Let's ditch persistent ring hotspots entirely by reseeding them on the daily tick or weekly server reboot. Any grouping of ring material would be temporary as inner material would orbit faster than material farther out, not to mention density waves and spokes, etc. Hotspots would "smear out" over time like scrambling an egg, others would happen to come together before themselves being pulled apart, etc. So reseed them on a regular basis and count yourself lucky to find a temporary double- or triple-hotspot while out mining.
Reseed ring hotspots frequently
- Thread starter Random Providence
- Start date
I very much doubt that real life mechanics are running in real time on every ring system in the ED Universe, so this is unlikely to actually happen without some new programming in order to simulate the real mechanics of ring systems.
Of course they're not, I wasn't suggesting they should be. We don't have actual atmospheric modeling, but we have planets marked unlandable to reflect the presence of atmospheres. In the same vein, we can reseed hotspots to reflect how ring material is always shifting.
What I was trying to say (maybe not very well!) is that it would take a lot of calculation to work out what should be where every time a Cmdr entered a ring, and in open it would require that the ring was then updated in real time, or else strange things could happen between Cmdrs whose rings were slightly out of sync.
Even shifting them around on the weekly tick would help. You can guarantee that there won't be multiple cmdrs in the system getting desynced when the spots move if it happens when everyone's forcibly logged out, and a weekly reroll would be enough to stop persistent ultra-goldrush systems without a monumental prospecting effort every week. Sure, people went searching the instant tritium dropped and found one within days, but that was on the promise of being able to rely on their finds being persistent - I really can't see them going to the same effort every single week in perpetuity.
The only problem I see with the implementation is to manage the change and prevent resulting paradoxes (instancing, hotspots shifting from under your bottom).
A single additional global number would be sufficient to shuffle all hotspots in every ring, and if the number is incrementing instead of random then that allows for some simulated rotation.
Still, I somehow like to know where I can find my pristine double painite hotspot. I don't have to use it, you know.
A single additional global number would be sufficient to shuffle all hotspots in every ring, and if the number is incrementing instead of random then that allows for some simulated rotation.
Still, I somehow like to know where I can find my pristine double painite hotspot. I don't have to use it, you know.
Just reshuffle the seeds with the weekly tick, that should do it.