The Mining discussion thread.
Apologies. I got distraced and complete missed the rest of your post.
I must check the DDA more often because it looks like some considerable thought has gone into the proposals.
There is a game for ipad (and possibly other devices) that I cant remember its name, but in it you could mine asteroids by landing on them and deploy a drill.
In this particular game, this initiated a rather dull minigame where you had to keep the drill from going off center and breaking, and the longer you managed to handle the drill, the further into the asteroid you got (and the more material you collected).
If you managed to go all the way to the core, there was a slight chance of finding a "special" material.
Cant remember what it was called, but I remember it being extremely well made and featuring alot of content for a "simple" mobile game.
In this particular game, this initiated a rather dull minigame where you had to keep the drill from going off center and breaking, and the longer you managed to handle the drill, the further into the asteroid you got (and the more material you collected).
If you managed to go all the way to the core, there was a slight chance of finding a "special" material.
Cant remember what it was called, but I remember it being extremely well made and featuring alot of content for a "simple" mobile game.
No apologies needed. Happens to me all the time.
I much liked the old FE2/FFE way of mining. Buy the MB4 Mining machine, land on an asteroid and deploy it, then come back in the future. Now that required some skill!
I Wish they would do it in this, or is that planned as well as mining lasers? Hope so anyway.
I Wish they would do it in this, or is that planned as well as mining lasers? Hope so anyway.
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Sorry but you are contradicting yourself there ... So its a smaller feature and yet you will be doing it 50% of the time you play the game? That's not a small feature!
There is no way of knowing how much of a percentage of the player base will be doing Mining , so saying its a small proportion of players doing it is complete guess work.
Yes there are other features that need to take priority of course, but again my point was that given there are many systems in the game that will have hooks into mining (trading, missions, mining lasers / drones etc.), its not something that can be dropped in at the last minute and expect to just work.
Either it gets left out of v1.0 or it needs to be implemented in some form fairly soon. Gamma will be way too late.
Just because it might take up 50% of my personal time doesn't make it a big thing, even if it's a "big thing" to me personally.
Obviously it's a guesstimate, but given the amount of player focus exploration has gotten, I think it's a fair bet to say that mining will have a smaller proportion than exploration, and it's a given that both will have a smaller proportion than combat and trading.
I wouldn't say mining has hooks in other systems, more the other way around, which is why they come first.
When you look at it, mining is like a simplified version of those systems all jumbled into one.
Shooting the rocks is like a simplified combat system. Trading the rocks is like a simplified trading system. Scanning for rocks is like a simplified exploration system. Even the whole resource depletion, node generation, aspect is a mini version of the dynamic market system.
So by doing those systems first, you've already removed 50% of the work load for mining. Pretty much all that's left is deciding on the mini-game itself; in other words, what happens when you shoot the rock.
You are both wrong:
Soon™
But seriously, you can see now that in the Beta 2 information; many different asteroid types have been added.
Mining itself is going to be a much more involved process than before, as such there is a lot more content to polish before it is released.
Trust me, I loved mining too in the original games, the new concepts will blow your mind!
Mining itself is going to be a much more involved process than before, as such there is a lot more content to polish before it is released.
Trust me, I loved mining too in the original games, the new concepts will blow your mind!
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You are both wrong:
Soon™
But seriously, you can see now that in the Beta 2 information; many different asteroid types have been added.
Mining itself is going to be a much more involved process than before, as such there is a lot more content to polish before it is released.
Trust me, I loved mining too in the original games, the new concepts will blow your mind!
Kerrash, you are learning from the best I see, prize of best cryptic answer goes to you!
Better luck next time, Michael If serious, I don't mind mining not being in Beta 2, as long as FD can handle testing it internally. It would be nice to hear clarification though. And maybe because it is much more complex in ED it makes people nervous if that's not gonna be tested
Exploration has to come before mining because they share a number of mechanisms, but exploration is simpler (and necessary for finding new places to mine):
On the face of it, in-system exploration is similar to mining: You approach a body, point a device at it, and collect some good that is liberated. But in-system exploration according to Newsletter #39 (leaving aside the plotting of hyperspace jumps into new systems as described in the DDF) should just be about pointing active scanners at a planetary body, perhaps from a few different angles to cover the whole surface area (Hey, when are we going to be able to go into non-geostationary orbits?). For this, the game needs to procedurally generate a set of data about each body, and track the segments of the body, perhaps for different sensor types, that the explorer player has scanned. The body data can be quite simple; I can't imagine that the scan models the imaging of the generated planet surface or that the procedural generation will model the chemical composition of individual sectors of the planet's crust.
Mining, http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=7196, will be a more complex activity minute to minute, and requires a larger set of data generated by the game. Asteroid, comet and gas clouds have a non-uniform distribution of some chemical elements and complex minerals (to make mining rare resources challenging). Presumably some asteroid belts have elements Fe, Si and Tn whereas others are good for Au, Pt and Th. Then within each rock/comet/cloud, there will be different concentrations of elements, so there's a skill-based game of finding the motherlode and accurately zapping it., and there are negative drops of contaminants and space critters to avoid to add to the body. That's 2 further dimensions of data to generate. These are just random numbers, no different to a visual surface texture to come up with, but it has to be done when a player enters a resource zone and again when they scan or approach a mineable body. Also, the UI and ship modules needed for the gameplay around them will be more complex than scanners. Lastly, the game will need to track the consumption of un-extracted resources per body. Resource locations will be randomly generated on island creation, not persistent, but any given rock should not be infinitely exploitable, or players will all call their friends and keep mining the Giant Floating Goldmine 24 hours a day.
And then there are resource refining and NPC claims to consider...
On the face of it, in-system exploration is similar to mining: You approach a body, point a device at it, and collect some good that is liberated. But in-system exploration according to Newsletter #39 (leaving aside the plotting of hyperspace jumps into new systems as described in the DDF) should just be about pointing active scanners at a planetary body, perhaps from a few different angles to cover the whole surface area (Hey, when are we going to be able to go into non-geostationary orbits?). For this, the game needs to procedurally generate a set of data about each body, and track the segments of the body, perhaps for different sensor types, that the explorer player has scanned. The body data can be quite simple; I can't imagine that the scan models the imaging of the generated planet surface or that the procedural generation will model the chemical composition of individual sectors of the planet's crust.
Mining, http://forums.frontier.co.uk/showthread.php?t=7196, will be a more complex activity minute to minute, and requires a larger set of data generated by the game. Asteroid, comet and gas clouds have a non-uniform distribution of some chemical elements and complex minerals (to make mining rare resources challenging). Presumably some asteroid belts have elements Fe, Si and Tn whereas others are good for Au, Pt and Th. Then within each rock/comet/cloud, there will be different concentrations of elements, so there's a skill-based game of finding the motherlode and accurately zapping it., and there are negative drops of contaminants and space critters to avoid to add to the body. That's 2 further dimensions of data to generate. These are just random numbers, no different to a visual surface texture to come up with, but it has to be done when a player enters a resource zone and again when they scan or approach a mineable body. Also, the UI and ship modules needed for the gameplay around them will be more complex than scanners. Lastly, the game will need to track the consumption of un-extracted resources per body. Resource locations will be randomly generated on island creation, not persistent, but any given rock should not be infinitely exploitable, or players will all call their friends and keep mining the Giant Floating Goldmine 24 hours a day.
And then there are resource refining and NPC claims to consider...
Oh and by the way, when a simple all in one mining laser and refinery module that does not require a skilled operator to make an acceptable profit is released, I'd like to claim the name for this market segment: the "Point and Scoop" system.
It's in the plans.
We've only seen the first pass on fuel so far.
It's one of those things that will be in before release though. Exploring is pretty difficult without it.
Because exploring is part of Beta 2 then we might get it for then? Or we may have to rely on the distress beacon refill placeholder we have right now.