Player Marker on Surface Map (non-tidal-locked landable worlds)

I've made a thread about this in the Horizons forum but was advised to check here... I've had some time to research this, and honestly I'm amazed this hasn't been noticed; surely someone else has seen this before...

Long and short of it is, if you're on a landable body and it isn't tidally locked, then if you open the Surface Map via the navigation hud (1 key by default) you can see it rotating on its own accord, with the terminator (region where the sun is visible at the horizon) stationary relative to the view. this much makes sense if you think about it, after all a tidally locked planet will have a stationary terminator while other planets will not (well, when locked to a star, can be forgiven for doing the same when tidally locked in general).

however these bodies have a severe navigational bug - it seems from my testing, that the player marker on these worlds (the blue arrow + dot visible only when you're too low for orbital cruise) is being displayed incorrectly relative to the surface map. i suspect what's happening is the marker's lat/long coords are being mixed up: marker-latitude is demonstrably a sum of your current latitude and longitude, you need only to try navigating to the north or south pole or exact multiples of 30 degrees to see this for yourself. a similar thing seems to be happening with marker-longitude, since heading to bearing 0 or 180 on these planets, moves the marker as if you were traveling towards 45 or 225 degrees respectively!

what i cannot figure out though is the exact problem here. yes there's a bit of arithmetic going on, but in that case i can't explain why coordinate north ends up on the equator consistently regardless of what my longitude near the pole is. however i can give you some data points that i've tested (all in lat/long order):

0,0 = equator
0,90 = south pole
30,90 = 60 deg south of equator or 30 deg north of south pole
30,30 = 30 deg south of equator or 60 deg north of south pole
+or- 90,anything = equator (apparently)

this makes navigating via the surface map pretty much impossible on non-tidally locked landable worlds right now. if you just need to get to specific coordinates, you'll never notice this, and if you're within some distance of a ground-base or installation of some sort, the marker decides to correct itself (i suspect because in that situation the marker is using the base as a reference position, but the relative coordinates may still be wrong, more testing there needed).

has anyone else encountered this and can confirm?
 
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In all seriousness i haven't a clue though and never noticed it
 
it's pretty severe when you encounter it. i challenge anyone to make sense of these player marker readouts vs planet coordinates (which i have verified do match up with the geography per surface map)







 
I haven't looked at this particular problem, but I did notice when searching for a basecamp recently that the daylight/ nighttime display wasn't correct either.
I was trying to find a certain crater, and finding it on the system map it showed up as being on the daylight side. When I went looking for it, it turned out to be round the nighttime side somewhere. Not helpful!
 
I think you're seeing what I was seeing over a year ago, unless I completely misunderstand. That was before we got textured maps. Must admit, I've not checked since.

https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showt...nnonball-run?p=4395460&viewfull=1#post4395460

it's quite possible but from that thread you were on a tidally-locked world as far as i can tell, and currently those are working fine with respect to matching the player marker to actual coordinates. maybe it was broken at the time on all worlds, hard to say now, but part of the symptom of this issue is that yes, if you attempt to navigate via the player marker you can end up going in circles for a long time before realizing something's wrong. especially the more pedantic you are about checking your position after every orbital cruise...

I haven't looked at this particular problem, but I did notice when searching for a basecamp recently that the daylight/ nighttime display wasn't correct either.
I was trying to find a certain crater, and finding it on the system map it showed up as being on the daylight side. When I went looking for it, it turned out to be round the nighttime side somewhere. Not helpful!

Re the night/day position on the surface map... I'm not sure how reliable it is at all. I've seen it change just by cruising to another spot on the same planet! (edit - ive just recorded a 25 min video as i was exploring this bug, and watching it back i noticed that re-opening the map changed the terminator position)

But. doing some testing on small worlds (~600km) i'm now 100% certain of the problem. it would help if we had more than just me verify this, but this is what im noticing consistently now -

addition of coordinates? yes this does happen but it actually has to do with the entire coordinate system for the player marker, relative to the surface map, being rotated 90 degrees along some E-W axis. so yes - the poles will end up on the equator, and depending on the specific longitude of the rotation and your actual longitude, it's possible that going N sends you E or W. In the case of diagonal-aligned bearings, this will happen on any non-90 multiple longitude on these worlds. fly to longitudes 45, 135, 225 (-135) or 315 (-45) and bearings 0,90,180,270 will send you on diagonal paths.

a rotation of the marker's coordinate system by 90 degrees along some E-W axis (not along N/S but it's possible i've just not seen it yet) explains this discrepancy perfectly.

update - I've refined my process for testing this, and summarized the issues in one 10 min display (full details are in the vid description, in spoiler here)

1. Opening surface map via navigation panel directly offers a back button which goes to the system map; whereas opening surface map using a hotkey for system map and then going into surface map does not.

2. Opening surface map via navigation panel directly, will show an animated terminator (day/night boundary); whereas opening surface map via system map - even if you open it directly then zoom out and zoom back in - does not show it animated.

3. Related to #2, the terminator is not in a consistent position when you don't see it animated - likely because it's animated in system map and freezes when you zoom in / unfreezes when you zoom out.

4. The player marker uses an alternate coordinate system, which can be derived as follows: construct an axis from (0 lat, 0 long) to (0 lat, 180 long), and rotate the player marker along it by 90 degrees. Sometimes the axis construction uses (0,-90) and (0,90) instead, but not on the world in this footage here.

What I did: I went to coordinates 0,0, which appeared to be in the correct place. I tried flying north, but was heading east - this suggests that the north pole was rotated 90 degrees clockwise when looking at my position from above per the surface map. Next, I tried using a nearby mesa as a reference point, and upon trying to fly towards it (roughly SSE) the player marker suggests I was heading west - clearly wrong.

It's possible #4 can manifest using a N-S axis rotation, but in testing around 15 worlds so far I haven't encountered that. They've all been rotated along some E-W axis that's aligned to 0 or 90 deg longitude.

[video=youtube_share;xMH2MLfq4oo]https://youtu.be/xMH2MLfq4oo[/video]
 
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