This is a really good question! Does it reflect the relative position of the planetary bodies at the current date and time and does it update in real time when open?
Orrery!
- Thread starter S3B4ST13N
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This is a really good question! Does it reflect the relative position of the planetary bodies at the current date and time and does it update in real time when open?
Ah, my apologies for misunderstanding!
I hope Fdev continue with both the mix of surprises and keeping member sof the community like yourself and Ant involved Alex.
It seems their ability to better manage their PR and their brand has taken a big step forwards in the last few weeks.
No problem at all. I hope OA won't mind me saying that I too was confused about what he meant by a UI change that was going to surprise people (and a lot of other people thought he was hinting at being able to change the HUD colours). It's a great example of how people, even Frontier themselves, have to be sooo careful about how they phrase things because they can be interpreted in a completely different way from the one intended.
I wanna see this in the new map; I was there yesterday. Still makes me feel like I'm gonna fall over.
In Soviet Russia, Mitterand Hollow chases you! (Mic drop)
I do too. I literally choked on my pint last night when I heard they'd revealed an orrery view. As I tweeted to Adam this morning, well played sir, very well played! [haha]
No problem at all. I hope OA won't mind me saying that I too was confused about what he meant by a UI change that was going to surprise people (and a lot of other people thought he was hinting at being able to change the HUD colours). It's a great example of how people, even Frontier themselves, have to be sooo careful about how they phrase things because they can be interpreted in a completely different way from the one intended.
Absolutely. Its a balancing act.
Tell everyone what you are doing and you get the entire community spending months trying to tell you how to do it and then moaning its taking so long, and when it is delivered it doesn't meet anyones wildly inflated expectations.
Tell nobody what you are doing and you get the community complaining you don't care and the game is dead.
Personally I prefer something closer to the latter situation. FDev have a very good reputation of employing very capable people who genuinely know their stuff. (go watch the vids on the stellar forge and procedural generation if you need evidence of this). Sure they have made a few left turns into blind alleys with some gameplay elements (powerplay isn't the best... the BGS has awesome potential but a number of squeaky bits) but on the whole this is a very professionally run company that has a long term plan and is slowly working its way through it with a few missteps and replanning and is always the case in a business plan.
There are other companies that are developing space games currently that could learn a lot.
Yeah, I'd prefer to always use it instead of the simplified map.
One Orrery usability feature I would like to have is a quick toggle between linear, logarithmic and 'chibi' scales (seen elsewhere in this thread, but search can't find it).
- Linear: useful for estimating distance and travel time
- Logarithmic: useful for quickly scrolling about a system while retaining an idea of relative distance, scale is logarithm of distance from the primary or primary barycenter
- Chibi or 'packed': a schematic-scale orrery for displaying relative positions of bodies and very quick navigation around the system. This would make using the orrery as a replacement for the current system map very practical. By replacing the distances between all bodies' orbits at the same level of the system hierarchy to the same unit distance sufficient to fit the bodies at that level and their orbits and nothing else. Satellites are shown at a smaller unit scale. When selecting a body which has its own satellites, expand the distance between that body and its neighbours to fit the orbit of its most distant satellite without clipping into its neighbours' orbits.
Agreed.
For me, it seems like the obvious place to add lots of info about factions, conflict zones and the movement of ships within a system. You'd probably need a stylised scaled view for that (which having tried the maths myself is no simple thing if there are elliptical orbits!) but it would really give you a lively at-a-glance sense of the different organisations, trade routes and who's fighting who - a sort of "strategic view" of a system.
I waited sooo long for this... I`m glad they decided to use the raw orrery they had available in the dev tools instead of taking years just to make it look better. I hope it moves though, and it would be even better if one could fast forward time to see the space ballet like in FE2 (but thats not gonna happen probably).
Anyway... I`m very happy
Anyway... I`m very happy
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