Please take this as *helpful* criticism, which I hope Frontier will find useful in improving the game. (Anyone who thinks this is "whining" needs to take a good hard look at themselves.)
I was hopeful that "the story" starting on 16th December would liven-up Elite Dangerous, as I've been playing since Beta & it's got a bit samey... But current events are almost impossibly far from me, and I guess many other people:
Sorbago = 165 Ly
Kappa Fornacis = 115 Ly
Problems with this:
The route planner doesn't go anything like that far, so I'll have to manually fly there, and I could finding myself stuck in a "dead end" that requires me to back-track a long way. (e.g. There is a star just 9 Ly away (slightly beyond my jump range) that require 10 jumps in a circle to get to!) I don't understand why long distance planning should be so hard to program, as I've written an "A-star" search algorithm before & it doesn't need much memory or CPU time (and you can even reduce memory & CPU usage with a little trick, at the expense of slightly worse routes).
My little Eagle with a standard FSD is only capable of an 8 Ly jump at max, but it's unlikely stars will be exactly 8 Ly away. So I'm more likely to make 4-6 Ly jumps on average. That's 23 or 33 jumps, assuming I can fly in a straight line without any back-tracking (unlikely), with at least 3 stops for fuel (better say 6 to avoid the risk of running out of fuel miles from anywhere). More likely I'll have to fly in a wiggly line & back-track a bit, so I guess about double the number of 'perfect' jumps, meaning about 50 jumps with 12 refuelling stops.
50 jumps is a pretty insane number to require, especially as when I get there I might find the current events aren't suited to me for whatever reason. (And even if I'm OK with it, I can imagine many newbies finding the Combat Zones too hard.)
Sadly I can already imagine the unhelpful replies I'll get, with people defending the game (as if it were somehow perfect), rather than trying to suggest possible solutions. So I'll try to get things going in the right direction, by suggesting a possible improvement that I already made in a related thread:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=77678&p=1267584&viewfull=1#post1267584
I was hopeful that "the story" starting on 16th December would liven-up Elite Dangerous, as I've been playing since Beta & it's got a bit samey... But current events are almost impossibly far from me, and I guess many other people:
Sorbago = 165 Ly
Kappa Fornacis = 115 Ly
Problems with this:
The route planner doesn't go anything like that far, so I'll have to manually fly there, and I could finding myself stuck in a "dead end" that requires me to back-track a long way. (e.g. There is a star just 9 Ly away (slightly beyond my jump range) that require 10 jumps in a circle to get to!) I don't understand why long distance planning should be so hard to program, as I've written an "A-star" search algorithm before & it doesn't need much memory or CPU time (and you can even reduce memory & CPU usage with a little trick, at the expense of slightly worse routes).
My little Eagle with a standard FSD is only capable of an 8 Ly jump at max, but it's unlikely stars will be exactly 8 Ly away. So I'm more likely to make 4-6 Ly jumps on average. That's 23 or 33 jumps, assuming I can fly in a straight line without any back-tracking (unlikely), with at least 3 stops for fuel (better say 6 to avoid the risk of running out of fuel miles from anywhere). More likely I'll have to fly in a wiggly line & back-track a bit, so I guess about double the number of 'perfect' jumps, meaning about 50 jumps with 12 refuelling stops.
50 jumps is a pretty insane number to require, especially as when I get there I might find the current events aren't suited to me for whatever reason. (And even if I'm OK with it, I can imagine many newbies finding the Combat Zones too hard.)
Sadly I can already imagine the unhelpful replies I'll get, with people defending the game (as if it were somehow perfect), rather than trying to suggest possible solutions. So I'll try to get things going in the right direction, by suggesting a possible improvement that I already made in a related thread:
https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=77678&p=1267584&viewfull=1#post1267584
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