Let people set a route without going to the map

myothershipisacobraiv · Jun 10, 2019

The only way to get something tagged as a route and therefore able to be quickly selected is to go into the map. This wastes time and is disorienting.

Let people quickly tag a star as a route from the nav panel.

dxm55 · Jun 10, 2019

It would be nice if I could manually type in the waypoint/destination name in the left Nav panel.
I'm familiar with some of my usual destinations by name....

varonica · Jun 10, 2019

myothershipisacobraiv said:
The only way to get something tagged as a route and therefore able to be quickly selected is to go into the map. This wastes time and is disorienting.

Let people quickly tag a star as a route from the nav panel.

But how do you know in which direction you are traveling if you set a route from the nav panel?

Screemonster · Jun 10, 2019

I'd love to see a keybind for "select furthest reachable star" since the left-hand panel only goes up to 20ly.

Micha · Jun 10, 2019

myothershipisacobraiv said:
Let people quickly tag a star as a route from the nav panel.

Um, you can. Just select a star from the NavPanel and you can jump to it.

Could you elaborate on what you're asking as (at least to me) it's not clear.

What I would like would be the ability to tag a star in the skybox and jump to it; either directly, range permitting, or via a plot if your ship doesn't have the range. But that would require the skybox to contain all the necessary information for each star instead of just being a background image generated during the FSD transition (which, in itself, is pretty darned awesome!).

dxm55 · Jun 10, 2019

Micha said:
Um, you can. Just select a star from the NavPanel and you can jump to it.

Could you elaborate on what you're asking as (at least to me) it's not clear.

What I would like would be the ability to tag a star in the skybox and jump to it; either directly, range permitting, or via a plot if your ship doesn't have the range. But that would require the skybox to contain all the necessary information for each star instead of just being a background image generated during the FSD transition (which, in itself, is pretty darned awesome!).

I think he wants to see stars beyond the 20LY limit of the menu.
Or have the Gal Map appear as a mini display on the left panel instead of fading to the mapscreen.

Personally, I would just like the ability to type in and search for the star name in the left panel. I have regular haunts that I remember by name. They may be 100+ LYs away. So typing it in would save me the hassle of getting into the Gal Map and then scrolling around or typing for it.

Eg. Shinrartra Dezhra to Khun.

Micha · Jun 10, 2019

Expanding the 20LY limit is untenable; go anywhere with a higher star density and your navpanel will have thousands of systems in it. The other thing is that currently it's not limited to 20LY but to the current range of your ship (1).

Suggestion of being able to type your destination into the NavPanel, or select from your Bookmarks, would also be good. (1)

(1) The game engine would need a rewrite though as currently the only place where routes can be plotted is in the Galaxy Map. That's the reason you have to go back into the Galaxy Map after buying commodities or changing your ship layout to replot the route.

War Eagle · Jun 10, 2019

Yep little confusing to me as well, if you scroll off the "System" you will find all starz within your jump range- correct?

Autoculto · Jun 10, 2019

OP, but if we could do that the gankers wouldn't need a wake scanner to follow anyone into highwake. Whereas at the moment if they don't have a wake scanner fitted they have to get behind the target and be traveling in the same direction and then quickly run through stars in the nav panel to see which one aligns with their current heading. Although searching through the list doesn't take long it takes long enough for the escapee to plot a second jump and permanently escape.

So although it'd be a nice addition for exploration it'd certainly be of a much greater benefit to gankers

FrogsFriend · Jun 10, 2019

If a system is selected as a 'route' in the galaxy map you can then select/reselect it by hotkey from the cockpit view. This lets you target another destination such as a station/planet in the system you're in but allows you to reselect the 'route' destination with one key press.

Currently, selecting a target in the Nav Panel doesn't let you set it as a route so you can't use the hotkey to return to it.

varonica · Jun 10, 2019

Screemonster said:
I'd love to see a keybind for "select furthest reachable star" since the left-hand panel only goes up to 20ly.

War Eagle said:
Yep little confusing to me as well, if you scroll off the "System" you will find all starz within your jump range- correct?

No, let me show you why, I discussed it once with another poster re; how many stars you get with a sphere of increasing size and a given density of stars, the numbers add up quickly to something unsupportable. If you doubled the size of the sphere each step you get 8 times the volume, once you get up to conda size jump ranges the numbers are enormous. If we start with a 10ly radius sphere with 100 stars and double the size of the sphere we get 800, then we double again for a 40ly jump we have 6,400 stars, then for a conda sized jump we get 51,200 in a sphere 160ly across. I suspect in some areas we actually get way more than 100 stars in a 10ly radius sphere

Sometimes we just can't have what we want not because people are being stubborn, but because they have looked at the issues and thought, "well that would be silly!"

myothershipisacobraiv · Jun 10, 2019

Micha said:
Um, you can. Just select a star from the NavPanel and you can jump to it.

Could you elaborate on what you're asking as (at least to me) it's not clear.

What I would like would be the ability to tag a star in the skybox and jump to it; either directly, range permitting, or via a plot if your ship doesn't have the range. But that would require the skybox to contain all the necessary information for each star instead of just being a background image generated during the FSD transition (which, in itself, is pretty darned awesome!).

that's not a route that's a selection. hotkey doesn't work. can't cycle back fast

Micha · Jun 10, 2019

myothershipisacobraiv said:
that's not a route that's a selection. hotkey doesn't work. can't cycle back fast

Ok, so if I understand, you'd like selection in the NavPanel to set the destination as a "route" so that the hotkey works? In which case, definitely support this request!

Kissamies · Jun 10, 2019

I wish the 20ly limit could dynamically increase on areas with low star density. I got someone trying to kill me at Beagle Point and had to go to the star map for the high wake target.

ThatSmileyGuy · Jun 10, 2019

While we are at plotting routes how about plotting a custom route?
Selecting destination point and "via" points without having to do select destination point in the gal map over and over again to visit systems of interest?

[Diplomacy] Carnegie · Jun 10, 2019

Micha said:
Expanding the 20LY limit is untenable; go anywhere with a higher star density and your navpanel will have thousands of systems in it.

Actually, this is already mitigated in the code. There's a maximum number of systems that the Nav Panel will display. In areas of high star density the list will stop well before 20 LY.

Increasing the maximum range will simply show more stars in lower density areas, without causing issues in other areas.

Lestat · Jun 10, 2019

myothershipisacobraiv said:
The only way to get something tagged as a route and therefore able to be quickly selected is to go into the map. This wastes time and is disorienting.

Let people quickly tag a star as a route from the nav panel.

Question How long does it take you to check the galaxy map and back to the main game? If it taking you a long time to view galaxy then the problem not with the game but on your end. When I log onto the Galaxy map there No lag. I hit the button and it opens in NS.

This could be due to a bad Internet connection which I had. A slow hard drive, Slow CPU/GPU maybe Ram could be an issue. You are not using a Dedicated GPU and using Intergraded GPU.

Micha · Jun 10, 2019

Lestat said:
Question How long does it take you to check the galaxy map and back to the main game?

Longer than selecting a star in the NavPanel. Especially in VR. And that's not due to game lag, that's just the way it is.

I can definitely see the use-case. Enter a system. Select a star from the NavPanel as a high-wake escape option. Go ahead with whatever you want to do in-system. If you get attacked, it's now just a single hotkey/button to select your pre-selected escape option and high-wake.

Would have been quite useful during the Hutton Bento Balls run the other day as sometimes it was only a few seconds after entering a system before getting interdicted! No time for GalMap until clear of the star and heading into deep space.

EDIT. PS: Don't forget, @Lestat , not everybody can afford a high-end gaming system. The galaxy map -is- slow on lower-end PCs. I play both on my fairly high-spec gaming PC as well as a fairly low-spec (for this game) laptop, and the differences are HUGE. I see you keep posting here poo-pooing other peoples' complaints about certain parts of the game being slow. Yes, depending on the PC, it can be. And apart from spending a thousand pounds (exaggerated maybe) there's nothing they can do about it.

myothershipisacobraiv · Jun 11, 2019

Lestat said:
Question How long does it take you to check the galaxy map and back to the main game? If it taking you a long time to view galaxy then the problem not with the game but on your end. When I log onto the Galaxy map there No lag. I hit the button and it opens in NS.

This could be due to a bad Internet connection which I had. A slow hard drive, Slow CPU/GPU maybe Ram could be an issue. You are not using a Dedicated GPU and using Intergraded GPU.

this is not about hardware performance. it's about not taking yourself out of the current scenario just to respond to it. the map is not a combat system and shouldn't be a part of combat.

you can't target freely until you have a route, you can't get a route without jamming your head into the galaxy map.

Misty_Dark · Jun 11, 2019

I see several issues with this, but lets tackle the select a target for a high wake escape!

Picking the star closest to your jump range, have obvious issues, especially when you get into the ships built for long jump ranges, as the number of systems to check could be huge. So that quickly turns impractical.

How about picking the closest star? this still have potential for checking many systems, but atleast far fewer than the option above, and we already seems to be able to show this information. But if you can choose this, then the pursuer could also gamble on this, and thus be able to follow you. So for escaping this is a bad option.

Lets try again, what if the game picked up to 10 first systems it could find that is within 70% of current jump range (so we do not leave you stranded with no fuel), and then randomly select one of these as the target, and now any pursuer would have hard a time guessing where you went. But there is no control at all for the player. Just as we can preload the nearby systems in the nav-panel, this could also be pre-set when you enter a new system. For escaping this seems to be the best option sofar...

Be able to select bookmarks from navigation panel, this would be great for standard destinations for standard travel, like visiting engineers, your home base, etc, etc. It would probably be less useful for escaping. As depending on how far away your destination it could be outside the realm of route plotter, or the plotting itself could be slow. Making this a unreliable option for escaping. Also settings like economic/fastest travel affects this. So more a Quality of life function than escape option.

Be able to search for systems directly from nav-panel, this is bad for almost all escapes, and do you really know any close systems to escape too? Take the example of Beagle point above... but it is another potential useful function, that I would argue can could be accomplished easier with he above bookmark option, as regularly visited system known by name, could as easily be added as bookmarks, and instead increase the demand for better bookmark management etc. Also, do not forget, that we have a many players not using keyboard when playing, and thus typing text is a totally different challenge, I think about VR players (who regularly wants some soft keyboard in VR) and console players who mostly only uses a gamepad. So restricting this option to the Galaxy map is in most cases a good compromise.