for the sole purpose of artifically creating gameplay for itself.
It's not those blue POIs I was talking about.
The whole SRV "searching" gameplay is random. That's one of the many reasons I hate it (plus the fact you need to do the searching, "for reasons", in a car, while having a flying vehicle at your disposal). YTOu are never actually searching or finding anything. You just drive randomly until the RNG god decides you have waited long enough, and places the "findings" next to you.
This I would get on board with. No need to tell us exactly what it is, but provide a way to at least do educated guesses on wether it's worth investigating, or just another worthless pile of poo. And following the wave scanner on a ship is sure less annoying than on the SRV.
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Man, I never understood that lack of persistence. I understand the need for randomness, or at least randomly-seeded procgen, but why do it all on-the-fly where the lack of persistence becomes obvious? Why not, when arriving in a system, pre-generate a massive look-up table of random numbers based on a seed hashed from the system's characteristics (or pull one in from another client if the instance is already populated) then use that whenever the RNG would normally be called? You'd have consistency across clients, even for unimportant things like random satellite crash sites, and more importantly you could store pointers into the look-up table so you could return to previously visited POIs, in the same session or even months later.
I think I must be missing an obvious gotcha, either in the programming or the data requirements, because this just seems so obvious. About the only immediate downside I can think of is that, unless the state of each POI was stored somewhere server-side, you'd have the situation where multiple players could raid the same satellite for firmware, or the same meteorite for materials, over and over. But then we already have that to some extent with places like Dav's Hope. And the obvious mitigation would be to overwrite the look-up table data for, say, a metallic meteorite with new data so that when the last player leaves the instance it moves to another location. Maybe even replace it with a "previously mined meteorite" model.
What am I missing?