NPCs Disappearing / Reappearing

[Morbad]

It does also seem -very- suspicious to me that, all of a sudden, after the January update - commanders suddenly start noticing super cruise functionality that has been "there since the start" and even add it to the issue tracker.

It's almost as if something changed...

Something did, but not the time-based sensor horizon, which is at least five years and three months old. It's been in the manual since at least the August 2015 revision, and I'm nearly positive I've personally been using it as a tool for longer.

I think you are confusing SC sensor range being based on time-to-target with the change to the dynamic sensor scale that was introduced in either the September or January update, as mentioned in posts like this one.

I don't think most players pay any attention to how the game works, which is why I think many didn't notice this feature until other changes made it harder to ignore.

 

[Drelthar]

Something did, but not the time-based sensor horizon, which is at least five years and three months old. It's been in the manual since at least the August 2015 revision, and I'm nearly positive I've personally been using it as a tool for longer.

I think you are confusing SC sensor range being based on time-to-target with the change to the dynamic sensor scale that was introduced in either the September or January update, as mentioned in posts like this one.

I don't think most players pay any attention to how the game works, which is why I think many didn't notice this feature until other changes made it harder to ignore.

I'm not, because I honestly didn't notice any difference in the sensor range thing.

All I noticed was ships dropping off scanners in SC, when they didn't seem to previously.

Also, what was in the manual when doesn't necessarily match up with what's happening in the game.

 

[Morbad]

All I noticed was ships dropping off scanners in SC, when they didn't seem to previously.

Some of us did.

Also, what was in the manual when doesn't necessarily match up with what's happening in the game.

I know.

 

[Morbad]

Finding examples has been a real pain...apparently I haven't archived many videos with significant supercruise content.

However, I did find an example I think is pretty clear:

Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=derkCaXehb8


You can see a bunch of NPC contacts appear around the main star and what would have been the ~40 second range (I had a somewhat closer planet targeted) and then you can see contacts start to vanish around the terminal approach to the station I was heading for as velocity falls dramatically. Some of those are the NPCs dropping out of SC, but at one point six vanish at once, and that is certainly due to the sensor range falling off.

Video is from April 2017. I'm positive I have others, but I haven't organized them well and there are almost two-thousand clips in my archives.