Points of Interests

[{SAS}Stalker]

What are people’s thoughts on Points of Interests on planets and how the game handles this element? Having spent a reasonable amount of time now doing sentry and rescue missions I can honestly say I hate them, the Points of Interests not the missions.

I Understand that they probably need to be randomly generated but I hate the way that there is little logic behind your on board computer establishing that there is a POI in the area and failing to give additional information as to where it might be within the blue circle. It wouldn’t be so bad if large buildings rendered at an appropriate distance instead of suddenly popping up (yes I have draw distance set to max). Why not consider smoke plumes for crash sites, industry and mining sites etc and reserve the blue circles for potential player owned mining sites?

With regards pop up, I’ve had instances where rocks render before crashed ships and I’ve lost count of how many blue circles I’ve visited that apparently contain nothing. I really think that the circles should be rendered on the HUD and not the radar and I think that if they are to remain (as appose to my suggestion of a more contextual approach to identification) then different POI should be differentiated between each other (maybe by a different colour circle?). Finally I really think the nerf to eyeball 1.0 should be rethought, my visibility range is considerably greater than 2km so please stop the ridiculous building pop up because it really doesn’t add to the experience. There is no excitement from discovering a crash site, mere relief that the blue circle actually contains something useful.

Apologies for the horrific mock up, hopefully you get my drift

 

[Lann]

You dont actually need to be in a POI to complete a surface mission.

I think these POIs are useless right now...

o7

 

[bamber]

I like the POI's - Hunting on the darkside or on the day side on an Ice planet is best or somewhere with long shadows as it approaches dusk. Its then easier to find the actual POI
.
I do wish there was some "latency" in POI's I must admit - I was returning to a Base and found a 40 unit Mining establishment and only had 2T space left so I noted the coordinates and went to unload at the base and then returned to the assigned coordinates and it had disappeared which was a shame
.
Overall POS's work well - When used with the SRV its fine. As for the smoke plumes - How ? we are in a complete vacuum there is no atmosphere to form the smoke into a plume

 

[{SAS}Stalker]

How ? we are in a complete vacuum there is no atmosphere to form the smoke into a plume

That's a good point well made

 

[Deleted member 38366]

I'm no friend of their current implementation either.

Can't recount how often I landed in the dead-center of the POI, deployed the SRV (= doing it as intended I think)... only to find nothing within 2.5km.
On other occasions, I just landed, looked around (including Debug Cam), deployed the SRV and *POP* 250m ahead the obligatory Tea Canister spawned out of nowhere.

IMHO it's really bad right now.

I'd appreciate if these issues were to be addressed :
- consistency in terms of spawning and Scanner Range
-> the SRV needs to be within ~45m to find a Meteorite to get it on Scanner, but the smaller Materials remain on the Scanner for 3km?
-> Ship Scanners can't pick up a Canister from 50m, but have no issues tracking the same one in space over upto 7km, as well as any Material even on the Ground?
(you can try it by abandoning some Scrap at the boundary of Planetary flight in normal space - just after getting Altitude information in the HUD you'll see dumped Canisters become instantly invisible >45m)

- POI just seem extremely inconsistent in terms of visibility from the Ship
-> you see Rocks and far smaller stuff indeed, but no wreckage and Canisters?
-> gets worse after the SRV presence spawns them and you get back with the Ship in the same position, all of a sudden it's all clearly visible now

- Gravity seems to kick in for Canisters as soon as they spawn
-> results in alot of Canisters rolling all over the place and often Skimmers guarding what's effectively a now empty place

- POI content (outside of Missions) needs tons of work in terms of Location Awareness
-> current frequency and content okay for high-population inhabited Systems
-> frequency needs to be drastically reduced already for uninhabited Systems inside the bubble
-> no later than 50LY from civilization, common Cargo Canisters or "Tea Party" scenarios need to cease entirely; at best that's where pure pirate stashes might still occasionally are
-> outside 100LY? A few Crashed Exploration vessels and very isolated Mining Rig scenarios
-> outside 500LY? Extremely few crashed Exploration vessels... anything else either natural phenomenon or of Alien/very old ELITE lore/entirely unknown origin
-> in an entirely Unexplored System (no 1st Discovery), spawn rates for anything man-made should be absolutely minimal (i.e. a failed Explorer Ship or SRV), in order not to nuke the 1st Discoverer feeling right every 5km

A POI on Exploration is a good POI only if it's actually interesting. A very rare sight, warranting careful investigation.
But definitely not "a dime a dozen", with the best "Planetary Exploration" Ship being either a Cargo-Optimized Anaconda, Type-9 or Cutter. Just to pick up all the dumped Cargo Canisters to help clean the Galaxy from all that litter

Last but not least :
Unlike the clearly visible different kinds of Signal Sources in space, there's currently no means to Pre-ID and at least roughly assess what type of POI one is seeing from the Ship.
That results in alot of wasted time.
Other than that, outside of being a Mission-Target, I haven't found anything of particular interest in any of the hundreds of POI I've checked out over various distances.

I did clean out many tons of Commodities just for kicks, but I've yet to find a single POI that's actually interesting.

 

[Alec Turner]

On the subject of POIs, thus far I've always found the blue circle to be too big. I zoom my scanner all the way out but basically the POI circle is still so big that it fills my scanner before I'm even fully over it. I fly at around 2000m to look for them. Is that too close to ground level? Would the circle be considerably smaller if I was further up?

 

[5AnaHalfHatsize]

TBH I don't see why your ships scanners can't just take you straight to the POI.

What does it add to the gameplay to force us out of our ships to find something we're not interested in?

If they wanted to make it interesting they could make the anti-ship turrets *much* more powerful and hide them so they popped up if you hovered your ship too close to whatevers at the poi, so the safe approach would always be to land and approach a poi from a distance in the buggy.

 

[{SAS}Stalker]

TBH I don't see why your ships scanners can't just take you straight to the POI.

What does it add to the gameplay to force us out of our ships to find something we're not interested in?

If they wanted to make it interesting they could make the anti-ship turrets *much* more powerful and hide them so they popped up if you hovered your ship too close to whatevers at the poi, so the safe approach would always be to land and approach a poi from a distance in the buggy.

They have mistakenly thought that frustratingly searching for something that may or may not exist / pop up when you get within 2km of it is an entertaining mechanic. I'm doing it because I need rank but its put me off POI so much that once this is done I don't think i will ever do another. Its a perfect example (again) of snatching a defeat out of the jaws of victory.

 

[Sevanje]

Yes those POIs started really really bad. Back in beta 2.0 there was a shhhit storm on this topic.
But as I see it now, POIs are interesting only for new players that are low on credits or old players for taking screenshots/missions.
But when initial joy fades away it becomes just another inconvenience.

Planet surface or not, big or small universe, FD needs to get their poo together, because competition is closing in on them.

 

[Amus]

It's not that there wouldn't be smoke or other particulate matter resulting from a crash. Fire dosn'ne care if its in a vacuum it only cares that there is an oxidizer, heat and fuel, which there would plausibly be plenty of all these things in a spacecraft crash. The problem is, the resulting chemical reaction wouldn'ne result in a telltale line of smoke but a cloud expanding outward in all directions and the fire itself would probably look something more akin to a blowtorch, if it managed to be sustainable, which would be highly unlikely. The most likely scenario would be that the event would result in a breach that would suck any oxidizing agent out of the immediate aria before the fire had a chance to use it. I would think that a small craft crash in zero atmosphere would result in very little fire damage. Theoretically you could use a gas detector to search for this expanding cloud but the expansion would be so fast and the cloud so thin, it would be difficult to differentiate what you're looking for, from background interference.
Perhaps a more plausible detection method would be a surface analysis. Any particulate matter heavy enough to be captured by the planetary body would theoreticaly be ejected on impact in all directions, possibly for many miles. But again, the dispersal would be so wide and thin, it would be difficult to detect any foreign particles from incidental interference and the presence and frequency of human activity would further skew the results.
If a more precise method is necessary I think the most probable solution would be a visual scanner that used a high-definition camera to survey an aria, coupled with a computer that analyzed the image looking for straight lines of a predetermined length or with variable resolution qualities and pinpoint these locations as 'pings' for closer inspection. Straight lines are highly improbable in nature (the limitations of computer generated graphics aside) however they are very easy to make, feature prominently in manmade craft and architecture (especially that which is built for utilitarian purpose as most spacecraft and associated materials are)... and while a computer analysis may still result in false (or no) indications, depending on the range and resolution, it's the most likely method of pinpointing the location of man-made structures, short of following a beacon and given all other cues are somewhat untenable.