From what I understand, biological locations exist in "biomes" that can be identified by flat, pixeless areas on the surface. It would be much easier to differentiate these areas if there was more contrast between those biomes and the surrounding areas. Since the scanner is already able to differentiate, it would require no more programming, but simply a change to the color value of those areas. Huge quality of life improvement IMO.
Sharper Color Contrast for Surface Scan
- Thread starter avarusbrightfyre
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- biological biome scanner surface
Yup. Why does a "heatmap" only use light blue to teal, when it could use blue to red?
Because it's not a heatmap, it's a location map, the difference in colour only reflects changes in the ground surface below showing through. It used to be a heatmap early in the Alpha and it was great, but they had a large number of complaints from players that it was confusing (no I don't know how a heatmap is confusing) and so it was changed from a heatmap to a location map that only shows areas where particular bio can be found, any changes of colour are not reflective of bio/geo density.
Yes it's true, sad but true. FDEV made an official post about it quite a while ago, not sure if I can find it now but if you really need to see it I can have a look around.
The current implementation is just, well, ridiculous. You DSS, you get a almost all blue planet, 92% blue or greater. You change filter, nothing changes, still 92 % blue. It is totally useless. It implies everywhere but mountains, and mountains is where GEO is. I don't get it at all. It is so senseless that I ignore it, I still find GEO and BIO. Where? The web sites that tell you where you can find a particular type, because my sensors in EDO are just, well, useless.
I actually don't mind it, I like the new way to "hunt" for what I am after. But the DSS filter stuff is so laughable that I wonder why it ended the way it is. It is NOT useful at all. Well, from my experience anyway.
I actually don't mind it, I like the new way to "hunt" for what I am after. But the DSS filter stuff is so laughable that I wonder why it ended the way it is. It is NOT useful at all. Well, from my experience anyway.
I don't disagree with the opinion that it's not a useful tool, but I need just point out that geo isn't found in mountains, mountainous areas are usually areas of thicker crust and thus less geologically active than lower areas. Subduction zones on the edge of continental shelves beneath the ocean where one plate slides under another, expansion zones where the plates are pulling apart and lava and gases well up from below usually coincide with deep and wide gorges like the East African Rift and Mid Atlantic Ridge. large volcanoes of course are different and often appear over active zones as lone mountains, such as Hawaiin volcano chain which is essentially a single source creating a mountain which then moves away from the active zone due to plate movement and new one rises in its place, hence you get a long line of mountains from one active source.
The Himalayas are of course a collision zone between two plates and there is very little active vulcanism there due to the uplifting of the ground creating a very thick crust at that point. Mountains aren't necessarily indicators of vulcanism and are in fact fairly inactive areas compared to other areas on earth.
The problem is that the range of where you "might" find things is just way too broad. I don't know that we need to return to the Horizons way of having specific locations that have a plethora of items packed within a couple of kilometers, because that was actually a little be too "easy mode", but having localized areas of "high density signals" where you're reasonably likely to come across what you're looking for isn't unreasonable. You shouldn't have to "hunt around" for 10-15 minutes only to realize there's nothing nearby. The scanners should be able to get you in the vicinity of what you're looking for from orbit, especially after you did a "detailed" surface scan.
Much like my gripe with super hands on long distance travelling, we're in a futuristic era where technology should be highly advanced and accurate, yet the developers continually choose to make systems and sensors and all these things quite vague or manually operated and a huge waste of time and effort. There's so much to like about this game, but it's these not-so-little things that just make the gameplay really annoying.
Much like my gripe with super hands on long distance travelling, we're in a futuristic era where technology should be highly advanced and accurate, yet the developers continually choose to make systems and sensors and all these things quite vague or manually operated and a huge waste of time and effort. There's so much to like about this game, but it's these not-so-little things that just make the gameplay really annoying.
It is indeed, I would love to have the original heatmaps from the Alpha back.
@varonica, Totally agree with you, no debate. But I don't see how the current DSS filter "heat maps" are useful at all. Change to GEO and it is the same as BIO. The current filter implementation makes no sense at all. Basically it is telling you to search, well, everywhere, in most cases.
Not saying I am having issues finding the GEO's, I see a hill, I head for it, and on the outskirts I usually find GEO, and in the plains, usually find BIO, and with web site advice sites, usually the other oddities. But with EDO heat map? With practically the whole planet showing blue, what is the point?
Paint me blue, I'm just not an expert with it, but I find the BIO and GEO anyway, due to persistence and flying across planet surface in areas web help pages tell me to, ignoring the "heat"/sensor map.
Not saying I am having issues finding the GEO's, I see a hill, I head for it, and on the outskirts I usually find GEO, and in the plains, usually find BIO, and with web site advice sites, usually the other oddities. But with EDO heat map? With practically the whole planet showing blue, what is the point?
Paint me blue, I'm just not an expert with it, but I find the BIO and GEO anyway, due to persistence and flying across planet surface in areas web help pages tell me to, ignoring the "heat"/sensor map.
Simple fix: Allow the scan gun to scan multiple plants silmutaneously and allow the SRV radar to ping for biologicals.
Planet scan lets you know you're in the right area, vehicle points you in the right direction...
Planet scan lets you know you're in the right area, vehicle points you in the right direction...
Yep I agree. As I said a lot of experience and knowing what sort of areas to look in the blue helps quite a bit, but it's not a replacement for a proper heatmap. One of the issues is the ground resolution of the current location map, in areas where it's not blue there are none, I have confirmed that with a lot of looking, but in areas that are blue where does the changeover come, 1 item per square kilometer, what is the resolution, does it vary from planet to planet?
Take this image for instance, that little row of blue dots in the center is the location map for a species on this planet, I couldn't spot any on the light side because the areas it occupies are so small you can't spot them from orbit against the background colour, I had to go to the dark side so it would stand out better, still a little bit further away and I wouldn't have seen it at all, I had to get in quite close and cruise around the planet. It took me ages to spot this, so the resolution is fairly high, it was still quite a large area on the planet though once you got down there.
In this case the POI would have been useful
The current location map doesn't work very well at all with bio and geo that's spread out really widely because the resulting location map can be impossible to spot from orbit, but if you get to close so it stands out you may not encounter any of the location areas at all because they are still quite small compared to the area of an actual planet.
I think they should have given us a toggle, location map or heatmap, and maybe see which on is the most used before changing it!
@varonica, totally agree with your observations and thanks for the advice. So much for FDev to do, I hope one day, patch 50+, they will reconsider what they did here and make the heat maps a little more useful. Till then, I guess I'll take your advice and other pointers to find those planet based delicacies. Yum.
Ah, I see. Yes, I remember that post, I only interpreted it differently. I thought it meant that heatmap colours represent "corrrect habitat/ likely occurrence" rather than "actual occurrence".
Anyway, yes, it would be nice to have the scanner give actual occurrence density on a wider colour scale.
the wave scanner does kinda indicate biologicals and geologicals, but it is in its current form also quite confusing, inaccurate and I seem to have to be really close for the waveband signal to be reliable.
The problem is it indicates the mats on the geo and bio, and that only applies to Horizons bio because Odyssey bio doesn't have mats on the bio.