Suggestion: interactive planetary resource map

[Varrag]

Here is suggestion to make the search for planetary materials less tedious and how to -partly at least- deal with the feeling that it's all totally random. Which eventually becomes frustrating.

I was inspired with EVE Online's planetary UI: as you can see in example below, sort of "heat map" is generated for each planet and by moving sliders around, player is able to get pretty accurate picture where is what, and in what amount (aproximately):

Spoiler

Now, I don't really know how ED generates resource nodes on planets and is the mechanics similar to EVE's even technically possible, but nonetheless I think it's worth trying to bring up this idea; albeit, simplified for ED. Concept illustration:

Spoiler

System should be pretty straightforward from the player's perspective:

• scan the planet with DSS (resource map won't show up without this)
• open up planetary view
• list of resources marked with different colours appears on the screen (in my example sorted from the rarest on the top to most common materials towards the bottom)
• sectors on the planet are marked accordingly
• click on the sector which contains material you are interested for
• place the bookmark there so that you know where to land

Important notes:

• this does NOT mean that the sector marked with certain colour contains only that material: it is just telling that there is relatively higher chance for spawn in comparison to other materials and/or different sectors; everything else on the list will be still showing up every now and then while you're driving a SRV. I won't go into details, but formulas should be fairly easy to define so that the player can really notice the difference in yield.
• empty sectors are NOT deserts devoid of all resources: everything that the planet contains can be found there too, but in comparably smaller quantities; general proportion between the rare and common materials remains valid for those sectors.

Well... that should be all I guess.

 

[slidingback]

They need to implement something along these lines.

 

[Varrag]

Thing is that, without the confirmation from devs, we don't know is this technically possible.

If ED generates resources on the fly, as we are driving SRV around -in other words, if there is only one table of spawn probability for planet as whole- then I suppose chances that we might see something like this are pretty slim.

 

[NeilF]

Thing is that, without the confirmation from devs, we don't know is this technically possible.

If ED generates resources on the fly, as we are driving SRV around -in other words, if there is only one table of spawn probability for planet as whole- then I suppose chances that we might see something like this are pretty slim.

A similar suggestion (procedural distribution map for planet surface and rings) has already been made else where. I'd personally suggest the mechanics for it are all very do'able from my understanding. Including adding in some stateful behaviour such that some areas, once mined of their hot spot of rich resource of materials, they're gone forever. ie: To give exporation some importance! Imagine finding a nice hot spot of Palladium!

Here's my take on its do'ability - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=258294&page=9&p=4008643&viewfull=1#post4008643

Here's the synopsis of the other threads workings - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=258294&page=8&p=4007154&viewfull=1#post4007154

 

[Lucius-Darcia]

This is something we really need to implemented. I think that we have to get the information, which sort of metals can be found there and where when we apply a detailed surface scanner on the planet.

AND
we need some sort of planetary navigation to mark coordinates. Today i got a "Treasure Map" as bonus for donating credits. It leeds me to
Shui Wei Sector XU-P b5-1 A1
Latitude -1,91
Longitude 173,20

it was AWKWARD navigating to this point and takes nearly an hour. No need to say that it wasn't worth the hour what i found there.....

 

[Varrag]

A similar suggestion (procedural distribution map for planet surface and rings) has already been made else where. I'd personally suggest the mechanics for it are all very do'able from my understanding. Including adding in some stateful behaviour such that some areas, once mined of their hot spot of rich resource of materials, they're gone forever. ie: To give exporation some importance! Imagine finding a nice hot spot of Palladium!

Here's my take on its do'ability - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=258294&page=9&p=4008643&viewfull=1#post4008643

Here's the synopsis of the other threads workings - https://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=258294&page=8&p=4007154&viewfull=1#post4007154

Thanks for the heads up mate, I can assure you that I wasn't aware of other similar suggestions. I also appreciate Erimus' idea to narrow down the distribution of materials even more - e.g. to certain distinctive geological formations such as craters.

It's good to know that many of us are sharing similar ideas; unfortunatelly, I am not aware that the devs commented on any - even if it was something like: "sorry, we can't do that due to technical limitations".