Have you actually tried using it rather than just looking at it? Its a gimmick. Its cool at first but it just makes things harder.
System map overhaul needed
- Thread starter Darkslayer
- Start date
Have you actually tried using it rather than just looking at it? Its a gimmick. Its cool at first but it just makes things harder.
I find brutal honesty refreshing really.
In my view the disputed view is fluff, and I'd rather the time was spent improving the actual game.
Just to compare, the London Underground map is not to any scale, and yet is one of the most widely copied designs.
In my view the disputed view is fluff, and I'd rather the time was spent improving the actual game.
Just to compare, the London Underground map is not to any scale, and yet is one of the most widely copied designs.
I like the current system information page. Map is a loose term for it IMO.
In a matter of a few clicks I can selects stuff set bookmarks etc or look up info about a body that I'm interested in.
An Orrery map would not make that any easier and in practical terms would just end up taking more time to find basic info from as you would now have to 'navigate' a mini system map to get the info required.
I've never thought to myself "I NEED to see that is representative 3d to understand it" And for me that is the key. An orrery map would literally just be a nice shiny thing to waste time to look at. If I wan to look at something I'd rather do it through the glass of my cockpit TBH.
In a matter of a few clicks I can selects stuff set bookmarks etc or look up info about a body that I'm interested in.
An Orrery map would not make that any easier and in practical terms would just end up taking more time to find basic info from as you would now have to 'navigate' a mini system map to get the info required.
I've never thought to myself "I NEED to see that is representative 3d to understand it" And for me that is the key. An orrery map would literally just be a nice shiny thing to waste time to look at. If I wan to look at something I'd rather do it through the glass of my cockpit TBH.
Scale isn't really the issue, it's relative placement. The underground map allows you to quickly determine a route from A to B via any number of intermediate points, the System map doesn't.
Even if the Sytem map had an option to sort objects by relative placement from yourself, with the object you're nearest too in the middle of the map, it would be a great improvement. At least you could then determine an optimal route to all objects.
Surely that depends on what you do in game. When I am exploring seeing an orrey map can show me where the planets are in relation to each other, I could then map out a route of scanning, making it a quicker and enjoyable experience. As it is now, sometimes it can take 2-3 times as long to scan a whole system.
That is just poor. Sir did you are not bothered about scanning systems, then it won't effect you anyway.
I scan systems most of the time when I find a new to me one...
I would wager that you would possibly spend the time saved in your scanning route from the orrery in actually creating a route in the map in the first place.
Doing a full system scan is quite simple a quick head 'up' while checking the system map after honk. Check the orientation and get going.
with an interactive orrery people will just spend more time in the map 'plotting the optimal route' and then only catching up IF said route was way quicker...
For me personally it's firmly in the nice to have box and FD shouldn't prioritise it over anything else.
I prefer the one from CIG for Star Citizen (yes, I know.. I know..).
https://robertsspaceindustries.com/starmap
Just had a look at that, I clicked on half a dozen of the system icons & all were single star flat plane systems, I didn't see anything that wasn't orbiting the main star either. The only items I saw that were off-plane were some jump points but there was no benefit to being able to view them in 3D, they were all close to the plane anyway.
I think when you have a limited number of simple systems you have more choices in how to present them. It also seemed unintuitive to have to use the back button to return to the previous scale when I'd used my mouse wheel to zoom in.
Looks nice for the game using it, but that interface would be severely restricting for ED's procedurally generated and much more varied systems.
ETA just looked at sol, there are moons in that system but no orbit lines for them.
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It worked just fine in FE2, and FE2 did have all kinds of weird systems as well.
Yeah, that's a big annoyance, switching between nav panel to lock a target and the system map to see what the target is.
If they won't go for orrery, they should at least put in the system map the distance of a body from your position, in addition to the distance from the star.
The current system map is really confusing for navigation.
FE2 is a complete game, not one with major features still to be implemented. FE2 also had a lot more ships, atmospheric landing & a whole bunch of other stuff.
There's stuff that's urgent, and there's stuff that's important. An orrery view could arguably be considered to be fairly important but certainly is not urgent. As Max Factor & several others have said in this thread, come up with a compelling way for this to benefit the game & maybe it will go up the importance scale, possibly even the urgency scale.
Right now it's just a nice to have, like a commander creator.
I think that design is a little on the excessive side as far as the animations and effects. I think creative balance is found in simplicity and well thought-out designs that achieve effective results. Just my opinion.
[CHEAPSHOT]Well, right, so to make it raise the importance ladder, we just need to find a way to put microtransactions in the Orrery map! ;P [/CHEAPSHOT]
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Yes - but it shows relative distance from station to station and you can plan a trip based on different stations because you know which ones are close to each other - plus of the underground system is only 2d any way.
The system map is NOT a map - it's just a basic catalogue of objects in the system and once you have left the main star and flown any distance from it the system 'map' is useless for navigation because you have no clues where you are or how far away anything is from you or from each other - that's why it's NOT a map. Apart from the pretty pictures it's actually less useful than the simple list in the Nav panel - at least that shows how far you are from each object.
If they really can't be bothered to provide a real 3d map of the system ( like they do for the galaxy ) then the make it system route planning remotely usable they to do two simple things.
1. Add the distance from you to the object to the system map ( maybe just update it every 2-3 seconds as the cmdr would probably be moving )
2. In the nav panel number the objects, ie UNEXPLORED 1 ( meaning closest object to the landing star ) obviously if it scanned it would say the full name instead.
This would help solve the problem wanting to scan planets 3,4,6,8 but having no clue what the quickest fly plan would be to actually do that - currently you'd have to switch to the system map, select the object, then switch back and look at the nav panel to see how far away you are - then repeat that for the planets to find the one that's closest to where to are.
It's crazy to have two views that show two different pieces important information and no single view that shows both - that's just really bad UI design!
And we've had this bad UI design with it's 'place holder' system non-map for over 2 years now!!!
It's a shame, but it is what it is. As far as rebuilding goes, I can't help thinking that we're actually flying around an orrery map when we play...
Perhaps just being able to zoom out of the game view to a remote overhead view and being able to scroll around, and have planets, ships and other bodies appear as tags... It wouldn't need to replace the current system map with all the data on it, it just needs to be a navigation aid and overview. Keep the current system map as it is for when we need to drill into the data.
But if a proper system map is out of the question, the current system map (which isn't a map at all, not by any stretch of the word) could really do with showing the distance from the player's current location. I know we can come out of the system map to check distance to the current selection, but it's not really practical for plotting your way around the system, not without writing distances down at least. The system map as it stands is just a directory. Nothing wrong with that (it's actually great at being a directory), but it's does nothing that a map is supposed to do, ie. aid navigation.
I realise it's probably a bit late in the development process, but if we're looking at improvements to exploration a practical navigation aid would be a massive benefit. I daresay it would help traders and passenger services too.
There's a lot of factors to consider with something like this. What does it really add? I'm not disputing the fact that the orrery view would be immense and show things off in such an awesome way, but it has to be easily usable. There's so much data to show, so many different aspects of the game that need to be/could be visualised to give a greater experience. This is a huge technical challenge not just from a "how do we display the stellar/planetary bodies" angle, but also you have to consider what data would be relevant to explorers, what would be relevant to mission/passenger runners, combat pilots, system states, trading, and so on. There's so much data in the game, and it would be great to show it all. But each thing is a "cost" as far as development, querying the data, system resource, and also screen space. These are only the things that I can think of from the perspective of someone who doesn't really know the first thing about effective UI design, and that's already a tough set of questions to answer...
I wish I understood the finer points of UX/UI design to really engage in conversation here more... but I don't. Every so often the topic comes up internally and people think a bit more about it, but please don't hate me for setting a realistic expectation: it's an unlikely thing for us to see within the foreseeable future. Just know that I, and probably quite a few others, would love to see this feature in game. Actually, there's a lot of these kinds of features we'd love to see... hence the 'wishlist'.
With all due respect, the UI issue was already 'solved' in Frontier: First Encounters and Frontier: Elite II. Use the 2D map to display complex information. Use the 3D/Orrery view to show the current relative position of objects in space without complex information. Or am I missing something here? You're saying something's 'a huge technical challenge', when it's already been implemented (albeit with less complex solar systems, and without advanced surface/texture mapping) in two previous games in the series??!?
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I know a lot of the people in this thread can't fathom a use for an orrery map, but for explorers (or anyone in the bubble wanting to see a system's physical layout at a glance) it would be an extremely useful feature. The current flat map just doesn't convey anything at all about orbital paths or distances between bodies and stations, especially out around second stars. A 3D orrery would allow pilots to quickly and visually see how far planet 5A is from planet 7B. It allows pilots to quickly tell if a system has interesting orbital paths, or a pair of moons in a very close binary orbit, or a very large gas giant orbiting extremely close to a star, or a moon around a ringed world in a non flat orbital path allowing great views of the ringed planet. For explorers looking at system maps all day long, an orrery would be super beneficial.
Now lets take pirates. An orrery map could also visually display shipping lanes in systems, showing pirates exactly where to fly to patrol for victims. An orrery map could also display permanent USS sites and CZ's, and mega ship locations, comet trajectories in the future when they get implemented. The flat map can't do any of that effectively. With the use of overlays an orrery map could highlight stations/outposts in red who are hostile to you and in green who are friendly, or stations in famine or in a boom state, the use of overlays could make navigation in systems much more visual and faster for everyone. An orrery map could even include a waypoint feature allowing pilots to plan in-system routes to fly from planet to planet, setting a course to follow.
In a basic implementation the orrery is just a useful tool for navigation, but with some in depth development it could be an immensely useful feature for everyone who plays the game. Think current galaxy map useful, but on a in-system scale rather than stellar scale.
Obviously very disapointing. An orrery would be usefull to plan the most efficient scanning path of the bodies in a star system. Think the travelling salesman algorythm among the planets. Also a gratifying thing would be to see the path followed so far in the system, ( think the new grey dotted line in the galaxy map or the afterfligth map in fligth simulator ), were other signals are and so on.
For me it is a real let down as the orrery was there in elite II and some early screens were advertised during the Kickstarter It is also a missed opportunity in VR as a god view « above the system » would surely give a sense of scale and something to toy with while in a long SC.
God Braden said a couple of times it is something he thinks should be implemented, so we may see it down the road.
My gut feeling is that the ED development team is much smaller nowadays. When I see the discount of the elite disk in the ps4 second hand shops I know it is really a niche market. The team is probably split into two. Half working on beyond, and half on atmo landing for 2019 as it is a major endeavor
For me it is a real let down as the orrery was there in elite II and some early screens were advertised during the Kickstarter It is also a missed opportunity in VR as a god view « above the system » would surely give a sense of scale and something to toy with while in a long SC.
God Braden said a couple of times it is something he thinks should be implemented, so we may see it down the road.
My gut feeling is that the ED development team is much smaller nowadays. When I see the discount of the elite disk in the ps4 second hand shops I know it is really a niche market. The team is probably split into two. Half working on beyond, and half on atmo landing for 2019 as it is a major endeavor
So in essence what is needed is a 'you are here' arrow then? Maybe I'm in the minority but I've never had an issue finding where I am- perhaps I'm blotting out switching screens.
I think you'll find JPE is the basis for any atmospheric world development
I think you'll find JPE is the basis for any atmospheric world development